The desk sergeant in your hypothetical isn’t claiming to support the protest march or collecting every last detail about the plans or participants and reporting them to the heads whatever institution they’re protesting against. You may not be familiar with U.S. law, but if he were that could be construed as a violation of the right to free assembly (specifically by NAACP v. Alabama, which affords participants privacy).
In the actual scenario, of course, no-one is alleging such a violation since Burchett was not representing the U.S. government. He was just ratting on the protestors on behalf of the authoritarian administration of a Xtianist school under the pretext of helping co-ordinate logistics.
Again, it’s clear from the article that they didn’t expect him to run to the administration with all the details of the march so they could get ahead of peaceful protests for PR purposes. That’s why it’s being brought up in connection with this Title IX lawsuit.
Baylor’s VP for marketing and comms and CMO said:
“[Burchett] indicated in his deposition testimony that he had advised the students up front that he would be coordinating with university personnel, including media, security, parking, facilities, pastoral care, and so on,” Cook said. “This is standard operating procedure for any significant student event on our university campus.”
Unless one takes the word “media”* out of the context of logistics implied by the other aspects discussed or takes an unusually broad view of “and so on” (which these PR weasels for the university would be glad for you to do) the reasonable assumption on the part of the protesters was that he wouldn’t be giving the university advance notice of talking points and specific participants (the sort of thing his boss said he was “adept” at, evoking the same tone of admiration with which Dean Wormer called Doug Neidermeyer and Greg Marmalard sneaky little shits).
[* which is not normally understood to include PR flacks of any kind]
Pretty much standard for any student group. In my experience all sanctioned groups have a faculty advisor. The student government had at least 3 university employees at every meeting, taking notes and reporting it back to various offices.
A faculty advisor is usually chosen by the sanctioned group and is assumed to have some affinity with the group’s goals or at least basic ethics. In most universities it’s the choice of the student group, not the administration.
In my experience (long ago) in the rare case that a university employee was brought into a meeting it was under the expectation that they were being informed of logistical issues (e.g. parking, security, press access). They were usually asked to leave once an understanding was in place. If this guy was allowed to stick around it was because he gave the protest group the impression that he supported their goals.
OK, true, but you’re assuming a lot that wasn’t said, and the allegations are based on a civil complaint and anonymous source (one would expect related to the suit). I don’t know about you, but I worked with the Student Activities Office in college. They were there to help us, and they were also there to protect the University and its assets from the depredations of sometimes irresponsible 20-year-olds. While we were friendly with the administrators, who I genuinely believe cared about us and wanted to help us, we knew they had a different agenda than we had.
If this was the Dean of Students offering confidentiality, or a rape counselor spilling confidential information, I would agree about the breach of trust. Here, there was no confidentiality implied, no one infiltrated anything (the groups came to the office - the office didn't send anyone "in"), and no one was a mole.
Perhaps the students' expectations were not met and they were surprised that people repeat things that are not said in confidence. It's really the tone of the allegations that gets me. It's sort of like a headline, "man surreptitiously steals secret recipe". When you read it, it turns out that a guy took a refill of coke without asking permission.
Also, as you rail against the "authoritarian administration of a Xtianist school", please don't forget that Baylor is indeed a Christian University, it does not hide that and the students who attend should not be surprised by that fact, either.
That’s not what this guy was doing. He was behaving more like the corporate HR person who says he’s on the side of the employee issuing a complaint against a manager but then immediately runs off to report everything to the head of legal and the COO. HR, too, claims to be there to help the employees but anyone who’s done enough time in corporate America knows where their real loyalty lies.
Normally I’d be willing to allow that the students may have been naive about this rat’s intentions, but given the issues surrounding the protest (which involve campus sexual assault and the administration’s mishandling of it) I highly doubt they were being careless when it came to preserving confidentiality. If these very serious and aware protesters allowed him to hear details of planned speakers and what they were going to discuss it’s because he gave them the false impression he was on their side.
That’s a fair point. Any student attending a Xtianist school should understand that it’s going to be crawling with more self-righteous tattletales and spies reporting to far more heavy-handed administrators than one would find at a secular university. In that respect, it’s no wonder they hired Starr.
How do you get that from the information on offer? That’s certainly what the article is implying, and exactly what I’m questioning. For example, it says he pretended to help them organize their protests. Did the protests not happen because he didn’t file the paperwork?
If the protests were organized, then he wasn’t pretending.
First, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that the lawsuit is alleging that he sabotaged the protest by trying to make it not happen (e.g by not filing paperwork). The allegation is that he sabotaged the protest by spying for the organisation they were protesting against (by falsely pretending sympathy with the protesters). Now that I’ve eliminated your evident confusion on that matter:
Let me put it this way: do you think that a group focused on a highly sensitive issue (campus rape) that inherently involves confidentiality that they’re claiming was mishandled by the university would willingly share details of the protest’s talking points and speakers (some of them perhaps new accusers) with someone who told them “I’m here to represent the university’s interests and not yours and will report all this back to them so they can pre-emptively respond to and undermine your protest”?
That scenario makes absolutely no logical sense. The only alternative is that, in addition to offering his help on logistical issues and filing the paperwork (as he did), he claimed (falsely, based on his tattling) to be on their side, which inspired them to share details they otherwise wouldn’t have. This is how the most adept spies and moles work: being helpful to the cause, acting like members of the team, but secretly reporting back things they shouldn’t to the opposition.
Which he allegedly did, in the sense that he was going beyond logistics co-ordination and participating in organising the details of the protests in a pretense of support for their cause.
You’re welcome to continue to try to play semantic games in defense of the school’s well-documented use of a spy, but the article is accurate. Now we’ll see if the court agrees.
