The U.S. Department of Education has opened an investigation into Title IX sexual violence issues at Baylor University in response to a complaint from the school’s former Title IX coordinator, Patty Crawford, who says she thinks the school set her up to fail.

Baylor was added Tuesday to the list of schools that have pending Title IX sexual violence investigations by the department’s Office for Civil Rights.

“Opening a complaint for investigation in no way implies that OCR has made a determination on the merits of the case,” Department of Education press secretary Dorie Turner Nolt said in an email late Wednesday afternoon.

“Rather, the office is a neutral fact-finder. It will collect and analyze all relevant evidence to develop its findings.”

Baylor, which was advised of the investigation Wednesday evening, did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on the investigation.

But in an email to faculty, the university said Interim President David Garland “immediately assured OCR the university will cooperate fully with the investigation.”

Wednesday night the school issued a brief statement from Garland in which he said he sent a letter to the department's Office of Civil Rights "pledging Baylor University’s full cooperation with their Title IX review."

"Over the past year, Baylor has undergone a comprehensive assessment of its response to sexual violence resulting in the adoption of 105 recommendations for improvement," Garland said.

" Within five months, we have completed or made significant progress on more than 90 percent of these recommendations. Should the OCR identify additional areas of improvement, we will work on those immediately. We are whole-heartedly committed to cultivating a safe and supportive environment for all members of the Baylor community.”

Crawford filed the complaint on Sept. 26 before she resigned, her attorney, Rogge Dunn of Dallas said.

The complaint alleges the school violated Title IX and retaliated against Crawford for trying to get Baylor to comply with the law, he said.

An investigator from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights interviewed Crawford last week, he said.

"It is significant that the Department of Education opened a formal investigation, which indicates that the Office of Civil Rights found Patty's complaints credible and that Patty's Title IX complaint warranted further investigation,” he said.

"In all the other cases involving people in the know...Baylor has bought the participants' silence. Patty is the first person to refuse Baylor's confidentiality agreement and step forward to expose what happened,” Dunn said.

Crawford resigned on Oct. 3 after daylong mediation of a civil rights complaint she filed against the school.

“In November 2014 when I came (to Baylor) I worked hard and the harder I worked the more they resisted,” she said two days later during an interview with CBS News.

Crawford said she went to work determined to ferret out the problems and within a short time had increased the number of reports generated by the Title IX office by 700 percent.

But after that effort, "it became clear that that was not something the university wanted," she said.

She told the CBS morning crew that her work environment worsened after she documented last July that Baylor was violating parts of Title IX.

She went on to say a group of senior leaders prevented her from doing her job and instead made sure "they were protecting the brand rather than our students.”

When asked about the scathing Pepper Hamilton report, Crawford said she believes the university continues to systematically fail victims of sexual assault to this day.

The board of regents hired the Pepper Hamilton law firm to investigate instances of sexual assault associated with students on campus.

On May 26, after hearing the firm's report, and saying they “were horrified by the extent of these acts of sexual violence on our campus,” Baylor regents reassigned Chancellor and President Ken Starr, fired head football coach Art Briles and put Athletic Director Ian McCaw on probation.

Briles and Starr have since reached settlements with the university, and McCaw remains on the payroll, but is no longer working.

Last Friday, Baylor regents emerged from two days of meetings vowing to be transparent, but otherwise saying little about the mounting furor over what sources say was a flawed investigation by Pepper Hamilton.

A university press release issued just before 6 p.m. Friday provided no specifics about the discussion of the fallout from the board’s announcement on May 26.

The board “focused its discussion on the commitment to rebuild trust with the Baylor family, the community and the public,” the press release said, quoting Board Chairman Richard Murff as saying:

“We know that many people have questions about decisions made over the past weeks and months. They want additional details and greater transparency, and they deserve that. We continue to look for ways to share more information while remaining true to our commitment to protect the survivors and spare them additional suffering. The board is committed to following through.”

A lengthy KWTX investigation revealed that the law firm fumbled in its investigation, according to university insiders and secret recordings of meetings with athletic staffers obtained by KWTX, which suggest that the firm’s investigators came to Waco with an agenda to purge members of the football program and had a racial undertone in their line of questioning.

The school released a 13-page findings of fact in May that didn’t identify any specific cases or name Briles or any other individual and a second document detailing 105 specific recommendations, but said it couldn’t provide any details about the specific cases in which Pepper Hamilton found university and athletic department failures.

The university has consistently denied that the law firm prepared a written report or that any record of the lengthy presentation to the board exists.

None of the sources to whom we talked disputes Pepper Hamilton’s finding that the university failed victims of sexual assault, and had major shortcomings in the systems and processes it had in place to deal with incidents and victims.

But in a meeting with athletic staffers in late July, the first the university had with them after the scandal exploded, Crawford, said athletics was not the main concern.

“A very small percentage of our cases have anything to do with athletics”, Crawford said in the meeting, of which KWTX obtained a recording.

“And I've made that very clear to our leadership. This is not an athletics issue in the sense of violence and all these things, this is a human issue.”

Crawford pointed out to the staff that just two football players have been convicted of sexual assault during Briles’ tenure at Baylor, a fact that those we spoke with say was lost in the media frenzy.

Neither of the two players stepped foot on the field after the coaching staff learned of the accusations.