Would you send your daughters to Baylor?

Parents Forum
201

The Colorado situation is interesting and I think still relevant. If you watch the Bill McCartney story on ESPN 30for30, it’s very interesting.

Bill brought in a lot of players who were not the typical student. These students were black, some slightly older than the average college freshman (19-21 so could legally drink and go to night clubs), educated in inner city schools, not necessarily strong students. Several were from Samoa so it was an entirely different culture. They brought a lot of diversity people say they are looking for at a college - racial, economic, cultural diversity. But these guys were fish out of water. There were no ‘black barbershops’ in Boulder, no where to shop, no food they were used to from California or Texas. Night clubs, movies and other entertainment was ‘white’ focused (still is). Even the churches in town weren’t what the players were used to (not many southern baptists in Boulder). Bill and the other coaches and school administrators worked with the players and the city to live in harmony, but it didn’t always change things. The players were the victims of racial profiling in stores and bars and restaurants. They were bullied and excluded. And they weighed 300 pounds so when they got upset, bad things could happen. Of course they hung out together because they weren’t that welcomed by other students or the town people. There were few other minority students on campus, including girls for them to date.

The coaches weren’t encouraging the behavior and tried to make the players happy inside the rules of the university and the town, but it wasn’t easy. On the 30for30 program, the players from those days, 2000-04, talk about how much McCartney did for them, how he tried to make them welcome but still punished those who needed to be punished. A lot of them admit they were jerks, just like other college kids looking back realize that the things they did were not cool.

I don’t think it would have changed to have new coaches brought in, new administrators. The coaches weren’t looking the other way. They were dealing with issues as they came up. What could have been done was getting rid of the inner city recruit, but with that would have gone the diversity. And the ability to field a decent team.

I’m not a big Bill McCartney fan, but after watching the program I did change my mind about how he tried to bridge the gap between town and gown in Boulder.

202

@201

And then McCartney quit to go bible thumping to men all across the country but particularly men who showed up at the Up With Men (or whatever it was called) events he helped organize. I’m glad you saw that 30 for 30 and I’m glad you were open minded enough to reconsider whatever your preconceived position was in the first place.

There was a time when the big D1 football factories used to house all the jocks in one dorm, theoretically to keep an eye on them, but it often turned into a zoo or animal house scenario. Sure. No debate from me. Other schools, such as ND, have always insisted that the jocks assimilate to the campus culture or else they wouldn’t be getting a free ride in the first place. Most schools have gone to the ND model because, well, hookers, DUI’s, drug abuse and academic scandals just aren’t good for business.

If we were talking about academics I’d be in line with the idea that most of these guys have no business being on campus. As it is, many of them, most of them, have to major in something light weight just to stay eligible until they leave early to the NFL, NBA or whatever. Tebow, for example, was home schooled as a kid, but allowed to play football at the local high school, and was three years older than the kids he was playing against. His major at UF was children and family studies which probably is as ridiculous as it sounds. I bet he made straight A’s, bless his heart.

Someone cited a few articles that studied the incidents of crime in the jocks vs the nonjocks on campus and they separated the tennis jocks from the football jocks for obvious reasons. If you do that, the incidents of violations gets a little clearer to see. But, as I’ve said a few times, little by little, all of these things are changing whether people on this board realize it or not. The changes started with Prop 48 an NCAA rule that is 25 some odd years old now that required the jocks to have a certain GPA to stay eligible or get into school in the first place. As a direct result of that rule some of these guys do actually get an education that is useful.

203

^Promise Keepers

Again, nobody ever said that there wasn’t another side to college athletics, or that there aren’t some great kids involved. I’m almost as tired of my own voice here as I am of yours, but as the father of a young woman, I cannot let you and your apologetic, Kellyanne diversion party, muck up the issue at hand.

Fifty two. 52. Five Two. The athletic dorms are gone. Yippee! Now we don’t have certifiably “off limits” places on campus anymore. Lots of progress there.

The kids Notre Dame brings in to their program are, by and large, a different cut at the total D1 recruiting population. I suspect you know that. Let’s focus on Duke basketball next. Then we can offer up Stanford football as an example of a typical D1 program. Then let’s check out what’s been happening at Vanderbilt. From that sample, we’ll get a pretty good picture of the cfb landscape, won’t we? And those places are also not immune from these things. Sure, I’d expect this kind of extreme **** show to more likely pop up again at an LSU than at a Vanderbilt, but everyone deals with it.

And you may, in fact, be right that the issue has improved across the board. I don’t know. I don’t really think you do either. But I do know that Baylor is looking into the possibility that it had 52 rapes of its female students committed by members of their football team, and the adults in charge wanted to throw a blanket over it and tell everyone there’s nothing to see. If that can happen there, today, you’ll have to excuse the rest of us for our cynicism.

No, sorry. I don’t believe for one minute that 90% of all the bad coaches, administrators, and players were all gathered at Baylor, and that everything else is relatively hunky-dory.

