What It Took to Resolve a Federal Sexual-assault Investigation at UVa
When efforts to resolve a federal investigation into how the University of Virginia handled reports of sexual violence began in earnest last spring, campus officials were corresponding with a lawyer in a U.S. Department of Education field office. By the time the case was resolved in September, tense legal wrangling had reached the highest levels of the university, the state, and the federal agency. A trove of nearly 2,000 pages of communication obtained under the Freedom of Information Act shows an increasingly torturous set of negotiations, with UVa steadily ratcheting up the pressure on the department’s Office for Civil Rights to soften findings that the university had a sexually hostile environment.