Have you reported misconduct at Penn State? Spotlight PA wants to hear from you.

WPSU | By Wyatt Massey of Spotlight PA State College

Published July 19, 2023 at 1:05 PM EDT

A woman is turned toward a window crying next to a laptop with a “State” sticker. — A 2017 campus survey commissioned by Penn State found that just 44% of faculty and 42% of staff believe the school does not retaliate against people who report wrongdoing. For nearly two years, the very office Penn State created to hold itself accountable struggled to handle behaviors it was designed to prevent, including alleged retaliation.

This story was produced by the State College regional bureau of Spotlight PA, an independent, nonpartisan newsroom dedicated to investigative and public-service journalism for Pennsylvania. Sign up for our regional newsletter, Talk of the Town.

Spotlight PA wants to better understand how Penn State handles reports of misconduct, no matter how small they may seem. We hope to gather information about whether university representatives respond to misconduct, how the different compliance systems function, and whether people who speak up face any form of retaliation.

As part of our “Missed Conduct” investigation, we found repeated and documented failures in Penn State’s internal accountability system, including multiple allegations of misconduct regarding the university’s former top ethics officer.

We want to hear from Penn State students and employees about what happened — whether you reported misconduct or if you were the subject of a report. We also want to know if you witnessed or experienced some form of misconduct or harassment and decided not to disclose it. Your direct experiences help us ask the right questions as we continue our coverage.

If you’d like to share your story, use the form below and Spotlight PA Penn State Reporter Wyatt Massey may follow up with you. None of the information you share, including your name, will be published without your explicit consent.

Documents related to your experience — emails, copies of official complaints, text messages, DMs, screenshots, etc. — will help us better understand what happened. You can attach such documents below. Otherwise, we’ve set up several secure ways to share information with us.

If you’d like to speak with Massey directly, you can contact him on Signal, an encrypted phone messaging app, or call 445-236-0562.

SUPPORT THIS JOURNALISM and help us reinvigorate local news in north-central Pennsylvania at spotlightpa.org/donate/statecollege. Spotlight PA is funded by foundations and readers like you who are committed to accountability and public-service journalism that gets results.