We may not have the sheer number of completely out-law, renegade, “in your face” programs we had 10 or 20 years ago. But if this happened at Baylor, today, then we still have a problem, and it’s prima facie stupid to think it’s confined to Waco, Texas.

204

Any college employee who tells, suggests, implies, etc. that a person who has experienced a sexual assault might want to think twice before reporting it to local law enforcement ought to be fired. Local law enforcement is incompetent and has a backlog of 10 years worth of untested DNA kits? That’s a different problem (horrifying and real- but a different problem). Male or female- whether this becomes a he said/she said, or who was too intoxicated to remember- all of this is noise. If you believe that you are a victim of a crime, you call the police. The idea that coaches or college employees are even in a position where they are “throwing a blanket” (love that term) and pretending there isn’t a problem is in and of itself a problem. The employees of a college do not have training in collecting or preserving evidence. Employees of a college are not able to execute a search warrant.

The idea that the “grownups” at Baylor or Penn State were even in a position to coordinate a coverup is sort of nauseating. A student is accusing another student of committing a crime? Call 911. And get your damn coach out of the business of covering up for accused criminals.

205

The sad thing is that this model is coming back, but not to keep an eye on athletes but as a recruiting tactic. Schools like Kentucky and Kansas have constructed ultra luxury dorms to attract basketball players, and then make sure slightly more non-athlete students live there so it does not count as an athletes-only dorm.

http://larrybrownsports.com/college-basketball/kentuckys-housing-chef-flat-screens/153247

http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/09/kansas-basketball-dorm-12-million-mccarthy-hall

206

http://www.wpr.org/student-athletes-commit-rape-sexual-assaults-more-often-peers

This piece, citing research by academics, suggests that not only has it not improved, but that the problem has worsened, which would be consistent with something as egregious as what we’re looking at w/ Baylor.

Interestingly, the issue seems to be most prevalent in the “power and performance sports”, which include football, high level basketball, hockey, wrestling and boxing.

So, again, assault crimes disproportionately committed by athletes, and among athletes, disproportionately distributed among power sports athletes.

207

@MiddleburyDad2

I’ve consistently said that the guilty parties should be held accountable for their crimes. Yet, you accuse me of engaging in KAC type diversions. If you want to have discuss things with me at least attribute my comments accurately. The article you linked was cited 100 posts ago and when I click on one of the hyperlinks it takes me to some entertainment news TMZ type revenue per click thing so I am unable to debate the accuracy of the studies. I’d bet it is based on old data.

In today’s climate you just are not going to be able to tolerate rape, assault, drug abuse, hookers or academic scandals although, obviously, those things have happened all over the place over the years. When it happens it takes time to be uncovered. The problems at Louisville and UNC are examples.

I have said that Baylor is an anomaly. Maybe that is why you think I am trying to sweep things under the rug. No. I am simply expressing my opinion that the vast majority of college administrators do not overlook serious crimes just to win games despite all the frothing at the mouth accusations of that very thing on this thread. No. BS.

This Baylor thread reminds me a little of the US Marines/Military photo scandal thing going on right now. The head of the US Marines Corps was grilled in Congress today and, from what I heard on the news while cooking, artichokes if you are curious, I heard that some members of Congress were incredulous that he didn’t know what 30,000 marines/military men were doing for all that time with all those victims. How the hell could he have known? It was a bunch of secret FB groups. he was busy doing his job. My position is blame the guilty parties. The Marine Commander guy shouldn’t be expected to know what people do in secret FB groups. It is just congress men and women taking out their anger on a guy who didn’t even do what they are angry about it. BS.

208

I am prepared to believe 100% that the head of the US Marine Corps did not know what 30,000 individual corps members were doing on Facebook.

I am less prepared to believe that there was NOBODY in a position of authority or in the chain of command who didn’t know about it AND decided to punt/ignore the problem rather then run it up the line.

THAT I don’t believe. The fact that the poor shnook sitting in Congress had to claim ignorance- I believe him. But he’s running a piss-poor excuse of a well trained, ethical, and leadership oriented organization if none of the people who report to him- who knew about it- and there had to be dozens if not hundreds- did nothing with that information.

Not a single officer ever heard his men bragging about it? Not likely.

Similarly- the president of every college in America is not likely to know or hear about every single sexual assault that takes place on campus or near campus by a member of that community. Not likely. But someone who gets his/her paycheck from said university who tries to pull off a coverup? They know but “don’t really know”?

C’mon.

209

@blossom

Welcome to America. Does it really surprise you that a certain segment of the population would share naked photos of women? Does that really shock you? It doesn’t shock me at all.

A few years ago, I heard about this “scandal” on the local news. Police officers, using their squad cars, would make comments on women while driving around on duty. Is that illegal? Inappropriate? Those are two different questions, by the way.

Should they have had training to prevent such behavior? Sure. But I hope we aren’t going to expect men to stop being men either. At the point that men can’t look at women I think we have gone way to far. Oddly, it is perfect fine for women to oogle men. No need for a federal case on that at all.

