Senate Standing Committee on Education

Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome. Welcome to this joint oversight hearing of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, the Assembly Higher Education Committee, and the Senate Education Committee. Today, we will discuss the findings and recommendations identified in the State Auditor's Report released in July titled California State University: It Did Not Adequately or Consistently Address Some Allegations of Sexual Harassment. This audit was requested by a bipartisan, bicameral group of legislators led by former Assemblymember and Chair of this Committee of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, member Salas.

As a subsequent chair of this committee, of the JLAC Committee, I plan to carry on the effort for this that the prior chair led by authoring legislation compelling system-wide changes at the CSU to protect students and employees from sexual harassment. As many of us know, sexual harassment has widespread consequences for all of those involved and who are affected. Sexual harassment can cause students and employees emotional and physical harm that interferes with their ability to learn and to be successful.

Like many Californians, I've been disheartened by the many cases of sexual harassment in the system that have emerged in recent years. Understandably, these incidents may cause many Cal State students and staff to lose trust in the University's ability to keep them safe. The Chancellor's Office has taken some actions in response to these incidents, including hiring an external firm to conduct a system wide assessment of CSU's Title IX practices.

The findings from the external assessment, along with the California State Auditor's Office, which we will hear of both of them here today, the independent report highlight the much more that needs to happen and that needs to be done. Allegations need to be adequately and timely investigated, first and foremost, disciplinary action needs to be consistently taken, and meaningful system-wide changes need to take place at the CSU. Specifically, the Chancellor's Office must take a more active approach to oversee campus activity.

The lack of complete and accurate information about the total number of cases of alleged sexual harassment is egregious. The lack of sufficient guidance has led to inconsistencies and deficiencies in how campuses handle, investigate, and issue disciplinary actions on sexual harassment cases. Suffice it to say, the Chancellor's Office has failed in its responsibility to keep students and staff safe when it comes to this issue.

Today, we will discuss the findings of the State Auditor's Report that identify these shortcomings and the role of the Chancellor's Office and the CSU campuses in handling reports of sexual harassment on a going-forward basis. We will also hear from Cozen O'Connor on the system-wide assessment of infrastructure and implementation of policies and procedures at the CSU system. Additionally, we will discuss CSU's plans for changes and the corrective actions to be implemented, and the countless recommendations to protect students and employees from sexual harassment.

Finally, we will hear perspectives from representatives from the California State Student Association, the California State Employees Union, and the California Faculty Association. My goal with this hearing, with this oversight hearing, is to shed light on the sexual harassment process and procedures at our California State University system, to make sure that the Chancellor's office and each of the campuses can better protect students and employees from sexual harassment on a going-forward basis. Before proceeding further, there's a few housekeeping items.

I'll ask the panels to keep their presentations to the time that we've allocated. This is approximately 15 minutes to the State Auditor's presentation, ten minutes to the CSU Chancellor's office to respond to the Auditor's presentation. Representatives from Cozen O'Connor will similarly have ten minutes for their presentation, and then we will have five minutes to hear from each of the participants in the final panel.

Following each panel presentation, I'll ask members to please provide ask their questions and provide some comments if they'd like to, and we will reserve the time for public comment after the last panel's question and answer period. Before we begin, I'd like to see if any Members have any questions on today's hearing. Okay. Then with that, I want to thank my colleague and Chair of the Higher Education, Assembly Higher Education Committee, as Member Fong who will say a few remarks. Thank you, Chairman Fong, for being here.

Chair Alvarez for convening us all here today, and for this joint hearing, this very important hearing today. And I'd like to thank our current and past legislators who have requested this very important audit. The impetus was to fully understand the scope of misalignment between written policy and our day-to-day implementation. As we have seen in the last 19 months, have yielded a myriad of headlines detailing how all 23 campuses have struggled to implement sexual harassment prevention, leading to the opinion that additional intervention and oversight may be necessary to ensure that our campuses are free of sex discrimination and harassment.

We are gathered here today as members of the Legislature to not only hear from our State Auditor on our findings but also to get answers from the CSU as to how we found ourselves in this predicament. At its core, sexual harassment prevention is meant to provide restorative measures to victims and corrective actions to perpetrators.

Creating a campus environment where students and employees can learn and work in an environment free from discrimination, regardless of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity, should be a core value of every post secondary education in our state. Thank you to the CSU for being here today and for providing transparency as to how we plan to fix the problems identified in the state audit and the Cozen O'Connor reports.

As the Chair of the Assembly Higher Education Committee tasked with oversight of public and private post secondary education institutions, I realize the issue of sexual harassment is not unique to the CSU. The Higher Education Committee staff, along with the staff of the Senate Education Committee, have been meeting with public and private higher education institutions to examine areas where the state can improve compliance. This hearing today is only the first step of the many steps we are taking to provide additional layers of protection for our students and staff. And so today, we will have a really robust hearing. And thank you so much again to Chair Alvarez.

Thank you, Chairman Fong. Appreciate that. Do other Members of the committee have any comments, opening remarks they'd like to make before we start with our first panel? Okay, seeing none, then I'll invite the state Auditor to please come forward. Remind Members that we will have questions after the State Auditor completes his presentation. And I want to thank Mr. Grant Parks, our auditor, for being here, and your staff as well. Please go ahead when you're ready.

Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Can you hear me now? Sorry about that. Good afternoon Chairman Alvarez, Chairman Fong, legislative members. My name is Grant Parks, the state auditor. With me here today is Nicholas Kolitsos. He was the audit principal who managed the day to day of our audit of CSU's compliance with sexual harassment investigations and practices. Sexual harassment can cause significant emotional and physical harm to both students and employees of academic institutions.

Congress enacted Title IX of the Federal Education Amendments of 1972 to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sex, which includes sexual harassment in educational settings. The US Department of Education requires that universities to comply with Title IX, establish their own procedures, and equitably resolve sexual harassment complaints. As the chair noted, the former chair of JLAC, along with 46 other members, requested this audit following public reports raising concerns about how CSU handles sexual harassment complaints, particularly when senior campus administrators and other prominent officials are involved.

In November 2021, news outlets reported that San Jose State had reached a multimillion dollar settlement with student athletes who were sexually harassed by a longtime sports trainer. And in February 2022, the former CSU chancellor resigned amid criticisms that he mishandled sexual harassment complaints directed against another high level official during his time as President of Fresno State.

This audit request was intended to provide the Legislature with an overview of how the CSU system handles sexual harassment complaints and whether there are improvements that can be made to better protect students, faculty, and staff. Among the several objectives that JLAC directed my office to address, some of the more prominent ones included determining the total number of sexual harassment complaints against employees of the CSU, and of those, how many were investigated and substantiated over a five-year period.

And for substantiated allegations determining the consistency and reasonableness of any discipline administered in those cases. JLAC also directed us to review the Chancellor's Office and three other campuses to evaluate whether there are any differences in CSU's approach to investigating different categories of staff, whether they be faculty versus non-faculty, administrators, or executives.

And we were also asked to examine CSU's policies with respect to executives' retreat rights to a prior job classification and how often these retreat rights have been used for those accused of sexual harassment and to evaluate CSU's practices for offering letters of recommendations for employees found to have perpetrated sexual harassment. Overall, there were two primary approaches that my staff took during the audit.

First, to quantify the total number of complaints and the number of investigations, my staff visited each of CSU's 23 campuses and the Chancellor's office to obtain or manually compile lists of sexual harassment reports from 2018 to 2022, based on campus investigative files. The results of these efforts are presented in the end of our report in Appendix A.

As noted in the Appendix, over a five-year period, we identified over 1200 complaints that were reported to campus officials, 251 of which were investigated, or about 20%, and 98 of those investigations were ultimately substantiated. Our review of CSU's files also indicate that 159 employees were the subjects of multiple reports of sexual harassment, of which 30 were the subject of four or more complaints.

Globally, our review also showed that roughly 25% of all reported complaints were resolved late beyond CSU's policy of 100 days after receiving the complaint, while 139 complaints were resolved more than 200 days after receiving the complaint. As I will discuss later in my testimony, we ultimately determined that some of this data was unreliable due to inconsistent and poor record-keeping practices within the CSU.

Our second primary approach to more fully evaluate CSU's sexual harassment process from intake to resolution, was to select a sample of 40 complaints at three campuses and the Chancellor's Office. Those included San Jose State, Fresno State, and Sonoma State. We selected a judgmental sample of 40 cases to ensure that we could evaluate different processes and outcomes, such as evaluating which complaints were investigated versus which ones were not, which complaints were substantiated following an investigation, and which ones were not, as well as ensuring that we were reviewing complaints submitted by students as well as CSU employees.

In all cases we reviewed, the CSU employees were the individuals accused of sexual harassment and were the focus of each complaint or investigation. Most of my testimony today will focus on the 40 case files that we reviewed and some of the high-level results found that 15 of those 40 cases were closed at the intake process before an investigation even took place, and eleven of these 15 lacked clear rationales to understand or allow an outside party such as us to understand the campus's rationale for closing those complaints.

