Wendy Hensel says Civil Beat got the facts wrong about a law professor's accusations. But what she's not telling you is how the professor came to file the complaint in the first place.
Our stories last week about allegations of retaliation against a Black law professor by a woman who is now a finalist for president of the University of Hawaii have prompted the candidate, Wendy Hensel, to mount a media campaign claiming that Civil Beat was just wrong and she had nothing to do with the incident at Georgia State University.
And that's a good thing. This is a situation that calls for a full public airing.
When Hensel, the provost of City University of New York, and Western Michigan University provost Julian Vasquez Heilig were announced as the two finalists for the UH president's job, we asked Stewart Yerton, Civil Beat's senior business reporter, to write profiles of them. The University of Hawaii, with its $1.2 billion annual budget, is one of the state's biggest economic drivers, one of our largest employers and vital to the state in ways that go beyond simply educating students. We're extremely interested in how Vasquez Heilig or Hensel would lead this important public institution.
Yerton began by backgrounding both candidates and soon was hearing from a number of people at Georgia State about discrimination and retaliation against a law school professor there, Tanya Washington. He obtained various documents, including the complaint Washington filed against Leslie Wolf, who was then interim dean of the law school, over Wolf's job review of Washington, as well as emails and other records.
One was an extensive request for public information submitted to the Atlanta university by Washington's attorney, Julie Oinonen, that laid out more details about the situation, including Hensel's part in it.
Yerton also was able to review a video of a hearing on the complaint. At the hearing, Washington's attorney demonstrated how the job review from Wolf contained metadata showing Hensel had created the document shortly before Wolf finished it up. Supporters of Hensel have dismissed that link to her by saying the document was likely created years before, when Hensel was dean, and that Wolf used it as a template. But Washington's attorney used the document metadata to show that the job review given to Washington had been created shortly before it was sent to Washington.
Civil Beat's initial story that "Hensel played a key role in retaliating against a Black law professor at Georgia State University" was based on all of Yerton's reporting -- the records and interviews with people who knew about the situation.
Now, Hensel is insisting in various media appearances that, because the complaint was filed against Wolf and not her, she is simply not involved.
"I have never been the subject of a discrimination or retaliation investigation and no one has ever filed a complaint of discrimination or retaliation against me," she wrote in an op-ed in Monday's Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
"I was completely uninvolved in that entire case that you're talking about," Hensel told Civil Beat for a follow-up story last week.
Hensel's comments are being played widely by the media, virtually unchallenged, and that has prompted Washington to go public. Again.
"They forced our hand with these inaccuracies," Washington told Civil Beat in an interview Monday. "Their statements have called my credibility and my reputation as a scholar into question in the public sphere."
Read Yerton's interview: Law Professor Says UH Candidate Is Lying About Discrimination Complaint
But, as Washington's attorney, Oinonen, told us on Monday, Washington "wasn't just opposing the acts of Wolf. That's a lie."
"To deny that Hensel herself is not subject of a complaint is absolutely inaccurate," she said.
The fact that it's taken us more than a week and a series of stories to draw out a clear picture of what happened at Georgia State is troubling.
Leading the state's university system is a critical job, but the search for a new president so far has been largely an orchestrated effort by the UH Board of Regents and a national search firm contracted to carry out the hiring process.
At the time we were reporting the initial story, UH wouldn't allow Hensel to be interviewed, so her side of the story was relegated to a no comment, something that happens frequently and unnecessarily when officials decide it is better to say nothing at all.
In this case, Hensel pushed UH officials to let her talk after the first piece was published. UH's director of communications, Dan Meisenzahl, at first argued that it wasn't UH that was prohibiting the candidates from speaking to the press, it was WittKiefer, the national search firm. We pointed out that WittKiefer works for UH in this matter and that as WittKiefer's boss, the UH could easily have overruled that policy and let the candidates speak from the beginning. UH reconsidered its position and decided that is in fact how it should be.
That also opened to door for the media to be able to interview Vasquez Heilig. Both candidates appeared on Hawaii News Now's "Sunrise" morning show on Monday. And they both did interviews with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that ran over the weekend.
It's great that the public is finally getting to learn more about the candidates through conversations with independent reporters who are in a better position than university officials to ask more delicate questions, like how they would handle criticism from certain lawmakers who frequently rake UH President David Lassner over the coals in public forums.
We've submitted a number of public records requests with Georgia State and with University of Hawaii officials that we hope will shed more light on the situation with Washington, as well as how the search process has been conducted by UH and WittKiefer.
Now the regents are planning to spend Wednesday and possibly Thursday interviewing Vasquez Heilig and Hensel. After the interviews, they're expected to either pick a winner or send the search firm back to the drawing board to find new candidates.
Regents' chair Gabe Lee has said that Hawaii's Sunshine Law allows the board to conduct the interviews, deliberations and decision-making in secret. But a 2019 Hawaii Supreme Court ruling made clear that the open meetings law does not automatically make it OK to hire, fire and discipline people behind closed doors, especially high-ranking public officials. The high court said the law requires that a decision to move into executive session balances the person's privacy interest against the public's interest in the situation.
It's hard to see how the regents can make a privacy argument stick when the board will be talking with the candidates about their leadership record, skills and qualifications, about which the public has a deep interest. The same goes for deliberations by the board -- the public is genuinely interested in what the regents are thinking and how they decide which candidate to choose.
People who want to see the regents conduct the presidential hiring in the open have a couple of options. They can send emails to the regents asking that the board not retreat into executive session or they can show up Wednesday and make that 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 to the state Office of Information Practices and try to get minutes from the executive session.
Last resort: a lawsuit to get the minutes. That will, of course, take years to resolve.