210

Remind me of the Marine honor code and the obligation of one Marine to another member of the corps?

Police officers commenting on women on the street- how is that an analogy?

211

They were doing something that they shouldn’t have been doing and that demeans women. It is also something that their training should have told them they shouldn’t have been doing but probably didn’t seem all that harmful at the time they were doing it.

212

Go, you seem to think these activities that demean women are about sexuality, just a little wrong in its focus. These abusive men have sisters, mothers, and daughters. They understand what is respect, relationship, fun, mutual. What they are doing is demeaning, a power move designed to hurt women. They intend to harm.

213

Can someone who is following this story clarify for me - originally it was 19 players accused by 17 women between 2011 and 2014, but the last couple pages of posts is talking about 31 players and 52 women? Or what is the 52? Same time period? How many of these cased are filed and currently being prosecuted by the courts or is it all rolled into one lawsuit? I’m completely lost about what is happening in the criminal courts. I’m also not clear on who is suing the college (as opposed to pressing charges). I think I did read that a couple criminal cases were dropped because the statute of limitations ran out?

214

@momofthreeboys The “52 rapes by 31 players” is coming from a lawsuit that came out a couple of months ago, alleging greater misconduct than what was initially revealed in the first law suit. This second lawsuit is the one that includes inappropriate text messages from assistant coaches talking about women, Baylor Bruins getting assaulted, women getting paid off in exchange for silence, and two additional gang rapes being uncovered. I could be missing something, but that’s the gist or it. Earlier lawsuits had assault #s in the teens. Also, yes, a few of the cases were thrown out because of the statute of limitations.

215

The ‘52 by 31’ is a different time period, I think back to 2008 or 2009.

I read through about the first half of the law suit. That suit is being brought by just one woman, and I couldn’t really tell what her personal numbers were, but at least 2 instances of 2 players raping her. She is not alleging the players attacked her or dragged her off to be raped, but that the hostess program required her to do whatever the ‘school’ told her to do, including having sex with the team members or recruits so she went to their rooms to comply. The law suit is a federal civil rights case against the university, not a criminal case against any players. I think the number of criminal charges for rape is 0 or 2, but there may be more charges for other charges like theft, robbery, drugs.

216

Is it a class action lawsuit? Can one person makes claims in a civil court on behalf of a dozen others (or however many people were alleged victims in the 52 alleged rapes) In order to make such a claim the attorney has to be able to substantiate the claim right? If it is one woman making this claim then how does she know that what she’s claiming is true. I don’t know, feels strange that a person can make claims on behalf of other people unless it’s a class action,

217

No, it’s not filed as a class action and she’s not seeking damages on behalf of others. She’s including the reports of the other women to show a pattern of behavior, to set the tone for her claims. She won’t have to prove that the others were raped, only that they reported the actions to officials at the school so the school had notice of violations and did nothing.

Class actions are usually for situation where all the people with claims can’t be easily identified, not just because there are many plaintiffs. Class action could be used if all plaintiffs can’t be easily identified or if it is unknown if they have a claim. I was in a class of people who had stayed in a hotel in a chain that charged a resort fee. The law firm running the class action didn’t know if I’d paid the resort fee or not, just that I’d stayed in the hotel.(and I got $16 back!) Here, the women can be easily identified, so even if there are 30 or 60 individuals, they can be named as individual plaintiffs if they want to join the case.

218

Some women readily attack other women because they identify strongly with men. Their identity is dependent on the status husband, brothers, or sons. We can see historical patterns of this patriarchal identity in the taking of the husband’s name or being given away by their father (as a possession). Their attacks on other women are protective of their source of power. It is hard to believe it still goes on today, but I did read a study that suggested that 50% of Americans think women should be required to take their husband’s name.

219

^Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 sets forth the basic threshold and certification requirements for standing as a plaintiff in federal court (where most class actions are heard): (1) class is comprised of so many that joinder is not practicable; (2) common questions of law or fact common to the class; (3) the claims or defenses of the class representatives are typical of those comprising the class; and (4) the class representatives will adequately protect the interests of the class. To certify a class, a court must also find that: (1) that prosecution of separate actions risks inconsistent adjudications; (2) that defendants have acted or refused to act on grounds generally applicable to the class; or (3) that there are common questions of law or fact that predominate over any individual class member’s questions and that a class action is superior to other methods of adjudication.

You’ll need to bring in a criminal law attorney to enlighten us on whether these tests can be met in a case like this. The rapes are all different, of course, but the common complaint would be Baylor’s institutional negligence. Are there enough people in the class to satisfy the numerosity requirement? I don’t know.

220

Thanks I did not understand where the claim came from or how one person could make a claim in court. Or if it was a class action suit by the Baylor greeters. The numbers are so different from the original investigation the outside firm conducted. But I think i now understand it to be an evidentiary point in her claim against the college.