Another 21 investigations conducted by the campus or third party investigators were performed, but seven of these 21 investigations, in our view, reached questionable conclusions not to substantiate the allegations, and in four cases were resolved through informal resolution agreements. And in two of those four cases, we noted that there was missing important documentation, such as signed agreements defining the terms and conditions of those arrangements, as well as missing documentation from the complainant demonstrating that he or she even wanted an informal resolution.

And with respect to timeliness of resolving sexual complaints. In our sample of 40, 13 of those 40 selected cases exceeded the number of working days called for CSU's policy, and three of those 13 were resolved more than 100 days beyond the expected time frame. Globally, our audit report is separated into three different chapters. Chapter one deals with the investigation process, chapter two deals with discipline, and chapter three deals with our ideas on where the Chancellor's office can take more of a leadership role with respect to sexual harassment investigations. I'll start off with some of the high points in each of those chapters.

With respect to chapter one and the investigation process, our report really starts off at the beginning where we noted deficiencies in CSU's intake process, the process to decide whether or not an investigation is even warranted. In our view, deciding whether to conduct an investigation is actually one of the most critical steps a campus can pursue when deciding how to best handle sexual harassment allegations.

If cases are closed prematurely before an investigation takes place, complainants can lose confidence that their concerns are not being taken seriously, while those who are accused may not be held accountable through discipline. Eleven of these 15 cases were closed at intake that lacked clear rationales, primarily as a result of weaknesses, in our view, in CSU's policy that does not require investigators or other campus officials to document and justify why investigators are deciding to close cases at intake.

Some of the specific issues we found included investigators prematurely, in our view, concluding that the alleged violation did not constitute a violation of CSU's policy. In our audit report, we talk of one example where four complainants reported that a male staff member made several inappropriate comments, such as implying one wasn't wearing undergarments, asking another if her sexual partners pleased her, and telling another that her boyfriend was lucky to have a woman like her.

The investigator concluded that an investigation was not warranted because these comments, in the investigator's opinion, were not of a sexual nature and did not fit the definition of sexual harassment. Ultimately, the employee simply took a training course, and the complainant later reported to CSU officials that she felt as if nothing had been done and still felt highly uncomfortable around the CSU employee. In other instances, we found that the university did not document efforts to contact other potential complainants or witnesses during the intake stage.

We also noted the campus officials did not always explain why closing a case at intake was the appropriate decision, even if the complainant didn't want to participate in the investigation. At times, those who report harassment may not want the CSU to investigate and may not want to participate at the outset. But CSU's policy is very clear that it requires campus officials to balance this request against the campus's duty to provide a safe, nondiscriminatory environment and to evaluate whether an investigation could continue without the complainant's involvement.

Ultimately, we had expected to see explanations in the case files justifying why campus officials decided to close these eleven cases prior to an investigation. Of note to their credit, San Jose State has recently developed its own guidance on the intake process that includes detailed protocols and documentation of the initial assessment process, and we think the Chancellor's Office should consider modifying or adopting San Jose State's process to better allow campuses to document and justify their determinations at intake.

We also believe that there's opportunities to reduce the likelihood of interference in investigations, particularly because in several cases we could not identify the campus official or officials who decided to close a case at intake prior to an investigation. Such lack of transparency, in our view, can help facilitate inappropriate interference when evaluating complaints. Moving on to investigations, 21 of our 40 sample items passed the intake phase and moved forward as an investigation.

However, seven of these 21 demonstrated weaknesses, in our view, that caused us to question the University's conclusions that sexual harassment had not occurred. Examples of the weaknesses that we identified include investigators using an unreasonably restrictive interpretation of CSU's definition of sexual harassment, and at times we noted that investigators omitted certain allegations or facts from its final analysis and determination. Table three on page 23 of our audit report lists the deficiencies that we noted with each of these seven cases.

And in figure six on page 26 of our report, we provide two examples where campus officials appeared to use an unreasonably restrictive definition of sexual harassment. I'll share one of those examples now. In this example, an official not affiliated with the CSU reported that a CSU employee made inappropriate comments to her at a social engagement following a professional event and touched her stomach and hip in an intimate way, stating that he always knew they would have sex.

The investigator determined that the conduct more likely than not occurred and was of a sexual nature. However, in the case files concluded that the conduct did not violate CSU policy because it was not sufficiently severe or pervasive. In our view, one way the Chancellor's Office can improve campus investigations is by requiring that they implement and document additional secondary review.

Apart from the individual performing the investigation, some of our concerns were the result of questionable interpretations made by CSU investigators and their inability to reasonably gather all available evidence during an investigation. We believe creating a structured supervisory review process and approval process for investigative reports could better ensure a more thorough and consistent evaluation. Chapter one also gets into timeliness issues at the CSU. As I mentioned earlier, 13 of our 40 cases were completed beyond the time frame established in CSU policy.

We acknowledge that investigations can take significantly longer than expected at times for various reasons, including scheduling conflicts of investigators, the availability of involved parties, and also the request by those parties that the investigators gather additional evidence. But our primary concern with late investigations is that in each of those 13 cases that were late, we lacked documentation in the files for one or more extensions granted by CSU.

And our concern is that the parties to these complaints can easily lose track of an investigation status as they are delayed and pushed out further and further. We believe the Chancellor's Office should implement a standardized system for tracking timeliness across all CSU campuses, and such a system might offer functionality such as a dashboard or other electronic means for complainants to periodically check on the status of their cases. So that was chapter one. Chapter two got into discipline, retreat rights, and letters of recommendation.

Those were important objectives that JLAC asked us to evaluate. In our view, CSU did not consistently implement or document corrective action and disciplinary cases. In seven of our 40 cases, the CSU campuses had determined that there was a need of some sort of corrective action, and in some cases, discipline against employees for their behavior. But in these seven cases, the CSU could not demonstrate that it followed through on these actions.

In one example, a student reported that a male faculty member made inappropriate comments to her consistently, walked her towards her residence after class, and made other comments about his and her personal romantic lives. Another individual had reported allegations of misconduct against the same employee two months prior. The campus closed the case at intake and referred it to the academic Department to address the behavior, but the case files did not include any information about what the ultimate resolution was, and when we asked the Academic Department, they were unaware of any conversations or counseling that may have taken place.

In another example, in 2016, a campus investigated allegations by a female student against her male professor, resulting in the campus substantiating allegations of sexual harassment violence, including touching a sensitive body part, all of which violated CSU policy. The professor had been the subject of prior complaints since 2003, including previous discipline for sexual harassment in 2005, but the CSU could not explain to my staff why the professor was not disciplined in 2016.

Roughly three years later, in 2019, the campus discovered that it missed the statute of limitations for imposing discipline and would wait years later until May 2022 to issue a letter of reprimand for that 2016 behavior. In many cases we reviewed, the resulting disciplinary action taken against CSU employees were not documented in investigative files, and CSU policy does not require campus officials to do so. Nevertheless, we believe doing so may better ensure campuses follow through when initiating appropriate corrective action and discipline.

With respect to retreat rights, certain executives and management are allowed to be reassigned to faculty positions at the end of an administrative assignment known as retreat rights. At the four campuses we reviewed, we did not identify any executives or management personnel who were subject to a finding of sexual harassment and subsequently retreated to a faculty position. But based on campus data, 121 executive and management positions held retreat rights from 2016 to 2022, and we found that two of these 121 were accused of sexual harassment.

One of those was sustained, but the individual did not retreat and instead left the campus under terms of a settlement agreement, while the second case was not investigated because the complainant did not want to pursue an investigation. But ultimately, in our view, CSU's policy on retreat rights has a significant limitation. It can allow employees with findings of sexual harassment to retreat to faculty positions as long as the findings did not lead to the employee's termination or separation.

To address this gap, we believe the Chancellor's Office should consider revising its policy to prevent retreat rights for those found to have engaged in sexual harassment under CSU's policy. We found a similar condition with CSU's policy of permitting positive letters of recommendation. An employee found to engaged in sexual harassment still remains eligible to receive a positive letter when seeking another job again, so long as the employee did not have findings that led to their termination, non-retention, or separation.

We recommend also that CSU change this policy and further consider prohibiting positive letters for those employees who were also suspended or demoted, but not necessarily terminated. And finally, in chapter three, we talk about how we believe the Chancellor's Office can take a more proactive approach to monitoring and administering CSU's sexual harassment program, particularly with respect to the variation in the data collection and quality practices that we noted among the campuses.

Campuses vary greatly in how they track and report sexual harassment, which leads to inconsistencies in the data they record, and is also a primary reason why, as we state in our appendix, that the data we present are unreliable, even though they are the best information we could develop in response to the audit request. For example, campuses sometimes count cases involving multiple complaints or allegations as a single report, while in other cases, campuses would count each complaint as a single report.

