This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The other day, reports started burbling across the internet that the president of a major religion-centric university was about to be fired because of how he handled — or mishandled — allegations that several female students had been sexually assaulted.

No, it wasn't anything to do with Brigham Young University. Though there are many parallels to be drawn, and perhaps lessons to be learned, each school from the other.

It was about Baylor, a university "affiliated with" the Baptist General Convention of Texas. And the president, it turns out, wasn't fired. He was "reassigned."

The irony, the kind the internet loves, is that the president and chancellor of Baylor — now chancellor and professor — was none other than Kenneth Starr.

Yep. Himself. The special prosecutor who, while moonlighting as a lawyer for Big Tobacco, nearly brought down President Bill Clinton through his partisan determination to make squalid disclosures of a sleazy affair that was none of his or anyone else's business.

So, the rumors flew, the man who once couldn't wait to investigate every sordid detail of a voluntary affair between two consenting adults was about to lose his high-profile job because he wasn't interested in charges that members of his football team had been attacking non-consenting women.

Consistent. Consistently misogynistic.

In the case of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Starr didn't give a jolly damn about the life or the feelings of the woman involved.

According to Lewinsky's version of events, Starr had her held in under FBI guard in a hotel for 10 hours trying to get her to detail her relationship with the president and agree to help him bug her conversations with Clinton.

Starr never let Lewinsky contact her lawyer or anyone else. He threatened her, and her mother, with criminal obstruction of justice charges that, he lied, could lead to decades in prison if she didn't help.

If that story is true, then Bill Clinton never thought of doing anything to Lewinsky that was a tenth as bad as what Starr did to her.

Clinton's own selfish interests happened to coincide with Lewinsky's. Total silence. The kind that would have let the young woman move on and build a life out of the spotlight, rather than spend decades in another kind of prison, living life as a ribald punchline.

Once the relationship became public, Clinton could have saved himself, and the rest of us, much pain if he had at least made it look as if he was trying to protect the young woman's honor rather than his own sorry skin. And allegations from the time that it was Hillary Clinton who was determined to save Bill by smearing Monica are a part of a sad pattern that is keeping her campaign from cruising to victory this year.

Just hours before the Baylor story broke, The New York Times, Politico and others were reporting on how Starr, speaking to historians in Philadelphia, expressed regret for his investigation, for the damage it did to the government's ability to do more important things, like head off Osama bin Laden, and expressed admiration for how Clinton had turned his life around since.

Maybe Starr is really sorry. Maybe he wants to get in good with the next President Clinton. Maybe, knowing what was about to break back in Waco, he was feeling reflective. But not a word of apology, so far as was reported, for the pain he caused Lewinsky.

At Baylor, Starr's attitude was to keep it all under wraps. Not, this time, for the benefit of the females involved, but for protection of his tender football players.

Baylor did fire its football coach, after a day or so of outraged online chatter about how it wasn't fair to blame the school's president for allegations that football players had been assaulting or harassing female students, mostly with impunity.

That impunity apparently ended when the Baylor Board of Regents brought in a high-powered Philadelphia law firm to conduct an independent investigation. The firm's report, released Thursday, blamed the whole university power structure — but mostly the football program — for what it concluded was a systematic habit of either not investigating allegations of sexual assault or dealing with them within the program.

Official responses reportedly focused on hushing it all up and helping some of those suspected of sexual wrongdoing to quietly transfer to other football programs at other schools. A model apparently copied, consciously or not, from the various Catholic bishops who moved child-molesting priests around to different parishes without telling anyone why. Such an outside investigation would be a good, and cleansing, option for BYU, as it tries to deal with the totally disgusting — and utterly unrefuted — allegations that the school has doubly victimized young women who have reported sexual assaults by bringing them up on Honor Code violations that could lead to the women, rather than their assailants, being expelled.

Just don't hire Ken Starr to do your investigation for you.

George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, is old enough to remember what Whitewater, the scandal Ken Starr was supposed to be investigating, was. gpyle@sltrib.com