According to Chip Brown at Hornsdigest.com, the Baylor University board of regents has fired Kenneth Starr as president and chancellor. Brown reports that it's possible Starr stays on in a reduced roll at the same salary, but that's not confirmed. The move is not necessarily a surprise—Baylor has faced growing concern and investigation into its handling of sexual assaults on campus for a while now. But it is curious that head football coach Art Briles has continued to escape any consequences for his role in building a program that continually looked the other way as players racked up allegations for sexual assault and other violent crimes. It seems the rationale for Starr's firing is that he exhibited a lack of leadership in handling the allegations against several football players, and yet the actual head coach of those players remains.
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Ramsower's new interim gig is similarly curious, given his "leadership" involved the same campus police who failed to do anything with these allegations for years and, as ESPN reported last week, worked in conjunction with Waco police to suppress reporting on a series of fights in 2011—involving 20-25 football players, with three players getting charged—"given the potential high-profile nature of the incident."Under Starr, Baylor failed to adequately investigate, or in some cases investigate at all, allegations of sexual assault from at least six women over seven years, and eight football players have been accused of violence against women over an eight-year period. Perhaps the most damning part of Starr's record, at least as far as the school is concerned, is that Baylor failed to hire a full-time Title IX coordinator, as required by federal law even for private schools like Baylor, for three years, until 2014. So not only had the school failed to investigate claims, they weren't even compliant with federal law at the most base level of requirement.As the allegations continued to pile up, it likely became easier and easier to cut bait with a University president who straight-up ignored federal law. As Art Briles continued to rack up wins, meanwhile, the sentiment expressed to Hornsdigest.com was that "if the board got rid of Art (Briles), they'd be sitting in a $300 million mausoleum instead of that new football stadium."[Horns Digest]The three dozen members of the Baylor regents board are blaming Starr - not football coach Art Briles - for failed leadership during the ongoing scandal over how the school handled reports of rape and assault made against five BU football players - two of whom (Tevin Elliott and Sam Ukwuachu) were convicted of raping Baylor co-eds, sources close to the situation told HornsDigest.com.
Reagan Ramsower, Baylor's senior vice president of operations and chief financial officer, whose oversight includes Baylor's campus law enforcement, is a leading candidate to succeed Starr on an interim basis, the sources told HD.