By setting clear expectations for campuses for how they should collect, define, and report data, the Chancellor's Office could improve the quality of data reporting. The campuses we reviewed explained that they generally have to manually compile some of the sexual harassment data they report to the Chancellor's Office. And during the audit, we noted that the campuses developed lists of cases often missed key information, such as the type of alleged misconduct, the names of the parties involved, and the key dates and outcomes.

In some cases, my staff had to manually compile the missing information by reviewing individual case files at these campuses. The Chancellor's Office has not issued any guidance in its sexual harassment policy for the specific data that campuses should document in their case management systems. And campuses are not required to use a single case management system, likely further contributing to the inconsistency and completeness issues with sexual harassment data.

The Department of Justice and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators have recognized the analysis of sexual harassment data is a best practice for identifying problematic trends and preventing and detecting sexual harassment. And although Fresno State, San Jose State, and Sonoma State each had multiple employees who were respondents to multiple allegations of sexual harassment, the Chancellor's Office does not collect information on which employees have been subject to multiple allegations over time, and having this information, in our view, would be useful for the Chancellor to identify potentially high-risk employees who may have a history of inappropriate behavior.

Mr. Parks, we're at 20 minutes.

Sorry. I'll just wrap by closing that we made five pages of recommendations to the CSU trying to enhance their policies and procedures over their investigative practices, their case file documentation, documenting the key decisions they make during the investigative process. Ultimately, CSU's Interim Chancellor indicated that CSU agreed with our findings and agreed to implement all of our recommendations. And I'd be more than happy to answer any questions that you have. Thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate the thorough report, as always, from the Auditor's Office. Let me just ask a couple of initial questions that hopefully can guide a little bit of the conversation. One of the things that I would like your opinion on is the different reported number of cases of incidents. You identified in your report 1200 sexual harassment reports in the four-year period of 2018 to 2022. There were numbers from the O'Connor report that were lower, 452.

The article that was published by the Los Angeles Times noted that there were 26 incidents just in a one-year period. I'd love to hear your perspective on why these numbers all differ and if you have a better sense of why they are. And I'll be asking this of O'Connor as well.

So I don't want to speak for O'Connor and their methodology. I think I'm somewhat familiar with the article that you're referring to. I think it was different methodologies that our office used versus perhaps what O'Connor used.

And can you tell me about your methodology then?

So, our methodology focused primarily on, and I'll have Nick jump in to help me here with further detail, but our methodology involved working with each individual campus, having them develop lists that we would then corroborate by going through individual case files at those campuses. Nick, you want to talk a little bit about our approach for developing the data in our appendix?

Good afternoon, members of the committee. My name is Nick Kolistos with the State Auditor's Office. I was the project manager for this audit. And just to walk you through a little bit of our thought process and methodology, when we first started the audit and we looked at the three campuses, we identified problems with the data that they were collecting. For example, there was fields missing. There was key dates that were missing.

So we had to actually go to the physical case files or electronic case files and then create that information for the three campuses we reviewed. We also went out to each of the campuses, the remaining 20 campuses, we obtained the same information, we found similar problems where some cases, they would have a tracking spreadsheet, where they would track this information. In other cases, they would not have a tracking spreadsheet or database.

Let me interrupt you just for clarity's sake. So where there was no tracking, did you physically count files in a cabinet?

Physically count files in the cabinet. Sometimes we had to obtain them electronically. Sometimes they were in employees' emails. So we actually had to do a lot of work to try and obtain all of that information.

Thank you. That clarifies it.

Is there any additional information you'd like?

On thatI think I'm clear, in terms of how you compiled your numbers, I'll have to ask that of the others. On figure three, page eleven of your report describes the process for how sexual harassment reports are handled by the campuses. Notice that the process does not include an internal review of the Title IX coordinator and investigators' determinations and conclusions. Who at the campuses so at the campus level now from the Chancellor's office is reviewing and approving the analysis or determination reached by the coordinator that's at the campus, or is there no one?

So the Title IX coordinator sometimes is the investigator or the person that evaluates the cases when they come in an intake. Sometimes they do have staff that perform the investigation, and in those cases, or they contract it out, and in those cases, Title IX coordinator performs a review. However, there's no clear requirement that there needs to be a secondary review or someone else reviewing the file before it's resolved.

And that's why that's one of your recommendations.

That's correct.

Okay. You pointed out to us the example, case example number four on page 26, where pretty clearly the allegation is, my opinion, quite severe. Protecting obviously confidentiality and all that, what did you actually find in the file? In this case was it just the allegation and then the only notes were that it was closed because the conduct did not violate CSU's policy? Is that the extent of it, or was there more that was provided in terms of the reasoning why that was determined?

Yeah, it's pretty general indicating that the conclusion that we state here on the figure and they disclosed the file which is why we're recommending that you need to have a clear rationale for why you're closing a case or resolving a case a certain way and then having a framework to consistently apply that for all investigations.

So there were no case notes at all?

Oh, there's case notes. But in terms of the rationale for how you reach that conclusion, that's where the detail was limited.

So then you obviously had access to the case notes and in your opinion, and please share how you would reach that conclusion. The behavior was severe and should have warranted additional either investigation or disciplinary action. Again, without being cognizant that we want to be protecting the confidentiality of what you found. I guess the question is, how severe was that, the findings in the notes themselves, that the person or not severe, obviously enough that they would lead them to determine that it did not violate the policy.

Right. Chairman Alvarez, I think from our standpoint, just reviewing the allegation on its face and the investigator concluding that more likely than not it had occurred causes us to reach the conclusion that clearly the investigator should have made a different determination. And so I think when you have different campuses, different investigators operating through perhaps different frames of how you interpret CSU policy and how you apply it, in my mind, it just speaks to the need for the Chancellor's Office to play a much larger role than it is now in terms of setting expectations and level setting for everybody about how do we judge these cases that come through these investigators to make sure that you don't have the kind of inconsistency that you have here. Because I would argue that most people reviewing case example number four, as you cite here on page 26, would clearly think that that was a severe incident that would require a different course of action.

What was stated that happened and what was said clearly to me is severe. And then, as you noted in the case notes, it identified that more likely than not, this actually occurred, and it was of sexual nature. That was made clear by either the investigator or the coordinator. I don't know who in this case was reviewing this, but it wasn't enough to violate the policy. Clearly, I'll be asking CSU about this specifically. I'll give an opportunity to my colleagues, and I'll ask Chair Fong to please.

Thank you so much, Chair Alvarez, and thank you to the auditors for this robust report and really reporting the many issues along the investigatory process and the inconsistencies across the system. And there's a lot of work to be done. If you had a couple of questions as well.

And in terms of the recent example by Chair Alvarez on case example four, we also wanted to see the letter that was requesting the audit asked the state auditor to review the Title IX investigatory process and to determine whether the University's system of response to sexual harassment is in compliance with federal regulations.

And something like case example four could have been a possible example of something that could have gone to for federal compliance issues. The audit also states on page nine that there were no cases involving the federally mandated... whether the sexual harassment cases could have risen to the standard. A federal regulation...

So none of the 40 cases that we reviewed were referred were identified as meeting the regulations under the federal law or under federal regulations. What we did find is that CSU's policy is the main document that they use to apply the criteria when they perform an investigation so that is what we applied. Given the timing of our report, that very few cases, because we would looked at cases from 2016 to 2022.

So the majority of our cases were definitely before the 2020 regulations, so we didn't end up picking up any of those at the time.

But with the new regulations, would they have risen to the level of federal compliance issues?

Our approach during the audit was to focus on CSU policy because they set a higher threshold or a more stringent threshold relative to federal regulations. On page eight, we have that graphic that says under Title IX, federal regulations, it has to be so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive. Under CSU policy, it's sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive.

So given that CSU was holding itself to a higher standard than what the federal regulations would suggest, that's the approach that we took during the audit to see whether or not CSU's own application of its own policies were being complied with. And that's where we focused most of our work.

Okay, thank you so much for and then in some of the cases that were examined, the complainants mentioned that they had adverse reactions to how the case was handled. We heard of extensive delays in some of these cases, and in some of the cases, one person specifically indicated that they quit their job. In the cases that were reviewed, were there any other incidents where the survivor had reactions regarding their case, how the case was handled, which led them to leaving the campus?

I think we have anecdotal examples throughout the report where we have complainants basically coming back to the investigator, complaining that "I feel like nothing has been done. I feel like I'm still unsafe". So we didn't take each one of those examples and talk about them in our report. But I think anecdotally throughout.

And Nick, I don't know if you can speak to this through your review of the case files, but we did see indications that those who were coming forward being brave to offer their experiences and to submit their complaints. Left less than satisfied with the effort that CSU took to take their complaints seriously and to ultimately act on them in an expeditious manner.

