Fido wrote:
I'm sure the posts were TIC, as not even Obama's education directive regarding transgendered people requires mixing men/women locker rooms broadly.
But this is why Baylor is in such trouble with their situation. http://knowyourix.org/title-ix/title-ix-in-detail/
While Title IX is a very short statute, Supreme Court decisions and guidance from the U.S. Department of Education have given it a broad scope covering sexual harassment and sexual violence. Under Title IX, schools are legally required to respond and remedy hostile educational environments and failure to do so is a violation that means a school could risk losing its federal funding.
And this is the issue with BYU--the event that spurred BYU's self-investigation into its Title IX policies was a Utah County deputy handing an investigatory file over to the Honor Code Office in an attempt to hold BYU football players accountable in connection with a rape case. For what, we don't know, but he obviously felt he wasn't getting anywhere within the Sheriff's office or the athletic department, or else why go over Bronco's/Sitake's/Holmoe's head and take it to the independent Honor Code office? Baylor started by looking at the same issue--something wasn't jiving at the Title IX office and some media reports of a few sexual assaults, and when one of them got national attention, they brought in the Philly law firm to truly assess what was going on.
To claim that what is happening at Baylor can't happen here is jumping the gun--BYU is starting the same investigation that Baylor started six months ago. We have a sheriff's deputy trying to get the university's attention for athlete's' activities by cutting out the athletic department and the Title IX office, but we want to believe this could never happen here.
From all reports, and having met the guy, Art Briles is a fantastic person, but he stands by his players to a fault. What he did, from my understanding, is to try and serve as a mediator between victims and his players to (i) make sure the victims were taken care of and got the help they need, and (ii) hold his players accountable while avoiding public exposure/embarrassment for 18-22 year olds. He wasn't trying to "get them off"--he involved the Waco Police (which will be the next shoe to drop) and helped come to settlements and plea deals that served mercy and justice. In an ordinary world, we'd applaud someone for doing those things. But in today's environment that is super-sensitive to domestic violence and especially football player involvement (hello, NFL), we get new interpretations and rules under Title IX and VAWA that set forth rigid protocols and reporting issues that have taken away other options. I can see Lavell Edwards and many other "old-school" coaches take the same tact--making sure victims get help they need, and then trying to find a method of accountability for the player that doesn't involve a perp walk.
But the new regulations caught up with Briles and Baylor. He was like Lavell at Baylor--he brought them out of the cellar where they had lived for decades as the annual butt of jokes in the conference, and got them to where they were beating Texas and Oklahoma and every year are in the national championship hunt. They are a top-5 team entering 2016, and he just got canned--it would be like Alabama firing Saban, OSU dumping Meyer. He was the safest of the safe, and he's gone.
I'm not saying that BYU will uncover the same issues on the same level, but I am worried about what that deputy was trying to draw attention to. Art Briles isn't a bad guy--I think he's a great guy and would love for my son to play for him, and for my daughter to date his sons. He's a good guy who didn't update his practices to meet changing social expectations and ever evolving federal regulations.
