A Texas writer grapples with the philosophical implications of Baylor’s conscience-of-a-nation president, the man who had WHAT to say about Bill Clinton’s fellatio with a White House intern, now clammin’ right up when it comes to his football players. Title of the writer’s article:
Ken Starr, Full Monty on Fellatio 18 Years Ago, All Shy Now About Baylor Rapes
When Lewinsky describes the sex she had back then, she says it happened because “I fell in love with my boss.”
When scads of Baylor women describe the sex they recently had, with members of the football team, they don’t talk about love. They just go straight to the police reports.
[Ken] Starr .. wanted to make fellatio a national issue … And now that Starr is president of a Baptist university, he and the regents of his school are cloaking themselves in legalisms and claims of privacy on the arguably much more urgent question of serial campus rape.
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To jog your memory:
Starr, whose main claim to fame at Baylor has been beefing up the football team and building a new stadium, now has two star players in prison for rape, a third about to be tried, another player expelled, a fraternity president arrested and charged. This occurs against a backdrop of foot-dragging on federally mandated anti-rape measures and a pattern of stony silence roundly decried by national and Texas media including even the university’s hometown newspaper, The Waco Tribune.
The Silence of the Starrs. We’ve had a lot of that, haven’t we? Brings to mind that Edgar Lee Masters poem…
I have known the silence of the Starrs and of their teams,
And the silence of the buck when it’s passed,
And the silence of the AD and the Assistant AD,
And the silence for which juries alone find the word,
And the silence of trustees before football season begins,
And the silence of boosters …
May 22nd, 2016 at 2:01PM
Look, I get that without football, Notre Dame may have ended up the same way as did St. Viator College. Knute Rockne, George Gipp, The Four Horsemen did more to elevate the uni’s profile and endowment than academics ever could.
Baylor, on the other hand, is the preeminent Baptist uni despite a football team that was for most of its existence nothing more than a footnote. So what accounts for BU’s scramble to become a football powerhouse? Is it to draw money from broadcast rights? Do they face the same question of how do we keep the lights on as do secular unis? There’s a book bangin around, waiting to be written…
May 23rd, 2016 at 8:17AM
Even the Notre Dame story is more complicated – ND certainly became famous through football in the Rockne-Leahy era, but its academic reputation was built (under Father Hesburgh) when it de-emphasized football to some extent (e.g., not playing in bowl games) and generally brought athletics under firm control.
May 23rd, 2016 at 12:31PM
I thought the national lesson we learned under the Clintons was that it was “just sex,” sexual harassment was OK, and obstruction of justice positively admirable, for some people at least. Starr has just “Moved On” UD. His team has just gone Full Bubba.
May 23rd, 2016 at 12:39PM
Mr. Punch, let me recommend a book that you may find interesting. “Shake Down The Thunder.” It’s a chronicle of not only Notre Dame football from its inception to the time of Rockne’s death, but of early college football, as well. One of the more fascinating aspects of that period was the use of what were known as ‘ghost players,’ or itinerant athletes, who when their eligibility ran out, would simply change names, go to another university and repeat the process. They weren’t students, just hired hands needed to maintain football programs. Notre Dame used more than a few of those guys, including George Gipp, who has almost no record of academic attendance. That was more or less the legacy that Father Ted inherited when he took over ND.
According to the book, Army may have been the best at using ghost players. The Academy would recruit guys who had played out their string, get them on board claiming that they were earning a commission, and start beating the hell out of younger, less physical teams. Nothing really has changed, except possibly the much higher rates of violence among the athletic chattel…
May 25th, 2016 at 2:42AM
The Texas writer is wrong. Starr wasn’t trying to make anything a national issue. He was very careful to watch what he was saying, as he was supposed to. His fault was that he didn’t realize that he had to get the public to understand what he was doing and why he was doing it.
The impeachment was about perjury. Whatever Starr’s faults as president of Baylor might be,the fact is that 18 years ago he was investigating what Congress had the duty to investigate.
If you don’t like what Starr was doing, blame Bill Clinton. If he’d been honest, there wouldn’t have been any need for the investigation.