Thank you so much. And the expeditious manner and to really examining of the cases where they took over 100 days, over 200 days, is horrible. And so, really, the timely resolution to these cases is so critical going forward. In addition into the cases that were reviewed by the state auditor, how many cases actually resulted in disciplinary actions or corrective actions? And did the state auditor notice a correlation in the state of severity or lack of severity of the action if the complainant was a student.

So we noted I'm trying to remember exactly how many were actually disciplined, but we didn't see any difference between whether the complainant was a student or whether it was faculty member. Our main issue that we found in the disciplinary process was one, getting to discipline and then also making sure that there's appropriate follow up. The disciplines followed through.

So, for example, in some cases, the investigation would determine whether or not that it did not meet the level of sexual harassment, but they referred it to another Department to take further action, and they would still not demonstrate that they took that further action. So our main issue that we found is getting to discipline and the timeliness of that discipline.

Okay, thank you so much. Thank you Chair.

Yes, Senator Patterson, please.

Is that on now? Great. Thank you. First of all, I want to say thank you to the auditor and for the audit. I've been here ten years and found that one of the tools that is so important for us is to have access to the auditor. And I think the manner in which you go about the professionalism and how you dig into these facts.

I want to visit very quickly two of these issues that troubled me the most with the Fresno State issue, and that has to do with letters of recommendation and retreat rights to an individual on that campus whose allegations were against him were upheld. It made a lot of headlines as a Fresno State alum. It was terribly embarrassing.

And I just find it inexplicable that an institution that has the responsibility of training our next generation would engage in these kinds of practices that are so egregious to fairness and to justice. And when I saw what unfolded at Fresno State, it wasn't just the retreat rights or a letter of recommendation, it was a couple 100,000 dollars in some kind of a payout. And I just can't help but say this.

If this went on in a private company, I think there were some laws broken and there would have been some severe penalties. And yet, look what we've seen. So my understanding is that your recommendation basically says those practices should end.

That's correct. We believe the CSU needs to change their policies over when retreat rights can be exercised and when letters of recommendations can be offered. And to the extent that employees are found to have engaged in sexual harassment, contrary to CSU's policy, they should not receive

Absolutely all retreat rights and a letter of recommendation should be reserved for those who do a really good job and whose record is clean. And I'm grateful for the recommendation. And a little bit later on, I'm going to ask the direct question of the leaders of the CSU whether or not they will end that practice.

Thank you, Mr. Patterson. Member Addis thank you so much.

Thank you so much. I want to thank the chair and staff, the auditor, and all who are there, here to testify today. I find this issue incredibly important, not just as a mom, but also as an educator, a K twelve educator, and someone who represents two CSU campuses, one of which is the recipient of the most infamous retreat right cases, and as well as multiple community colleges and other private colleges and universities. And frankly, I'm stunned by the findings.

I mean, I was recently elected, so I knew about this situation just as a person in the General public. And when you view it through those eyes, you cannot believe what is happening in our state university system. Then to receive the auditor report and to really get in the details of what's been going on at our state system is, I think, a tragedy for many students and staff, faculty and other campus employees.

So I want to thank the auditor I just did that, but say thank you one more time because the work that you have done is tremendous and it's tremendously detailed. I do have a few questions, the first of which is what kind of repercussions or consequences are there for any of the campuses who don't follow the trustee approved policies with Fidelity or with the Chancellor's office if it doesn't follow these policies?

So I think ultimately, it's up to the Chancellor's Office to hold campuses accountable. But also the Chancellor's Office needs to step up and set expectations and clarify their guidance and expectations. It's difficult to hold campuses accountable if there's not a clear understanding, as I think is the case here, where all campuses are operating under the same set of rules.

So I think the first step is the Chancellor's Office needs to do a much better job of setting expectations, ensuring consistency, monitoring timeliness, addressing the retreat rights, and the letter of recommendations issue that we just talked about earlier. And once those policies are well understood, then I think the Chancellor's Office is in a position to start thinking about accountability mechanisms.

One of the things that we noted in our report is the Chancellor's Office used to have a practice of going out and monitoring campus compliance with Title IX. And it was something that we actually recommended that they do. I believe it was in 2014, but they stopped in 2018 or thereabouts. And during the audit, we obtained some internal memos from their Title IX System Wide Compliance Manager to the General Counsel and the Executive Vice Chancellor saying, hey, we got problems here.

And a lot of the problems identified in that internal memo, I believe, from 2018, echoed the same kinds of issues that we mentioned in our report today in terms of incomplete investigations, reaching questionable conclusions. So I think there is an ability, obviously, for CSU to exercise more oversight. But I think first things first, CSU needs to make sure the Chancellor's Office needs to make sure that all the campuses understand what the expectation is.

So I believe it was the Chancellor's office that said, it's going to take all of us to fix this. You talked to a lot of people, and I'm wondering if in those conversations, you felt like there is an interest and a willingness to shift culture, or if you got the sense that a legislative fix is needed when it comes to ensuring the Chancellor's office and the system are following the policies.

We've made our recommendations to the Chancellor's office and the CSU as a whole, I think in terms of capability, they're more than capable of doing it. They need to demonstrate the will to do it, and to the extent that over time, they can't demonstrate the will, and we'll be following up on our recommendations at six months, in a year, we'll continue to report to the Legislature on progress.

And of course, at any time, the Legislature can impose its own requirements and impose its own legislative mandates on the CSU in terms of how they operate their system.

I just have two more questions. The next one is really around the anonymous portal, and the CSU offers anonymous reporting, yet there's been trouble around sexual harassment complaints where the complainant is not wanting to cooperate or has requested confidentiality. And so just wondering how those anonymous complaints are processed.

We discussed in the report that there are instances, and CSU's policy describes this, where complainants may not want to be so forthcoming. They want to do it anonymously, and then they want to back away. And CSU policy is very clear that investigators can't just back away under those circumstances.

It's a balancing act between respecting the wishes of the complainant, but also recognizing that they have a responsibility to the broader CSU community to make sure that they're offering education and policies and programs that are free from discrimination and harassment. And one of the judgments that investigators need to be thinking about is, how far can I go with this investigation without the complainant's participation? Do I have enough there to proceed?

And I think one of the challenges we had when we were encountering these cases in our sample is that there were instances where we asked questions, why didn't you go further? And there wasn't clear rationale in the case files about why didn't you go that extra step. Yes, they were anonymous. Yes, they provided you information, but just because they're anonymous doesn't mean and they don't want to participate doesn't mean you just automatically stop.

I think investigators have a responsibility to look out for the CSU as a whole and use every opportunity to make sure that they're finding and investigating instances of sexual harassment.

Thank you for that. My last question is back to retreat rights. And I know you feel the policy should end, but if you could detail kind of what goes into that a little bit, deciding when somebody should have retreat rights.

So our main concern with the retreat right policy is that it's overly permissive and that the only way you are ineligible to retreat is if you are ultimately terminated or suspended or you're not allowed you separate from the CSU for some reason. But hypothetically, let's say that you're found guilty of sexual harassment, but you didn't terminate. Maybe something else happened to you. You're still able to exercise that retreat right. We think that's fundamentally wrong.

So that's one of the reasons why we made our recommendation that for any CSU employee who is found guilty of violating CSU policy on sexual harassment, the opportunity to retreat should be off the table.

Thank you so much.

I don't see anybody else, thank you Ms. Addis, I don't see anybody else wishing to speak. Just to finalize questioning for you on the retreat issue. Is that something the change that you've recommended, is that a policy change from the CSU system, is that require legislative action? What would it take?

My understanding is that the CSU can do it if it so chooses. I don't have my lawyers with me at the table, but I also believe the Legislature has a great deal of power as well, in terms of the statutes that you can craft and the laws that you pass. So I think both options are probably on the table.

Thank you, Mr. Parks. Thank you, Mr. Kolitsos. Appreciate both of your work. We will go on to our second panel, and I know that we have Chancellor's office, Interim Chancellor Koester, who is joining us virtually. I appreciate you making yourself available. And then we have Leora Friedman, Vice Chancellor for Human Resources, who will be joining the table here with our auditor and also Gina Maisto Smith with the Cozen O'Connor and Leslie Gomez as well. If you can all come forward.

We've allocated about five minutes for each of you, 20 minutes total. I will just give reminders of the interim five minute periods, but I believe Interim Chancellor Koester would like to begin. Can you hear us?

Yes, sure.

Chair Alvarez, are you able to hear me?

There you go.

Yes, please go right ahead. Thank you.

Chair Alvarez, Chair Fong and committee members. I do appreciate the opportunity to speak on behalf of the California State University System today, and I am appreciative that you have allowed me to participate virtually. I do have some important family matters that I need to attend to, and that permission to be with you virtually has allowed me to do that. Family attention has been of short shrift over the last year and a half of my life.

