CSU, nation's largest university system, mishandled sexual misconduct, bullying claims
A constellation of failures at California State University contributed to the widespread mishandling of sexual misconduct claims and an erosion of trust among students, faculty and staff at the nation’s largest four-year public university system, according to a written report released Monday by the law firm Cozen O’Connor.
The report caps a yearlong, systemwide assessment of the university’s Title IX practices, as well as its handling of discrimination, harassment and retaliation. It was commissioned by the school’s Board of Trustees in March 2022 in response to an exclusive USA TODAY investigation.
USA TODAY’s reporting last year revealed how then-CSU Chancellor Joseph Castro ignored sexual harassment, bullying and retaliation complaints against a senior administrator with whom he was friends during his tenure as president of CSU’s Fresno campus.
Rather than discipline or terminate the administrator, Castro gave him glowing reviews and even nominated him for a prestigious lifetime achievement award. When Castro could no longer ignore the behavior, he authorized a settlement agreement that allowed the administrator, Frank Lamas, to retire with a clean record and $260,000. He also provided a letter of recommendation for future employment elsewhere.
Castro was named chancellor of CSU's entire 23-campus system weeks after signing the settlement, a position he held for little more than a year. He resigned in February 2022 in the wake of USA TODAY’s reporting. He now serves as a professor of leadership and public policy at CSU’s Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
Read the original investigation:Fresno State president mishandled sexual harassment complaints. Now he leads all 23 Cal State colleges.
The new report by Cozen O’Connor found that Lamas’ behavior, and Castro’s response to it, were endemic to a larger, institutional problem in which complaints about sexual misconduct, discrimination, harassment and retaliation were ignored, mishandled, or simply fell through the cracks.
Campuses winging it, staff overworked, no centralized system
These failures were fueled by a lack of coordination across the sprawling university system that left individual campuses winging it when it came to documenting, investigating and resolving complaints, the report found. Rather than set clear expectations and consistent processes for handling such matters, the report revealed, the chancellor’s office provided ad hoc advice and had no centralized system to collect, track and manage data and information.
"The downsides of the gaps in documentation and records management systems are plentiful," the report noted, before ticking off a list of resulting problems like the inability to detect patterns, allocate resources based on need or adjust education and prevention measures to align with the realities they face.
The report also highlighted a severe lack of staffing and resources that made it all but impossible for campuses to adequately implement the requirements of applicable university policies or state and federal laws, especially the equity in education law known as Title IX. As a result, those who reported sexual misconduct or other questionable behavior felt unheard at best and further traumatized at worst.
“Individuals that are overloaded with too much responsibility are focusing on the fires and, as a consequence, all the other things are just dissolving and leading to a lack of trust in the system,” said Gina Maisto Smith, chair of Cozen O’Connor's institutional response group, during a Board of Trustees meeting in May where she and a colleague gave a verbal presentation of the report’s broad conclusions ahead of its release.
As an example, Maisto Smith said, the sole Title IX coordinator at one of the system’s campuses also oversaw numerous other functions, including human resources, equal opportunities, the Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as receiving whistleblower complaints and those about discrimination, harassment and retaliation.
“At most campuses, there are not enough people to do the work they are assigned,” Maisto Smith continued. “The impacts are plain: We cannot consistently demonstrate care and core compliance functions. Timeliness is impacted, overall effectiveness is impacted, perception of the process is impacted, the inability to engage in proactive and preventive work is impacted.”
Among the broad findings of the Cozen O'Connor assessment were:
◾ Insufficient infrastructure for effective implementation of the responsibilities required under Title IX and policies related to discrimination, harassment and retaliation.
◾ Significant “gaps in the provision of prevention and education programming required by the Clery Act and state law, as well as a need for expanded training and professional development beyond the online modules required by state law and system policy.”
◾ No “policy, process, or practice for consistently responding to other conduct of concern that may not rise to the level of a violation of the University’s Nondiscrimination Policy ... or that is not based on a protected status,” including abuse conduct, bullying or other unprofessional behavior.
◾ A lack of trust across the system and throughout all stakeholders, including students, staff and faculty with regard to the university’s concern for their well-being and handling of their reports.
◾ The need for an accountability process, “both to hold campuses accountable in carrying out an effective Title IX and DHR program and to hold individuals accountable for conduct that violates policy.”
CSU spokeswoman Claudia Keith said the system has spent about $1 million on the report, to date.
'We will not squander this opportunity'
As part of their assessment, Cozen O’Connor associates reviewed reams of data and documents, visited all 23 campuses in the system, interviewed key stakeholders and met with several groups representing a cross-section of the university community, including administrators, students, staff and faculty.
They also received dozens of emails from people who shared their experiences, and they conducted a systemwide survey that got nearly 18,000 responses.
In addition to individual reports for each of the 23 campuses, the main 236-page report made numerous recommendations for how the university can improve.
Those recommendations include centralizing oversight and accountability processes at the chancellor’s office; hiring more staff across the board to implement the provisions of Title IX and other requirements; providing more and better prevention and education programming; developing, training and overseeing a shared pool of investigators and hearing officers through stand-alone regional centers; and implementing an enterprise-level case management system.
