General Discussion

But in a 2018 interview with NPR, Starr said this about the Baylor scandal: "Unfortunately — and this is going to sound like an apologia, but it is the absolute truth — never was it brought to my attention that there were these issues. And I focused on student safety from day one."

Soon after the report was released, the school's athletics director resigned after being sanctioned and put on probation, and the head football coach was fired, along with other members of the athletics program. Starr was stripped of the presidency, and subsequently resigned from his faculty position.

The same year, a case was filed against Baylor alleging violations of Title IX and a "deliberately indifferent response" to student-on-student sexual assault. According to an early complaint filed in the case, reports of sexual assault to "high-level, policy-setting employees" at Baylor failed to result in change at the university.

"Starr was at the helm the entire period of time," said Dunnam, one of the plaintiff lawyers in the case, which remains ongoing.

When asked how much he thinks Starr knew of the school's sexual assault problem, Dunnam pointed to a lesser-known 2014 report by the consulting firm Margolis Healy & Associates that was also commissioned by the university and obtained by the Waco Tribune-Herald in 2018.