U of Virginia apology?

When I first read this piece about people calling for the University of Virginia to apologize for collectively punishing the students in its fraternities and sororities based on unverified (and now apparently untrue) claims of misbehavior at one fraternity in Rolling Stone, I thought the university would be in full apology mode in order to avoid a lawsuit.

Thinking about it more, I think Virginia has decided that the probability of a lawsuit (or, more likely, many lawsuits) equals one, and so they already rehearsing the strategy they will take in the courtroom of framing the punishment as a "pause". Seems like a dubious strategy to me, but I am not a lawyer. Presumably they think it is the best one they've got, which suggests that they should be getting out their checkbook.