“The systemwide and university recommendations outlined in this report provide a pathway that moves us from where we have fallen short to a stronger and more vital university system,” said Interim Chancellor Jolene Koester in a press release issued along with the report on Monday. “To bring about meaningful, authentic and sustained change, the entire Cal State community must walk this path together. We will not squander this opportunity. We will get this right. The CSU’s mission and core values demand it and our community deserves it.”
On a positive note, reviewers said they found an abundance of dedicated and caring professionals committed to eliminating, preventing and remedying toxic behavior within the system, according to Leslie Gomez, vice chair of Cozen O’Connor’s institutional response group.
But Gomez said in May that the university must do more to support them.
“The common refrain we heard at the CSU and across the nation is the perception of institutional bias – the default conclusion that individual campus administrators act to protect the interests of the institution rather than care for the individuals who have been harmed,” Gomez said during the May meeting. “That perception was palpable at the CSU, almost like a default button that we heard on a regular basis.”
That sentiment was echoed Monday by CSU Employee Union President Catherine Hutchinson, who said there's little faith in campus leaders to do the right thing.
"We fully support one core finding of the report: The CSU needs to centralize its oversight program if it will ever repair its failures in handling Title IX compliance, including discrimination, harassment, and retaliation," Hutchinson said. "Talk to students and staff and you will see there is little, if any, faith in campus leadership to do the right thing. At Fresno State, the same administrators who worked under former Chancellor Castro, a failed leader who exited in disgrace, are now being recommended to implement recommendations made in the Cozen report. Union staff members must sit at the table and be heard if campuses are serious about increasing transparency and accountability."
Another damning assessment due Tuesday
In addition to the Cozen O’Connor assessment, the California State Auditor's Office is expected to issue its own report Tuesday into the CSU system's handling of sexual harassment complaints about administrators, faculty and staff.
According to the Los Angeles Times, which reviewed a draft of the report, campus officials exhibited poor judgment in failing to investigate multiple accusations, did not properly document cases and did not discipline people found credibly responsible.
In all, the news organization reported, “more than 1,200 sexual harassment reports were made against employees“ from 2018 to 2022, and “auditors identified at least 150 employees who repeatedly violated CSU policy and accounted for more than 30% of all reports.“
The audit, which began last year, focused primarily on three CSU campuses recently rocked by sexual misconduct scandals: Fresno State, San Jose State and Sonoma State.
Fresno State was Castro’s stomping ground when he ignored six years’ worth of complaints from staff about the toxic behavior of his vice president of student affairs before signing the secret settlement agreement that allowed Lamas to retire with a golden parachute.
Sonoma State’s seventh president, Judy Sakaki, resigned last year amid revelations that CSU paid a $600,000 settlement to a former SSU administrator who faced retaliation for reporting alleged sexual harassment by Sakaki’s estranged husband, lobbyist Patrick McCallum.
At San Jose State, administrators had mishandled multiple complaints from student-athletes about alleged sexual misconduct by the school’s longtime sports medicine director, Scott Shaw, a 2020 USA TODAY investigation revealed. After a flawed internal investigation cleared Shaw of any wrongdoing in 2010, he remained in his position and continued to abuse students, an FBI probe found.
An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division found San Jose State officials violated Title IX for more than a decade by repeatedly failing to adequately respond to reports of Shaw’s conduct. The university agreed to pay at least $6.6 million to settle the legal claims of 28 of Shaw’s alleged victims.
Federal prosecutors also filed criminal charges against Shaw last year; his trial begins this week in a courthouse just steps from his former campus.
CSU already taking some steps to correct problems
The Cozen O’Connor report detailed these, and numerous other incidents involving sexual misconduct, harassment, retaliation and toxic behavior, across many of the university’s nearly two dozen campuses that garnered media attention in the past year.
“In some instances, the CSU has already taken steps to address the concerns publicly identified and assessed through these internal and external reviews,” the report said. “For example, on March 22, 2022, the CSU’s Board of Trustees passed a resolution approving the development of systemwide policies regarding retreat rights for administrators and a policy on letters of recommendation.”
Retreat rights are contractual clauses that allow administrators to retreat to a faculty position at any time if a new president cleans house or the role is a bad fit. Some former administrators, like John Lee at Cal Poly Humboldt, have used the rights to escape termination after credible accusations of sexual harassment and bullying, as detailed by a USA TODAY investigation last year.
Castro, too, exercised his retreat rights after resigning as chancellor to take a professorship position at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
The university changed its policy on retreat rights to prevent their use in cases where administrators were found responsible for misconduct. CSU also now prohibits the issuing of letters of recommendation for current and former employees similarly found responsible for misconduct.
Individual campus reports also revisited some of the high-profile incidents and provided the law firm’s assessment of how they were handled. In the case of Fresno State, for example, the reviewers found Castro exercised poor judgment on many levels.
“Following an ultimate finding of responsibility, the disciplinary response by the then-President (who subsequently became Chancellor of the CSU system) reflected bias and poor judgement,” the report noted, “including his role in sanctioning and the Vice President’s separation from the CSU, a letter of recommendation written by the then-President, and the exercise of retreat rights by the former Chancellor.”
Emily Le Coz and Kenny Jacoby are reporters on the USA TODAY investigations team. Contact Emily at elecoz@usatoday.com or @emily_lecoz and Kenny at kjacoby@usatoday.com and follow him on Twitter @kennyjacoby.