The Department of Education is sticking by negative comments an official with the agency’s office of civil rights made about a University of Virginia dean during an interview with disgraced Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely.
The dean, Allen Groves, says that he was maligned in the article, “A Rape on Campus.” In that now-debunked piece, Erdely asked Catherine Lhamon, a 2013 Obama appointee to head the Department of Education’s civil rights division, about remarks Groves made regarding sexual assault investigations at UVA during a Sept. 2014 board of trustees meeting.
Video of the meeting shows that Groves responded to a question from a trustee about any ongoing sexual assault investigations at the school. While Groves appeared to give a thorough and measured response, Erdely characterized him as much more nefarious in her 9,000-word article.
Erdely wrote that after the trustee asked the question, Groves “swooped in with a smooth answer.” Groves downplayed the inquiry into the school by saying that the Department of Education’s investigation was only “a standard compliance review,” Erdely claimed.
But in fact, as video of the meeting shows, Groves did not “swoop in” with an answer — he was directly asked. He also told the trustee that UVA was being investigated for a specific sexual assault complaint and was also undergoing a standard compliance review.
Lhamon was not at the meeting. But Erdely described Groves’ remarks, and the civil rights officer offered a response, telling the reporter that Groves comments were “deliberate and irresponsible.”
“Nothing annoys me more than a school not taking seriously their review from the federal government about their civil rights obligations,” Lhamon said.
But in a March letter to Steve Coll and Sheila Coronel, the two Columbia University deans who did an independent investigation of Rolling Stone’s failures, Groves pointed to the video of the meeting and said that Erdely’s report “did not reveal the true substance of my response.”
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