Civil Beat: How profiling of a UH presidential candidate led to a serious complaint

Our reporting last week on allegations of retaliation against a black law professor by a woman who is now a finalist for president of the University of Hawaii prompted the candidate, Wendy Hensel, to launch a media campaign claiming that Civil Beat was simply wrong and that she had nothing to do with the incident at Georgia State University.

And that’s a good thing. This is a situation that requires full public disclosure.

When Hensel, provost of the City University of New York, and Julian Vasquez Heilig, provost of Western Michigan University, were announced as the two finalists for UH president, we asked Stewart Yerton, business reporter principal of Civil Beat, to write their profile. The University of Hawaii, with its annual budget of $1.2 billion, is one of the state’s largest economic engines, one of our largest employers, and a vital part of the state in beyond the simple education of students. We are extremely interested in how Vasquez Heilig or Hensel would lead this important public institution.

Yerton began by grooming both candidates and soon heard from a number of people in the state of Georgia about discrimination and retaliation against a law professor, Tanya Washington. He obtained various documents, including the complaint filed by Washington against Leslie Wolf, then interim dean of the law school, on the review of Wolf’s work in Washington, as well as emails and other documents.

One of them was a broad request for public information submitted to Atlanta University by Washington attorney Julie Oinonen, which provided more details about the situation, including Hensel’s role in it. affair.

Yerton was also shown a video of a hearing on the complaint. At the hearing, Washington’s attorney demonstrated how the review of Wolf’s work contained metadata showing that Hensel created the document shortly before Wolf completed it. Hensel’s supporters rejected this connection with her, saying the document was likely created years earlier, when Hensel was dean, and that Wolf used it as a model. But Washington’s lawyer used the document’s metadata to show that the job evaluation given to Washington was created shortly before it was sent to Washington.

Civil Beat’s initial story that “Hensel played key role in retaliation against black law professor at Georgia State University” was based on all of Yerton’s reporting — records and interviews with people who knew the situation.

Today, Hensel insists in various media appearances that because the complaint was filed against Wolf and not her, she simply isn’t involved.

“I have never been investigated for discrimination or retaliation and no one has ever filed a complaint of discrimination or retaliation against me,” she wrote in an op-ed that appeared Monday in the Honolulu Star -Advertise.

“I was absolutely not involved in this whole thing that you’re talking about,” Hensel told Civil Beat for a follow-up article last week.

Hensel’s comments were widely reported in the media, virtually unchallenged, prompting Washington to make them public. Again.

“They forced our hand with these inaccuracies,” Washington told Civil Beat in an interview Monday. “Their statements called into question my credibility and reputation as a scholar in the public sphere. »

Read Yerton interview: Law professor says UH candidate is lying about discrimination complaint

But, as Washington’s lawyer Oinonen told us Monday, Washington “didn’t just object to Wolf’s actions. It’s a lie.

“To deny that Hensel herself is not the subject of a complaint is absolutely inaccurate,” she said.

The public deserves more transparency

The fact that it took us more than a week and a series of articles to paint a clear picture of what happened in the state of Georgia is troubling.

Running the state’s university system is a crucial task, but the search for a new president so far has largely been an effort orchestrated by the UH Board of Regents and a national search firm charged with successfully complete the recruitment process.

At the time we reported the initial story, UH would not allow Hensel to be interviewed, so his side of the story was relegated to no comment, which happens frequently and unnecessarily when officials decide he Better not to say anything at all. .

In this case, Hensel pushed UH officials to let her speak after the first article was published. UH communications director Dan Meisenzahl initially argued that it was not UH that barred candidates from speaking to the press, but rather WittKiefer, the national search company. We pointed out that WittKiefer is working for UH on this issue and that as WittKiefer’s boss, UH could have easily reversed this policy and let the candidates speak from the start. UH reconsidered its position and decided that this was indeed the way things should be.

This also allowed the media to be able to interview Vasquez Heilig. Both candidates appeared Monday on Hawaii News Now’s morning show “Sunrise.” And they both did interviews with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that took place all weekend.

It’s great that the public can finally learn more about the candidates through conversations with independent journalists who are better positioned than university officials to ask tougher questions, like how they would respond to criticism of some lawmakers who frequently criticize UH President David Lassner. on hot coals in public forums.

We have submitted a number of public records requests to the State of Georgia and University of Hawaii officials that we hope will shed more light on the situation with Washington, as well as how the research process was led by UH and WittKiefer.

The regents now plan to spend Wednesday and possibly Thursday interviewing Vasquez Heilig and Hensel. After the interviews, they must either choose a winner or send the search firm back to the drawing board to find new candidates.

Regents Chairman Gabe Lee said Hawaii’s Sunshine Law allows the board to conduct interviews, deliberations and decision-making in secret. But a 2019 decision by the Hawaii Supreme Court made clear that the open meetings law does not automatically authorize the hiring, firing and disciplining of people behind closed doors, especially high-ranking public officials. The high court said the law requires that a decision to move to an executive session balance the person’s privacy rights and the public’s interest in the situation.

It’s hard to see how the regents can make the privacy argument when the board is talking with candidates about their leadership backgrounds, skills and qualifications, which are of deep public interest . The same goes for board deliberations: the public is genuinely interested in what the regents think and how they decide which candidate to choose.

People who want to see the regents conduct presidential recruiting openly have several options. They can send emails to the regents asking that the board not go into executive session or that he be able to show up Wednesday and make the same request in person during public testimony.

If the regents ignore the public and conduct the interviews and decision-making behind closed doors, the public can file an after-the-fact appeal with the state Office of Information Practices and try to obtain the minutes of the executive session.

Last resort: a trial to obtain the report. It will of course take years to resolve this problem.