I am Jolene Koester, and I have had the opportunity to serve as the Interim Chancellor of the CSU. Last year, shortly before I became the Interim Chancellor, it became very evident that our university system had fallen short in its efforts to provide campus environments and system wide direction to ensure that each of the 23 universities were safe and welcoming to our diverse community of students, faculty, and staff.

In March of 2022 in response to these shortcomings, the CSU Board of Trustees did take immediate action, and at that time, the Board retained Cozen O'Connor's Institutional Response Group to conduct a system wide assessment of the university's implementation of Title IX and other nondiscrimination programs at the Chancellor's office and across our 23 universities. That assessment evolved into what can be pretty accurately described as the largest review of its kind ever conducted in this country. We undertook the assessment not because it was going to be quick or easy or comfortable.

It was none of those. But we did it because it was the right thing for us to do. The Cozen review was comprehensive, methodical, importantly, it recognized that meaningful change needed to be holistic and that we had to strengthen the CSU's interrelated cultures and cultures it is of both compliance and care. I do want to acknowledge that we in the CSU have also benefited from the audit that you heard summaries of prior to my comments.

This second independent review done by the California State Auditor also has contributed to the pathway we are committed to moving forward with. We are appreciative and respectful of the California State Auditors team and their thoroughness and their professionalism in doing the audit. The recommendations of the Cozen assessment, together with those of the State Auditors Report, have given us a very clear pathway forward to address our critical areas for improvement.

As the Interim Chancellor, I have officially, formally, informally, loudly, and consistently committed the California State University to adhere to the recommendations from these two outside groups who have worked with us to create a path forward. The findings and recommendations do create an inflection point for us. It's in some ways a unique opportunity, but it will require us to fundamentally change the way we serve and care for the diverse and talented students, our world class faculty, staff, our partners and our friends.

I am here to say to you, we are not going to squander this moment in time, this opportunity. We have the commitment and yes, we have the will and the fortitude to move forward. It is going to take us some time.

Change like this of culture, the culture of compliance and the culture of care does take time, and it is going to take resources, and it's going to require the Chancellor's office to reconsider the role that it's had in terms of oversight and support of the 23 universities. But we are going to undertake this important process, and we will get it right. Our students, our faculty, our staff, the state that we serve demand it, and our mission and core values require it.

As you will hear momentarily from our Vice Chancellor of Human Resources, Leora Friedman, we have already taken critical and essential steps forward, both in the Chancellor's office and across the system, to carry out these recommendations, and we will continue to hold ourselves accountable for meeting the required deadlines and for communicating regularly and publicly on our progress.

I might also add that Chancellor Select Mildred Garcia is fully briefed, fully informed, and, like me, fully committed with the will, the fortitude, and the resources to support the CSU as we move forward. I thank you for the opportunity to meet with you today, and I will look forward to answering questions you might have.

Thank you, Chancellor. Very well timed. At five minutes. Appreciate that. Next, we'll hear from Leora Friedman. Welcome, and please go ahead.

Thank you. Chairs and committee Members, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. Can you hear me okay? Great. My name is Leora Friedman, and I'm the Vice Chancellor for Human Resources at the California State University, where I oversee system wide human resources, collective bargaining, employee relations, learning and development services, and equity services, which include Title IX and other nondiscrimination programming and services.

As you've just heard from Interim Chancellor Koester, both the State audit and the Cozen O'Connor assessment have given the CSU a unique opportunity for clear eyed self reflection regarding how we manage Title IX and related issues. Together, these reports have provided a thorough assessment of our strengths and weaknesses, as well as a path forward. We're grateful for this opportunity, and we are moving forward with care, determination, and commitment.

With that said, let me give you a brief outline of where we've been and where we are headed. Recent events have made clear that the CSU needs to do more to provide safe and welcoming working and learning environments for all students, faculty, and staff. To that end, and as Interim Chancellor Koester described, our Board of Trustees called upon the firm of Cozen O'Connor to assess how we implement Title IX and other nondiscrimination policies and practices at our universities and at the Chancellor's office.

The goal of the assessment is to improve our response to complaints of discrimination and harassment, and also to strengthen campus culture for all community members, whether in classrooms, residence halls, athletic fields, workplaces, or elsewhere. Compliance with the law and university policy are important, but compliance is just a part of what it takes to improve an institution's culture and climate. Cozen O'Connor's assessment included site visits to all 23 universities and the Chancellor's office, and feedback from nearly 18,000 students, faculty, and staff.

The Cozen team also reviewed each university's written policies, procedures, written resources, and a sample of case files. The Cozen report recommended that the CSU strengthen the Chancellor's Office oversight and supervision, address infrastructure challenges, improve prevention, education, training and awareness, provide for enhanced accountability, develop a formal process for responding to other conduct of concern which we can talk about later, and build trust in our communities. The findings and recommendations of this assessment provided the CSU with an important roadmap for the future.

We are committed to carrying out these recommendations and becoming a leader in responding to Title IX and other protected status complaints and in providing effective prevention and education programming. During the same time period, the California State Auditor reviewed a total of 40 cases, as you've heard. The CSA, the California State Auditor, made important recommendations in the following areas most of the work will be completed by July 2024. Some will be completed no later than July 2025 and 2026.

I'm going to highlight some of the recommendations below. In the area of initial assessments and investigation procedures, we will create clearer and more comprehensive expectations for how universities should perform and document their initial assessments of allegations. It's very disappointing to a complainant when a case is not accepted for investigation, and it's important to document and explain to them as clearly as possible the reasons why the case was not investigated.

In the area of timeliness of investigation and discipline processes, we will require all universities to track key dates and timeline extensions related to reports of sexual harassment in a consistent manner. Investigations often take much longer than expected, and sometimes that's unavoidable. However, if we carefully track dates, we'll be able to monitor progress, ensure that the matter is proceeding reasonably under the circumstances, and we will keep the parties informed of any delays and the reasons for those delays.

In the area of case file documentation, we will procure an enterprise level case management system, but that's going to take some time, and in the meantime, we are developing guidelines and will employ them that include a specific list of documents that a university's time coordinator must maintain in a sexual harassment case file before closing the case. In the area of systemwide data and oversight, we will establish a process for regularly collecting and analyzing sexual harassment data from all universities. This serves several purposes.

It's an effective way to share information with our community and the public. It helps us to identify patterns and trends that warrant action by the university, and it's also a very useful method for accountability. With respect to letters of recommendation, we will amend our policy. Currently, the policy does prohibit giving a positive reference for an employee or former employee who's separated from employment as a result of a finding that the CSU employee engaged in misconduct.

So we've already revised the policy to reflect that. We are now, at the recommendation of the California State Auditor, we are now going to further revise that policy to prohibit or qualify positive references for employees who were found to have engaged in sexual harassment, but who received lesser discipline, such as suspension or demotion. So now the policy will be revised to reflect that any references either can't be given or would have to qualify a note that there was a finding.

I think we should talk later about the Retreat Policy. It has already been revised, so I think there's a little bit of confusion about what the Retreat Policy provides, because it already does prohibit retreat if there was a finding of a Title IX violation.

I'm sorry to interrupt, but you're at five minutes. Just letting you know I'm almost done.

Thank you. The CSU has established a work group that's dedicated to ensuring that we follow through on each of these recommendations. And we've already made important progress in advance of our 60 day response, which will be on September 15. To conclude, we respect and accept the California State Auditor's findings, and we will continue the work that we have already begun to implement recommendations made by the CSA, as well as Cozen O'Connor.

Through our ongoing efforts, we will continue to improve education and awareness, reduce barriers to reporting, ensure that appropriate institutional responses and support systems are in place, and strengthen our cultures of care and compliance. We will regularly communicate our progress in implementing the recommendations and ensuring accountability. Thank you again for the opportunity to speak with you this afternoon. I look forward to answering any questions you might have.

Thank you, Vice Chancellor.

Move on to the Cozen O'Connor representatives.

Good afternoon, Chair Alvarez, chairs of other committees, and members of the committees here today, and everyone in the audience and listeners. My name is Gina Maisto Smith. I'm the chair of the Institutional Response Group at Cozen O'Connor. The Institutional Response Group was started in 2006 and we developed this practice expressly as a result of being sex crimes, child abuse, and domestic violence prosecutors for 15 and 20 years respectively.

Our collective 47 and 39 years in this space is informed by walking with thousands who've experienced sex and gender-based harassment and violence, and we recognized very early on that the law alone is not sufficient to solve these problems. It is a system of care, it is a culture of care, and it is the confluence of the law and understanding the psychological issues, as well as the culture within which these things occur.

I share that with you because I wanted you to have our orientation as we share with you our approach in this particular review. We are privileged to be part of such an incredible state effort, many committees, the state auditor, and we are buoyed by the outcome of the state auditor's report, as it is in alignment with most of what we observed in our report and our process. We do not engage deliberately, and this is important for all to know, in civil litigation, ensuing, or defending institutions.