Sensitive issue - not sensitive protest. I’m quite sure the protest wasn’t planning to secretly out victims (if it was, I hope an administrator stepped in and stopped them). It says he pretended to help them, but there is no evidence that he did not, in fact, help them. Again, you’re assuming something with absolutely no supporting information. The only allegations are that he feigned support for their cause, with no suggestion that he wasn’t actually a supporter. They have interpreted his informing his superiors as proof that he is evil.
He might have claimed to be sympathetic to their cause, actually been sympathetic to their cause, and still told the administration that they were planning a protest. Again, it's a scheduled and permitted protest - it isn't like there are deep secrets. Yes, he might have revealed who their speakers would be and given the administration's PR firm a chance to have a prepared rebuttal, but he didn't prevent them from holding the protest, they don't accuse him of sabotaging their event. But somehow, despite all evidence that he was actually helping them, it was "pretend".
Some might think that a campus rape survivor voluntarily making her first public appearance (and wanting to do so on her own terms rather than a PR company’s) or a revelation of a new sexual assault would not be potential examples of sensitive protest, but I guess that would be another “different perspective.”
I dunno, the documented fact that he ratted them out to the administration they were protesting kinda indicates to me that he wasn’t a genuine supporter or particularly sympathetic to their complaint against the school.
They have interpreted that as his spying for them using the pretext of feigning support for their cause. I’m careful about using the word “evil” but terms like “unethical” and “immoral” and “snake in the grass” come to mind, whatever excuses you want to make for such behaviour.
I could go on but it’s clear you’re just stretching now. I’m done wasting my time with your nonsense.
This finally has me breaking my commenting cherry.
So, I worked with crime victims in Waco, Texas a few years ago. Most the victims were children, and most the crimes were aggravated sexual assault. We worked close with the children’s protection wing of the Waco PD.
I had a few clients who were Baylor students. If the victim was a Baylor student, the police would allow Baylor to handle the investigation. We had a sick, twisted game where we would pass around mugshots and newspaper articles about perpetrators who were arrested. (Again, most the victims were children, so there were cheers when justice happened.) But I never saw anything from Baylor.
It makes you think there’s something sinister afoot. But there’s no way to prove it, so it becomes a conspiracy theory. And then, Ken Starr and his football coach are fired! Thereby confirmed what you knew - that the school was protecting its precious football players.
While good that Starr is gone, this is a cultural issue at Baylor and many other universities so his firing will not solve anything.
It’s sad that Baylor students who were sexually assaulted were treated this way by the school. They swoop in like they would care for the victim and help seek justice, but they just get enough details in order to silence the whole matter.
A private university should never, ever handle criminal investigations - there is zero accountability, zero transparency, and hence zero justice.
All your comments here seem to be based on the assumption that the only thing this guy was learning about were basic logistics of the protests. The university was under scrutiny for lawsuits. This guy was getting whatever oppo information he could on these folks, AND feeding them pro-Baylor legal talking points. The complaint mentioned that he befriended the groups and built trust, meaning they probably talked a lot more than just “what time should we meet, should we wear the black teeshirts this time guys!?”. Abusing trust that you build with victims of sexual assault in a context where the university is hostile to their wellbeing is shady AF.
First, thanks for your valuable contribution. That must have been a harrowing and demoralising job but I’m sure you made the victims’ lives a little better by your work.
Agreed, especially at schools where sports are king. The Paterno situation at Penn State was a case in point: there are still alumni and townies there who want his statue restored despite the fact that every new revelation has him hearing about the child sex abuse earlier and earlier.
The risk only grows when, in addition to prioritising football, the school is a private one that loudly announces its “Christian values”.
[as a side note, nice work on your monicker! First time I’ve seen the forbidden word spelled out properly in text without the autocensor kicking in]
It was surely a difficult job, but I loved my coworkers. We all had a dark sense of humor to cope with the cases. I liked working with the parents (the only worse than someone assaulting you is someone assaulting your kid), and as they told their story and I listened with zero judgment, I could see their burdens become lighter and hope come back into their eyes. I only left because I had to move.
My agency worked cases in the ~10 counties around Waco as well. It was also frustrating with the smaller police departments, towns of less than a thousand or so people. If the accused was a friend of the sheriff or mayor, then the case would slowly disappear. (These would also be very “Christian values” towns.)
There is no indication that is the case. The story says he provided intelligence to the school’s PR firm, so that they had a media strategy ready. Again, not really mole work.
Why did they need a media strategy for a sexual assault survivors group? That doesn’t seem a little fishy to you? Because it certainly does to me. It’s not like the problem with sexual assaults on college campus is optics.
I work at a university, and as far as I know, when student organizations hold events, especially groups meant for some sort of mutual support, they tend to not have someone who feeds all their meetings goings on to a PR firm whose goal is not the help root out the problem of sexual assault on campus, but to make the university look good.
Also, if this shit is true, it’s highly fucked up and shows a clear problem:
McCaw alleged Baylor hatched "an elaborate plan that essentially scapegoated black football players and the football program for being responsible for what was a decades-long, university-wide sexual assault scandal," according to court documents.
They need a media strategy for when the press calls to ask questions about this weekend’s protest march. That’s what a media strategy is. Why do the students need to have a protest march other than to attract media attention?
That they need to hire an entire PR firm for. How about say, "yes, we know it’s a problem on campus. We plan to work with the survivors to address it.
You really don’t understand the entire purpose of protest marches? Really? The very POINT is indeed to attract media attention in order to force change on campus, in this case to bring to light a culture that encourages sexual assaults by sweeping them under the rug or possibly scapegoating minorities. That’s not some women “attention-seeking”, it’s seeking to create positive change. You may not mind living a in culture that regularly condones sexual assault, but I promise that victims of sexual assault do not.
