YPSILANTI, Mich. (AP) – For two months after Laura Dickinson was found dead in her dorm room, Eastern Michigan University officials assured her parents and the public there was no sign of foul play.

But campus police knew otherwise all along.

It wasn’t until a fellow classmate was arrested in February that the truth came out: Dickinson had been raped and murdered. She had been found spread-eagle on the floor, naked from the waist down, a pillow covering her face and semen on her leg.

Now university officials from the president on down are being accused of endangering students to protect the school’s image.

“Somewhere a choice has got to be made to tell the parents,” Dickinson’s father, Bob Dickinson, said from the family’s coffee shop in Hastings, about 120 miles from Detroit. “We always suspected something had happened besides something natural. But we had no idea what.”

This week, the faculty council at the 23,500-student public university approved a no-confidence resolution against President John Fallon III by a vote of 22-4 and called for his firing. The school’s Board of Regents may also take up Fallon’s fate soon.

Faculty union leader Howard Bunsis said the cover-up was typical of the administration.

“They are so afraid of bad publicity,” he said. “I believe they just hunkered down and thought they could not tell the truth.”

Dickinson, a 22-year-old junior majoring in nutrition, may have been dead as long as three days before two housing employees and a custodian investigating complaints of a foul odor found her body about 1:30 p.m. on Dec. 15, just before Christmas break, in her locked room in Hill Hall.

Campus police began the investigation but soon called in the sheriff and the Michigan State Police crime lab. State police told school officials Dickinson may have been murdered. By 9:30 p.m., the county medical examiner had listed the death as suspicious and decided foul play was a possibility.

But the next day, Eastern Michigan posted the following on its Web site: “At this point, there is no reason to suspect foul play. We are fully confident in the safety and security of our campus environment, and our campus officials will remain vigilant in ensuring safety for all members of our campus community.”

Bob Dickinson said the university told him the same thing but never offered a more specific explanation for her death. Two years earlier, his daughter suffered an irregular heartbeat that doctors suspected was stress-related, and he said he thought something similar had happened this time.

When the medical examiner later ruled it was death by asphyxiation, he didn’t ask any more questions, he said.

Then on Feb. 23, 20-year-old Eastern Michigan student Orange Taylor III was arrested by campus police and charged with murder and criminal sexual conduct. Taylor had become a suspect in January after being seen on a security camera entering the dorm early on the morning Dickinson is believed to have been killed.

DNA analysis showed it was his semen in the room, police said. Under police questioning, he admitted stealing a PlayStation controller, a scarf and maybe Dickinson’s keys, authorities said. He is awaiting trial.

“They kept telling us there was no cause for alarm, (but) we were sleeping through this girl being murdered in her room,” said Asia David, 20, who lived a few floors above Dickinson. “It just seems like they were really holding stuff back from us.”

In the uproar that followed, the Board of Regents ordered up an independent investigation in March by a law firm. The 568-page report, released June 8, revealed that the vice president of student affairs, the public safety chief and the school’s communications office knew Dickinson’s death was probably a homicide but kept it secret.

The law firm also said that a police document containing the lurid details about the crime scene was ordered shredded by James Vick, vice president for student affairs.

Vick has been on paid administrative leave since early March. He complained that he has become the “designated scapegoat.” His lawyer said Vick had the document shredded because he believed police did not want certain facts about the crime to become public.

According to the law firm’s report, Vick never told the university president that homicide was a possibility, and Fallon did not even know there was a homicide investigation until police made an arrest.

On Tuesday, Fallon apologized for the first time to students, staff and particularly the Dickinson family, saying the university’s actions “compounded your pain.”

“We did get it wrong, shamefully so,” Fallon said. He pledged: “Never again will such a confounding series of mistakes be made on my watch.”

Fallon has refused to say why the university covered up the circumstances of Dickinson’s death. But Eastern Michigan has seen a lot of turmoil and bad publicity in recent years.

Eastern Michigan has had four presidents since 1999 – one of whom resigned in 2004 after it was learned that the $5.3 million presidential residence the university built was improperly funded. The school also was hit with an 11-day faculty strike last September.

Eastern Michigan may have violated the Clery Act, a 1990 federal law that requires colleges to disclose campus security information. It was named after Jeanne Clery, a freshman at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., who was raped and murdered in her dorm room in 1986.

The U.S. Education Department is investigating Eastern Michigan and could sanction the school. Once that report comes back, the Board of Regents will discuss whether to remove Fallon, said Regent James Stapleton.

“The Eastern Michigan situation appears to be the single most serious violation of the Clery Act that we have ever seen,” said S. Daniel Carter, of Security on Campus Inc., a nonprofit group.

“They misled the entire campus community,” he said. “I think they felt they knew best.”

Bob Dickinson said he is not angry at the university.

“We’re somewhat indifferent about it – the investigation and the outcomes from it,” he said. “Bob and Debra Dickinson don’t have anything to do with that. We’re dealing with the death of Laura and the trial coming up.”