We are asked frequently throughout the country. We represent several hundreds, actually higher education institutions, more than 50 public institutions, and I share with you that we focus on systems design, infrastructure, policy, procedure, practice, prevention in all areas of higher education. We are called upon frequently to give a candid and unflinching account, and we brought that here. I will say preliminarily, the CSU system is a transformative place.

Our team of 15 that worked on this project over the course of a year, interviewing thousands, almost 2000, collecting 1800 survey responses, reviewing documents, and sitting on each campus and getting to know each campus was transformative for our team as well. In the context of the report, I'm going to turn it over to my colleague, Leslie Gomez, to share the findings and the recommendations at a high level. I will say th1at ten minutes is not enough to give you a 250 some page report for sure.

I encourage you to read it. And in particular, I draw your attention to pages six to nine, because that grounds us in the context of the seismic shifts that have occurred for higher education, the consistent pendulum swings of federal and state law that schools, and particularly the CSU system, has to navigate, and the important efforts that you, as a Legislature can take.

Thank you, Gina. Good afternoon, Chairman Alvarez, Chairman Fong, and members of all of the committees present. I'm delighted to see so many committees coming together to look at these significant issues. My name is Leslie Marie Gomez. I am the Vice Chair of the Institutional Response Group at Cozen O'Connor and I have had the great privilege and humbling honor of working with the California State University faculty staff and students over the course of the past year.

What I want to share for you is a very high level overview, but I'd like to hearken back Chairman Fong to something that you said in one of your earlier remarks and questions, which is that the CSU is not unique. We could find issues of this caliber and this degree at most institutions across the country, including other California institutions.

What is unique about the CSU and what exacerbates the issues are the extreme extent of the resource constraints that each of the 23 universities and the Chancellor's Office operate within. And that's an important factor, not to be offered as an excuse, but to offer context to explain some of the challenges that we observed. In our work across the country, we know that no institution is immune or invincible. We more often see issues that are related to incompetence, not malfeasance.

And when we think about the work that we do, we step in to look at and assess how policies, practices, and procedures are implemented. So how do we think about the flipping the lens and the people that we are serving, whether it be a complainant or a respondent, a student, a faculty or a staff member?

How do we build a process that removes barriers to reporting, encourages participation, allows for the sensitive and informed gathering of information that then informs good decisions about outcomes as to whether or not particular conduct violates policy or separate and apart from individual conduct if there are culture or climate concerns that we need to address more broadly. That's the orientation and the lens through which we approach our work. Gina referenced the transformative impacts of the California State University education.

We saw that firsthand in a palpable way, and we truly view the nondiscrimination laws Title IX, Title VI, Title VII, and the civil rights framework to be about removing barriers to education that are put in place when we have discrimination or harassment. Largely today's questions have focused on Title IX, but I want to remind all of the committee members present that we looked at Title IX, we also looked at discrimination and harassment on the basis of all other protected classes.

The federal framework is slightly different, but we applied the same standards. Turning to our findings, they fell into six core areas. Those six core areas are outlined both in our executive summary as well as in great detail in the system-wide report. We chose to do a system-wide report because we kept seeing the same issues arise on each of the 23 universities. The core finding number one was related to system-wide coordination and oversight.

And in this way, it overlapped significantly with the findings that were set forth by your state auditor that we asked how do we best utilize centralized oversight to drive consistency across the 23 individual and unique universities? Where the efficiencies in those systems that support effective implementation? And we made recommendations that are set forward that include creating an associate or assistant vice chancellor for Title IX and civil rights at the Chancellor's Office level.

Restructuring how we do oversight of the campuses in alignment with the 2014 auditors report. Centralizing those oversight and accountability processes. Establishing a center for investigation and resolution. Developing procuring an enterprise-level case management system. Some of these things you will have heard echoed in the Auditor's Report as well, and then ultimately developing a robust web presence and importantly, expanding staffing in the Office of General Counsel.

Under our second finding, we discussed the infrastructure, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the infrastructure is insufficient as designed to cover the core legal compliance responsibilities across the California State University. The gaps permeate every aspect of effective responses, from confidential advocacy to the delivery of robust prevention and education programming to timely and comprehensive investigations as this committee has already identified, and the auditor identified as well. We offer recommendations that speak to address the infrastructure gap that exists.

Those gaps directly impact the personnel that do this work on a daily basis. We have a high rate of turnover, a consistent of hitting of reset on campus relationships and campus processes, difficulty recruiting and retaining staff, both because of the resource constraints, but also because of a dearth of talified, talified I make up new words, talented and qualified professionals from across the country. We also saw as result of the infrastructure gaps, an inability to engage in proactive, strategic work to address culture and climate.

Those challenges in documentation and data I won't go through again because we've already heard about those from the audit and they're echoed in our report. Third finding, we saw gaps in prevention and education programming, not just traditional programming might think of for students, but also training and professional development for faculty and staff, and for those who are leaders, managers, or supervisors. Other conduct of concern is a term that we coined.

It's essentially that conduct that would not rise to the level of a protected class, discrimination, and harassment but is nonetheless extremely disruptive to the living, learning, and working environments. We offered recommendations for building a framework, again aligned with the findings from the auditor, which speaks about how we discipline or respond to unprofessional conduct. The other two areas of findings included the trust gap and accountability.

And one of the core accountability things that we noted were the way in which the state contractual personnel processes and the collective bargaining agreements, particularly in some areas, caused a tremendous delay and an inability to seek accountability following our original Title IX process. And we can speak more about that in questions. I want to wrap by saying that although we relied on different evidence bases than the auditor, our findings ended up being aligned in some ways. And I'm going to turn to Gina to talk a little bit just as we wrap. I think we've got about a minute left or so.

Yes, please.

Context matters and the context of your support and the coordinated support of all of these committees matters. And so what is it that you can do to give leverage to this effort? I share with you a couple of things. Resources are critical. It is tragically an underresourced operation to comply with the state and federal requirements, and there's no other way to say that. There are also legislative reconciliations between state law and federal law. You have to wrangle with that.

There are currently conflicts between some state law and federal law issues. And then finally, through legislation, you can drive some significant, creative solutions. An enterprise-level data system that gives you the data that you need to lead the nation in understanding predictive analytics, in understanding prevalence, and informing prevention. You can do that legislatively. And then a regional center. A regional center would ensure the quality control of investigations and adjudications. Thank you.

Thank you all. I appreciate your presentation. I'll again start by asking a few questions that can help drive the conversation in a way that can be useful for everybody. Let me start with the question on the cases. You heard my question to the auditor. I'd ask the same to the CSU, if you'd like to answer, or definitely to the O'Connor report. In terms of the number of cases, can you give me your perspective on how you identified the number that you came up with?

We accepted the annual reports out each year as a foundation, and we reviewed what was reported out in light of our interviews of the implementers across the campus. So we did not do any file review in the manner in which the state auditor's report showed. We independently accepted the numbers that they collected, and that was supported by the findings we were making, which was...

So just to clarify, you took the numbers provided to you from those reports, but as we heard earlier, there were cases that weren't even reported anywhere.

That's correct, and we found that as well in our interviews. And so our interviews supported what the state auditor's report found.

Thank you, I appreciate the...

But Chairperson Alvarez, one additional very important factor. The Chancellor's Office collected data from campuses in an annual report. That data for many years focused on what we call the VAWA offenses of sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking. It was not until the academic year, 2021-2022 that the Chancellor's Office gathered data on sexual harassment and sexual exploitation.

So the data that's presented in the University reports from Cozen O'Connor is based solely on that one year of reporting of sexual harassment, which is significantly different than the five-year window I believe that the auditor looked at.

Appreciate that question to the Chancellor's Office. We do audits for a reason, and we receive recommendations for a reason. You will be providing a 60-day response, as you noted, to the audit. Are we going to see specific dates on the implementation of every recommendation provided by the auditor?

So with the auditor, we have agreed on dates. They are in 24, 25, and 26. The Cozen recommendations are more granular.

Sure.

And even the auditor's report recognizes that things might happen in step. So, for example, the case management system. We've agreed with the auditor that we will have an enterprise system by 2026. I am very hopeful that we'll have it before then. But even if we don't have it before then, we will be tracking data in a less efficient way, but we will still track the data and be able to hopefully get the same information that we would get from a much more efficient case management system.

Okay, I look forward to seeing the dates in the response to make sure that we have that information in writing because, and that leads to my second question. In 2014, the State Auditor's Office recommended that the Chancellor's Office conduct routine reviews to ensure that its campuses were complying with Title IX requirements. And that was done for some time.

But the recent audit found that the Chancellor's Office no longer performs those reviews, even though that was a finding, a recommendation, and a recommendation accepted by the CSU Chancellor's Office that was not actually implemented, even though, again, there was an audit and a commitment to do so. So, going forward, I like to get a direct answer as to who exactly will be responsible for doing this on a going-forward basis. I know that the report talks about maybe creating a new position, but if the position doesn't get created, whether it does or it doesn't, who will be responsible for these specific recommendations?

