Update on Title IX Review

Monday, February 8, 2021; 4:15 p.m.

I wanted to take this opportunity to update you on our review of the University’s handling of past sexual and domestic violence cases.

As you know, we retained Husch Blackwell, a firm with extensive knowledge of and experience with Title IX in higher education, to conduct an independent review of specific cases as well as our overall Title IX reporting process.

Since then,  Husch Blackwell has been working hard to review case files and thousands of documents and to interview victims, staff members, the LSU police department, and both current and former administrators. They have also met with a number of student leaders and organizations, and are now inviting any students who would like to meet with them to do so either in a group or individual setting.

Please use this link to sign up for a group interview. 

 Please use this link to sign up for an individual interview.

If you have experiences or perspectives to share, I very much hope you’ll consider meeting with them.

Husch Blackwell’s report is on track to be finalized in late February or early March, and it will be made public at that time. It will include an assessment of the cases reported on in the media, as well as an analysis of whether sexual and domestic assault allegations have been handled properly and consistently at LSU.

Like you, I want to see us make necessary changes, where warranted. You have my commitment that we will act swiftly to fix what the Husch Blackwell review determines may be broken.

In the meantime, we continue to develop new initiatives and explore changes that we can make to improve the process of reporting sexual and domestic assaults, to provide better and more sensitive support to victims, and to find ways to prevent assaults from happening in the first place. This work is being done with input from students, faculty and staff, as well as external partners. We are also finalizing a contract with the Sexual Trauma Awareness and Response Center (STAR) to provide additional training and educational resources to our campus community. Athletics is implementing a new program for coaches, staff, student workers and student athletes called LiveRespect that will include topics such as healthy relationships, consent, bystander intervention and workplace culture.

This is an extremely serious and critically important issue to everyone in our LSU family. We are committed to owning up to any mistakes we’ve made in the past, holding ourselves accountable, and, most importantly, doing better going forward. We owe it to victims to ensure a safer and more supportive LSU in the future.

I look forward to sharing more with you in the coming weeks.

Sincerely,

Thomas C.  Galligan, Jr. 
Interim LSU President and Professor of Law