A recent investigative article by Spotlight PA and the Centre Daily Times focuses on Penn State’s methods for handling reports of wrongdoing. WPSU’s Anne Danahy spoke with Spotlight PA reporter Wyatt Massey about their findings, including a lack of a standardized way for tracking reports of misconduct.
Here is their conversation:
Anne Danahy
Wyatt Massey, thank you for talking with us.
Wyatt Massey
Yes, thank you for having me.
Anne Danahy
Your year-long investigation found Penn State does not have a uniform way of handling employees' reports of wrongdoing and a lack of public disclosure of reports about what the university is seeing. What types of wrongdoing are we talking about? And then I'll have a follow up question about how the university does handle those complaints.
Wyatt Massey
Yeah, our investigation really looked at in the last 10 years. In the wake of the Sandusky child sex abuse scandal, the university had created a series of offices to oversee misconduct or compliance across the university as well as different policies that it either implemented or strengthened. And in doing that work, we found things that were inaccurate or things that weren't consistent across those various offices. One of the things that stood out is that the university doesn't have a universal way to track reports of misconduct. So your report could go to one office, but the university overall can't really track that report. Maybe if you reported to office A, but you should have actually reported to office B, and things can get lost in the shuffle.
Anne Danahy
How the university handles the complaints then depends on what type of complaint it is or what office it impacts?
Wyatt Massey
Yeah, the university has several units or offices that handle different types of complaints of misconduct, whether that is sexual misconduct, race or gender based discrimination. So the type or the nature of your complaint kind of determines which office it goes to. And in some cases, people will report misconduct in the kind of general sense through the Office of Ethics and Compliance, which was created to be kind of this like overarching hub to take these complaints and then kind of shepherd them to the right administrative unit. The university has said it still lacks a university-wide tracking system, which can kind of create these lapses where you might file a report and go months and months without hearing back and not even getting a 'Hey, we looked into this, and we found nothing,' or like, 'Hey, we're on top of this.' Stuff like that.
Anne Danahy
And are there specific incidents that you found that really stood out to you? I mean, there's different types of complaints, right?
Wyatt Massey
Yeah, we interviewed a professor, John Champagne. In the fall of 2021 he had made a report to an office at Penn State. And he even admitted it was a relatively minor thing, but he wanted to flag it for the university administration. And he had gotten no response. He waited weeks. Weeks, turned into months. He had sent emails to that office asking, 'Hey, I made this complaint. I got this tracking number, but I can't find anything about it. What's going on?' He reached out to the president's office. Nothing. And it took about a year and a half for the university to even get back to him to say, 'Hey, oh, we're sorry. This shouldn't have happened. We're going to take this very seriously.' And in that time, he had actually confronted one of the vice presidents during a faculty senate meeting. And that vice president had told him, 'Oh, this is probably a communications gap between our offices. That's something we're working on.'
Anne Danahy
So is the concern that that length of time that it would take for the university to respond to a complaint or the fact that it seems like it's getting lost in the shuffle isn't just one case, it isn't just this one professors. Is there concern that that's more widespread.
Wyatt Massey
Yeah, we've heard a lot of people stories about long wait times to get answers, or even just kind of getting a response from the university. Yeah, the professor is one example, is the one in the article. But there's many more that we've heard of, of people just kind of getting silence when they report misconduct to varying degrees.
Anne Danahy
And what was the university's response to this? Because they have defended the system that they have set up in the way they handle the investigations. And you could argue, well, different types of complaints, maybe should go to different offices. Did they dispute your findings?
Wyatt Massey
Yeah, the university said that it obviously takes these reports of misconduct very seriously. It said that it's a large, complex organization. Of course, Penn State has campuses across the state, has tens of thousands of employees. And it said that it is kind of continually working through identifying issues, making new policies, making changes to make sure these systems are operating correctly.
Anne Danahy
One of the incidents that you kind of take a close look at in the story is about a former head of the ethics office who was the subject of complaints herself. So that was pretty surprising, I thought.
Wyatt Massey
Like I mentioned, the Office of Ethics and Compliance was created in 2013, to be this kind of like central hub for these types of things. And it was created to be sort of independent from the administration. It could answer directly to the Board of Trustees. And in a period between late 2018 and early 2020, the director of that office, the chief ethics officer was repeatedly accused of misconduct, retaliation, abusive behavior, bullying, those types of things. And reports were coming in, through the university's official hotline system, like flagging these types of things, asking the university to do something. But of course, those complaints were going to the ethics office that this chief ethics officer was in charge of. So people were getting upset that those official channels weren't working. They were reaching out to the president, they were reaching out to the Board of Trustees asking them to do something. And they were pretty upset with how the university handled the entire situation, because it seemed like the unit really wasn't set up to handle reports about its own office.
Anne Danahy
Much of, but not everything that you've reported on, happened under previous university administrations, not necessarily the current one. Do you have a sense of whether the approach is changing at all under the current administration?
Wyatt Massey
Yeah, the new president — I guess she's completed her first year, so relatively still new — she has said that one of her goals is to create a university-wide tracking system. Obviously, that's something that has been talked about for years. And there's no real clear timeline of when that is, but it is kind of in her top five goals for the next coming couple of years.
Anne Danahy
So people often think of Penn State as being a public university, but it isn't, and it's state-related. So it doesn't have to publicly disclose a lot of the same things that a public university would in Pennsylvania. How did that impact your reporting?
Wyatt Massey
Yeah, one of the unique aspects of Penn State, which most people don't realize, even employees and people that are well versed in Penn State, is that it is, unlike other public universities not having to be compliant with the open records law. And that comes up big, specifically with things like the Office of Ethics and Compliance, because our reporting, and the university told us, that that ethics office does kind of provide data on how well it's doing, the reporting outcomes. Things for example, about, you know, how many reports did they get in a certain year? What trends are we seeing, you know, what percentage of them are abusive bosses? What percentage of them are sexual misconduct? Those reports, I guess, are provided to the trustees, but is done behind closed doors. The public doesn't have a real sense of transparency of how well some of these systems are working. The university could if it wanted to publish those types of things, but it chose not to.
Anne Danahy
Wyatt Massey, thank you so much for talking with us.
Wyatt Massey
Thank you.