Well, first of all, the position will be funded, and we are also expecting about five other positions in the Chancellor's Office. I have to explain that the relationship between the campuses and the Chancellor's Office is evolving over time and that the Chancellor's Office has always respected the individuality and accountability of the campuses. Each campus president runs their institution. Over time, as different areas have become more and more regulated, we can rely less on that kind of independence.

We've learned that in certain areas, I know there was a hearing earlier this week, and also in the Title IX area and other areas as well, that are so complex and highly regulated that we realize that we can no longer leave it up to the campuses to independently enforce the law and the policy as they wish. So we need more staff to do that.

But even before we have the positions, the chancellor has already written to all of the presidents and informed them that they must inform me and one member of a Chancellor's Office liaison, I'll describe who those people are, whenever there is a case, a Title IX case involving a high-level administrator, whenever there's a case involving sexual violence or violation of our policy. And we're creating a form for everyone to fill out so that we get real-time information about that so that we can oversee.

So we're definitely changing our infrastructure, and we'll be able to provide more oversight. And we've also changed the philosophy. There was some ambiguity about whether the Chancellor's Office was providing guidance and support and mentoring or oversight, and that there's much more clarity to the working relationship now.

I appreciate that. I'll hand over to Ms. Addis. I see everybody's hand, so we're keeping track. Thank you.

I have a number of questions. I'll try to be quick, but thank you so much for your testimony. Very enlightening. My first question is pretty broad, but I hope you do have an answer. It's by when do you expect to get to zero findings? If the audit were repeated.

There will never be zero findings. Oh, what findings of violation of policy?

Correct. Say we repeat this audit. In what year could we repeat this audit and there be zero findings? Zero negative findings.

Okay. I thought you meant violations of policy because human beings will continue to be human beings forever. We will always have complaints and in fact...

Say we did this exact same audit in five years. Would we expect zero findings?

I would certainly hope so.

Is there an expectation in the Chancellor's Office of getting to that point and by when?

I wish I could answer that question with clarity.

I think the Chancellor wants to say something.

Yeah, let me jump in. Clearly, our expectation is that we seek to create a world in which we do all of these steps perfectly, including all of the recommendations in the Cozen O'Connor report for us and including those from the California State Auditor. I will say in five years, we should be following these recommendations precisely. I hesitate to say we will be doing everything perfectly. We're a large system. We're committed to doing these things right.

But I also want to recognize that we probably won't be 100% perfect, but the goal is to be 100% perfect. That is what we're trying to do. And we're going to seek to accomplish that in a resource-starved environment because we do care and we do share the values undergirding this entire conversation. So recognizing that human frailty is part of it, auditors very rarely find perfection when they go in to look at something. What is important to understand is that that is our commitment. We're going to seek to achieve perfection.

Go ahead.

I would just add that we're going to try to seek that perfection long before five years. I mean, this is something that we are very committed to and feel very strongly about doing, but we are in an under-resourced environment.

I asked the question because I think we're going back to 2014 already, and so it's been a long time already of dealing with this issue. So, anyway, thank you for that answer. Is there anything, I know you mentioned the autonomy of the campus presidents. Are they evaluated annually in terms of progress towards making changes in this area?

Yes. Can I just go back to one point that you were making about 2014? After 2014, the regulations, the federal regulations, and California law changed many times. And as Cozen describes it, it's a little bit like a wrecking ball where we had to revise our policy so many times. And although I'm not happy about the fact that we weren't able to continue the audits, when you have a limited staff, what we had to do is we had to change the policies. And so a lot of focus was redirected. But we are going to get more staff. That's a commitment that's been made.

I appreciate it. I don't mean to be argumentative. I'll just say sexual harassment, I don't think it's ever been okay.

No, it isn't.

Right. So presidents are evaluated annually?

Well, presidents are evaluated on a regular basis, and they are evaluated annually and triannually. There are different processes, but we certainly will be expecting them, holding them accountable. And we will be reporting on that. We already have the opportunity to report. It's just that we will have more criteria now.

Thank you.

I just want to acknowledge Ms. Addis' question once again, though, on 2014 and not be argumentative about it, but the recommendation is pretty clear, and that was to ensure that the universities are complying with Title IX. And yes, changes occurred, but that compliance stopped. And so I want to be clear when we're referencing 2014, that, in fact, was not followed.

I just have one last question.

Oh, sure.

In terms of magnitude of resources, I mean I've heard I think Cozen say resources are needed. You're saying resources are needed. What are you thinking in terms of magnitude of resources needed?

In what dimension?

Well, both of you mentioned lack of resources. What you're referring to and what's the magnitude that you're asking?

Well, we're trying to do it as efficiently as possible and what we are hoping to do is develop a structure whereby there are five regional managers at the Chancellor's Office who have a much closer relationship with they'll each have four or five campuses to work with closely. We also believe that we must have more prevention education professionals who are devoted to prevention education exclusively at the Chancellor's Office and one on each campus.

We also would need to have a person at the Chancellor's Office who is overseeing the investigation process and training and who can give more oversight. And I also believe, and I think Cozen agrees, that although every campus has a Title IX coordinator, that's not enough, because the intake work, the supportive measures that you give, are extremely labor intensive, time-consuming, and require social work skills. There is a lot to this work. It's very complex. And so we need to have more people boots on the ground who can do intake and provide supportive measures.

Thank you, Ms. Addis.

Each of our campus reports outlines many of the resources that are missing, and the other consideration is the infrastructure pieces, the data system, the education and training, the commitment to prevention, all of that programming. In some cases actually many cases, is nonexistent.

Thank you. Chair Fong has a few questions, and I'll go to Mr. Patterson after that.

Thank you so much, Chair Alvarez and thank you to the CSU system and Cozen O'Connor for the reports. As we heard from the recommendations between the state audit and the Cozen O'Connor report, there are a plethora of recommendations for the CSU system to implement. What direction is currently being given to the campuses, as to what to implement first? And is there a priority in terms of what will be implemented to best rectify the issues raised by both the state audit and the Cozen O'Connor report?

So the very first thing that happened was that the chancellor wrote to all the presidents and said, we need to know about every significant case that's being reported. The other thing that the chancellor directed the campus of the presidents to do was to form implementation teams. So every campus has an implementation team that includes the Title IX coordinator, generally chairs the team, the DHR administrator, which is a term that applies to effectively the coordinator who handles all other discriminatory, other protected class complaints to age, race, disability. So those two individuals are on the implementation team, as well as faculty, staff, and a member of the President's Cabinet.

We at the Chancellor's Office have developed a group of CO liaisons, chancellor's office liaisons, who are work in my office and in the General Counsel's office, a combination. There are five of them. They will be serving as liaisons for these implementation teams. They're going to be training the chairs in September on how to run an implementation team. They're going to give them a form of project plan to try to simplify and streamline so that each campus doesn't have to reinvent the wheel.

And they're going to be working with the campuses. The campuses are already identifying all the recommendations for their campus triaging, prioritizing, which are the ones that they can do first, either because they require less resources and so they can do them right away or because they are the most urgent. And we will be meeting with them on a regular basis and coming up with a plan and a schedule which will be publicly available.

Thank you so much. Chancellor, do you want to add anything else to that?

You've heard a very clear commitment of steps that we've already undertaken. And let me just say, in terms of the prior question around resources, the Board of Trustees at the September board meeting will consider an operating budget request to the governor and to the Legislature for consideration for next year. So the specific dollar amount for next year is still in the hands of the Board of Trustees. It's likely to be, for the first year, at least 16 million, and then additional millions for years subsequent to that.

Thank you so much, Chancellor, and thank you, Vice Chancellor, for those comments and for that request. On page 13 of the audit, I quote in there, and thank you to the audit for state auditors for this report, on page 13, it says, officials in the CSU Chancellor's Office expressed some hesitancy to create more prescriptive and potentially burdensome requirements for campuses. Is there a reason why the CSU is hesitant to provide more prescriptive requirements to ensure that our campuses handle complaints in a consistent and timely manner?

Was that directed to the state auditor's office?

To the chancellor. Please.

Sorry.

Thank you.

Yeah, let me answer. I would suggest that it's probably because they have been under resourced and understaffed, so additional prescriptions are met with recognition that they are going to have to do additional work. The element of this that has changed is that we have firmly committed to provide additional staff and resources, and we have made quite explicit a new kind of definition of responsibility of the Chancellor's Office moving forward.

Thank you, Chancellor. And lastly, in the two reports on the state auditor's Report and the Cozen O'Connor report, were there unique recommendations that were found in the State Auditor's Report that are not in the O'Connor report?

That would require a cross-referencing of both recommendations. I would say generally, they are both relying, but they are both aligned. But we came out the issues from different perspectives and actually came to the same conclusions overall.

