“There should not be two reports. I’ve never heard of two reports,” said Mick Grewal, the attorney representing 65 of Nassar’s victims. “If there were two, they should have been released at the same time. Not years later.” By making the internal report public in 2014, Jim Graves, Thomashow’s attorney, said Michigan State could have prevented further abuse. “They deprived Amanda and all of the survivors from that knowledge they held at the time. Had they disclosed that information, it would have been disseminated so people would know that Nassar was preying on girls.”

Because the 2014 investigation was conducted internally, conflict of interests may have influenced the outcome, allowing Nassar to continue his abuse for two more years. That possibility, along with Michigan State’s role in the scandal more generally, is now coming into sharp focus. The university’s long-time president, Lou Anna K. Simon, resigned late Wednesday. A few hours later, Gary Peters, a U.S. Senator from Michigan, called on Congress to launch a formal investigation into how the school handled the Nassar case.

Title IX, a 1972 federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, has long required universities to adjudicate cases of student sexual assault and harassment. After the Education Department issued what later became known as the Dear Colleague letter in 2011, outlining the specific requirements a university must fulfill to comply with the law, colleges rushed to hire Title IX coordinators to handle these cases, or at least assign the role to someone already on staff. (Although the Department has since rescinded the 2011 guidelines under Betsy DeVos, few universities are likely to make cuts to their Title IX departments.)

University employees typically investigate incidents of campus sexual assault, but not always. While the Dear Colleague letter encouraged universities to employ internal teams to adjudicate campus sexual assault, it also warned them against potential conflicts of interest. Particularly if the case involves staff members, as opposed to just students, it can be difficult to hold a fully independent investigation. Colleges are tight-knit communities. And even when a school has 50,000 students, its medical specialists are likely to know one another.

If a case is particularly sensitive or high-profile, universities will often hire outside specialists—law firms that focus on college sexual misconduct—to handle the investigation and publish a public report. Brett Sokolow, a Title IX attorney who runs an independent practice outside of Philadelphia, said 17 colleges call on his team to investigate every single Title IX complaint they receive. That’s not economically feasible for most institutions, though, and many additional colleges hire Sokolow on a case-by-case basis. “We must do 400 of these investigations every year,” he said. If conducting the investigation internally could potentially hinder the results in any way, Sokolow said, the school has an obligation to hire an outside team. (As a third-party investigator, it bears mentioning, Sokolow would stand to benefit from that).