Baylor. The most obnoxious program in college football. The one that the NCAA still isn't talking about. When the fact is that it's important that people keep talking about it because as long as people are still talking and still upset there's a chance that something might get done about it. So people need to keep writing articles and need to keep writing blogs because it might persuade people to look at this like it needs to be looked at.
Having said all that the reason that we're back discussing Baylor is because of this article. It's basically an article about how Baylor is moving to dismiss the lawsuit against them that alleges the 52 acts of sexual violence committed by over 30 Baylor football players and the culture of "selling sex" to recruits in order to get them to come to the university to play football. The dismissal is on the grounds of, according to the article, "as a general rule universities do not have a legal duty to protect their students from harm caused by other students."
Okay can we just talk about that for a second? First of all that's a pretty weak reason to dismiss a case with the allegations being what they are. The school doesn't have a legal duty to protect their students? Well the same argument could be made for literally anything else and people would be upset about it. If a school didn't have a severe weather plan people would be mad, especially if something happened and the school wasn't prepared and their students were harmed. See how stupid it sounds in this case. "Well the school doesn't really have a legal duty to protect students from harm of severe weather." That's how stupid this sounds. Schools do have a duty to protect students that pay money to attend their universities. And saying that they don't just seems like a cop-out.
Second of all, this seems like a poor attempt to get out of a lawsuit. It's not that like they're dismissing this case on the grounds of they found evidence to the contrary, they want to dismiss because they don't want to take responsibility for the safety of their students. That's basically what they're saying. And that seems to me like an admittance of guilt. This is an easy way to get out of the lawsuit, or so they think, and so, to me, it seems like they're saying, "Yeah we did this. Yeah we're guilty. But we don't really have to take care of the students who go here, so there's no reason we should be sued for this." That's sick.
Why would anyone want to go to a school that so flippantly says that they don't have to protect their students? Why on earth would someone say, "I trust my kid to go to that school." They openly said that they don't feel like they have to protect their students, which we all know translates to, "We will protect the important ones." Like the athletes who are responsible for all this. It makes me so angry.
The lawsuit was also filed on the basis of statute of limitations which had expired because in Texas statute of limitations for sexual assault is five years and Title IX is two years. Not that it would have mattered because Baylor mishandled the Title IX investigation anyway, even though there was no actual Title IX office at Baylor at the time, the school claims that there were plenty of avenues that could have been used to report it. You can go here to view a timeline of events at Baylor that show that the first sexual assault was reported in 2013 and that the Title IX office (or VP of Human Resources as it was known at the time) didn't know about it until 2015, conveniently two years later.
And all of this is a just a build-up to saying this: Why on earth isn't the NCAA or someone getting more involved in this? We punish schools and players for payments and for signing autographs and selling things with their name on it. We punish schools and players for a plethora of things, but we can't punish the school for doing something like this? Baylor needs to be punished. And the people involved in this need to be punished more. Because regardless of whether all of this is true or only some of it is true, Baylor is in the wrong. And if we just stand by and let all of this happen what does this say about us? It doesn't matter if there actually were 52 cases of rape and sexual violence, if there was only one case that is enough. Students shouldn't be afraid to go to school, they shouldn't have to worry that if something happens to them at the hand of other students that the school is going to cover it up and hide it so that the other "more important" students aren't harmed by the allegation. What about the victim? What about their life? What about them? And by Baylor saying that they don't have a legal obligation to protect their students it's like they're throwing the victim away. They don't matter. What matters to Baylor is protecting Baylor. And that's gross. If they had done what they were supposed to do they wouldn't be in this predicament in the first place.
Baylor needs to take responsibility for what happened, and they need to be punished accordingly. Someone needs to do something. This is isn't over, and as long as there are still things happening with it people need to keep talking about it. Because as long as people are still talking there's still a chance that something might be done to prevent it from happening again.
