OPINION:
When one journalist (Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller) made a Freedom of Information Act request of the U.S. Department of Education about possible involvement of federal officials in the now-discredited Rolling Stone story, “A Rape on Campus,” the department sent him a box with a CD in it.
The CD contained nothing. Another response has been promised.
When the University of Virginia (UVA) Dean of Students Allen Groves filed his own FOIA request for any communications between a senior Obama administration official in the U.S. Department of Education and Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely — including “telephone records, calendar entries, emails, text messages, correspondence, case file notes, or social media postings” — all he received was a note that a call had been put on the official’s schedule.
The Civil Rights Office of the U.S. Department of Education is beginning to give the appearance of stonewalling legitimate requests that would shed light on whether there was any official involvement in a journalistic debacle that attacked the integrity of a great university.
We are moving past the story about the story. Two deans of the Columbia School of Journalism had skillfully conducted an autopsy of the Rolling Stone’s “A Rape on Campus,” which relied almost solely on a single, unreliable source to portray the University of Virginia as indifferent to reports of the gang rape of a woman at a campus fraternity house. But how this story came to be published remains a matter of intense interest.
Mr. Groves’ FOIA request to the U.S. Department of Education first raised the possibility of federal involvement in the Rolling Stone story. In a prior letter to the Columbia deans, Mr. Groves says Rolling Stone mischaracterized his extensive and earnest remarks to the UVA Board of Visitors about the school’s response to heightened levels of federal scrutiny of its handling of sexual assaults, which described Mr. Groves as downplaying the issue as “standard” and “routine.” Mr. Groves pointed out that this misrepresentation served to set up the next quote in the article from an Education Department official, calling the attitude attributed to Mr. Groves as “deliberate and irresponsible.”
Why would a high-level federal official give such a comment and what factual basis did the agency have to make such an assessment? It’s a question the public deserves answered.
Then Mr. Ross, the journalist, brought to light that this same official served on the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault with a campus activist who put the Rolling Stone reporter, Ms. Erdely, in touch with the unreliable source at the University of Virginia. Records show that this official made nearly 60 visits to the White House complex since the beginning of 2014, the activist six, and that both were invited to the same White House meetings on three occasions.
If there was any federal involvement in Rolling Stone’s contrived story — whether prior or after publication — it should matter to all institutions of higher education. UVA is one of 113 postsecondary institutions currently under investigation by the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education over allegations that these schools didn’t properly and thoroughly pursue charges of sexual violence. It is fair to ask if someone involved in this government effort wanted see Ms. Erdely’s inquiries into a woman’s allegation of gang rape at UVA as an opportunity to make a case for even more government intervention.
The Department of Education should answer the following questions:
• Did department officials have any contact with the alleged victim, her handlers or the reporter prior to or just after the story?
• Did department officials have any prior knowledge of the UVA story and the issues it raised before Rolling Stone went to press?
• Why did a senior department official give her comments about the UVA dean?
• Did the department get involved in coordinating any of its activities with Rolling Stone or activists prior to, or just after, publication of the story?
• Why did the department schedule some rape awareness activities immediately around the story?
• Did the department conduct its own fact-finding or investigating of the allegations to see if the university was in compliance with federal policy?
• Did the department do anything to investigate the violent attack on a male fraternity house at UVA after the story was published?
Understanding how such a flawed article came to be should matter to the Obama administration and students of the University of Virginia. It should especially matter to Phi Kappa Psi men who were tagged with a heinous gang rape, charges about which the Charlottesville police “exhausted all investigative leads” to conclude “there is no substantive basis to support the account alleged in the Rolling Stone article.”
Above all, the answers should matter to journalists, who unearthed the flaws in the story. Now they should want to know if ideologically driven groups and politically motivated officials tried to act as journalism’s new assignment editors.
• Mark W. Davis is a former White House speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush and a former member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at the University of Texas at Austin.
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