I would say, Chairman Fong, on that last question, I think it's important to note, because we had a lot of work with the CEO team, that there is a firm belief that to bring individuals along on campuses that a collaborative relationship and not a more of a policing relationship may be able to drive change more efficiently.

We've seen through the auditor's report and through our report that this needs more teeth than that. This isn't a here's the recommendation come along. The auditor said, structured supervisory review. We said we need tiered accountability with metrics and with oversight. And so that's just a shift and I think that shift goes back to Leora's, Vice Chancellor Freedman's, commentary about the history of how the CEO's office interacted with campuses historically.

Yeah, Chairperson Fong, I would also add to that the auditor's recommendations, I think I would really describe as a subset of the Cozen O'Connor recommendations, that they focused on adding written guidelines, documentation practices, and communications with the parties to focus on the tightening of what we're doing as it relates to timelines or writings or communications. Cozen O'Connor's recommendations are far broader. They address prevention and education programming.

They address very specifically the need to, for example, separate intake support, case management supportive measures, from our neutral and impressional investigative functions. We speak a lot about the coordination of information and personnel, how we work together across an institution. So I think ours are holistically broader because we looked at a far broader set of data than the case files.

And I think together they provide a comprehensive set of recommendations for the Chancellor's Office to work with each campus, and importantly, to note on each of the 23 universities, the priorities will be different. There is a wide range of schools, some very high functioning, some really needing to rebuild programs from the ground up, and many sort of muddling through in the middle.

The last piece I would note about that particular observation that you raised on page 13 is a term that Gina and I have called overload accommodation, which is that the folks who are doing these jobs right now and the long report covers this are having such extensive amounts of burnout, leaving the CSU to go do careers in other areas because it's simply not possible to do all of the tasks that are on their plate, to do them well and to do them with fidelity.

And so you pick and choose what you prioritize, which is often direct response to reports. And the documentation pieces don't get the same light of day necessarily than sitting face to face with somebody who's been impacted or harmed. And that's a space where we have technology that we can drive and leverage with administrative support to close some of those gaps to make the work more palatable and sustainable for the individuals that you're asking to do the most difficult frontline work imaginable in navigating the intersection with complainants and respondents and working through driving culture and climate change across 23 institutions.

Great. Thank you so much to both the state auditor and the Cozen O'Connor report and to the CSU.

Thank you. Chairman Fong. Member Patterson.

Yeah, this is a follow-up to the Vice Chair. I am trying to understand, you say that you have already implemented a removal of the retreat rights and that also letter of recommendations.

We've revised those policies, yes.

Revised them. What does that mean?

Well, with respect to the retreat policy, we have stated that an administrator will be ineligible to exercise their option to retreat under the following circumstances. And we define that if a finding was made, and the finding I'll just explain that the finding has to be that the administrator engaged in misconduct or a policy violation that renders the administrator unsuitable to have continued direct interactions with CSU students or employees. So if there's a finding made to that effect and the administrator is asked to leave their position, they may not retreat.

I believe that that was the case in Fresno.

And if this policy were in effect now, this policy would apply to that situation.

Yeah. And yet there is some controversy about the retreat rights to another university, but that's neither here. I'm trying to understand the letter of recommendation as well.

Okay.

I thought I heard you say that under certain circumstances a letter of recommendation would be provided, but then there would be a note to the letter of recommendation about the sexual harassment issue.

No. What the policy was revised and it currently says that if a person was found to have engaged in misconduct that resulted in their being non-retained or terminated, that they cannot have a positive letter of recommendation. The question that the auditors raised was, well, what if there was a finding that they engaged in sexual misconduct but it wasn't the kind of misconduct that warranted termination and they decided to leave? Would you give them a letter of recommendation then?

And the policy was not completely clear in that respect. So what we've agreed to do is modify the policy and say, even if you weren't fired, even if the employee wasn't fired, if there was a finding, if they asked for a reference, we could give a reference, but we're going to say, but there was a finding that they violated the university policy. I mean, we haven't actually worked that out. What they said was either change the policy completely...

Excuse me, but that's a ridiculous roundabout way of doing this. Can I please, I mean, you're going to give them a letter of recommendation and then you're going to say, oh by the way?

No, it would be in the letter. Let me give you...

How do you give a letter of recommendation and then also have, what, a paragraph in there about a sexual harassment claim?

Well, sexual harassment takes many different shapes. Sometimes people are found who have violated policy because they made inappropriate comments, they made bad jokes over and over again, they were tone-deaf to their audience. This is something that might be cause for a finding. Does that mean that they can't work in a laboratory or do some other job where they really don't have much contact with, I mean, I think that it means that.

I don't have the floor, but...

We'll give you an opportunity, Mr. Cortese.

I'm not going to have an opportunity. This dialogue is going nowhere fast in 2 hours and I have to be somewhere else. But obviously, the legislation is needed to move this along a hell of a lot faster than five years, by the way.

Thank you for your comment. Mr. Patterson, it's your opportunity here.

So I raised earlier the three issues with respect to the individual at Fresno State. Repeat rights, this letter of recommendation, and a very large six-figure payout. Now, how in the world does that take place? Unless the system itself and those who are leading it allow it to happen, foster it, and approve it? Because that's what took place here.

Again, this individual, in fact, some of the difficulty was so egregious that the university put a window in that office so that others outside that office could see what was going on inside behind the closed doors. Now, that's a pretty serious set of circumstances, and I'm just trying to get to the bottom of why, under those kinds of circumstances, would there be retreat rights, a letter of recommendation, and a payout?

I mean, when is the behavior so egregious that there has to be a consequence that doesn't include a pat on the back, another job offer, or a letter of reco, and a big check? That seems to me to be an insult to the individuals that...

Were sexually harassed.

Would you like me to respond without going into the details of past cases I can tell you one thing. If you revise the retreat policy the way we did, and this person would no longer be eligible to retreat, then there would be a lot less likelihood that they would be paid any money upon their departure.

To the auditor, you've heard this exchange. Do you think that what we are hearing they will be doing satisfactorily addresses your concern over the repeat rights and the letter of records?. No, specifically, as we note on page 43 and the top of page 44, we acknowledge that the CSU changed its policy, and I believe 2022. I think the part that we're disagreeing about talks about you're not eligible for retreat if you're terminated or separated, and what we're recommending is remove that qualification instead. You're not eligible for retreat rights if you are found to have violated and you were assessed guilty of a sexual harassment complaint.

Oftentimes, if somebody has a retreat right, which is a very valuable right to them, you might pay a year's salary if that means they're off the campus and they're not going to be harassing anybody again, I agree it's a painful price to pay, but to us, it's more important to keep our campus safe.

I can't speak to CSU management for why they pay settlements or not pay settlements.

We have some lawyers here. Do you want to try to address this?

Well, I just want to address your specific question about why an institution might pay a settlement to separate from an individual. And it's actually one of the things that we address in our report specifically, which is given some of the contractual and or collective bargaining agreement processes that occur after a Title IX finding has been made. So we've gone through our campus investigation, made a finding that somebody has committed sexual harassment to get to the stage of sanctioning.

It now goes off to a state personnel board, it goes to a faculty committee, or it goes to an administrative law judge. And in each of those processes, there are significant challenges in how those processes are laid out. They're not consistent with federal law. They're not consistent with the Title IX framework. And what has happened in a number of cases is that the employee who the CSU sought to terminate is then ordered returned back onto the campus and to have back pay presented to them.

And so sometimes what you see and it's set forth much more articulately in the writing in the report, is in order to uphold the integrity of the underlying finding, in order to take action to protect the safety of students because we have a broken disciplinary process on the back end that we have no ability to control. We don't run it.

It's driven by state law and or the collective bargaining agreement that the safest course of action is to ensure that that person does not return to our campus, even if that means that there's some settlement payment. It's a judgment call. It is a difficult judgment call, but underlying all of it is the integrity of the underlying finding and the protection of campus.

And again, I appreciate that, and we're talking about integrity here. I want to tell you something. The integrity of Fresno State was severely damaged by this episode. It's very difficult to explain to people in Central California how this individual can do what he did, was found to be charged and did what he was charged with. And then to have USA Today come out and report a retreat, right. A letter of recommendation and a big payout.

You can, I guess, explain all the reasons why you have to do something like that, because something else you can't do or whatever. But that's a very hard thing to understand when your people out in Fresno. Fresno State is our institution, it's our university. We are as proud as can be of it. And yet we have this spot on its integrity.

And so what I hear is that in order to maintain some kind of integrity, we'll make a settlement that essentially is the opposite of demonstrating integrity.

Well, I would suggest that that's the opportunity, respectfully, for this Legislature to take a look at those contractual processes, to look at the state personnel board, to look at the training that's provided to those individuals, to look at the framework under the collective bargaining agreements and that we implement post investigation disciplinary processes that track and follow federal law and that respect the underlying finding of a violation that is found by talented, neutral, impartial investigators who gather the facts.

I think Gina and I, I know as well as other Members of the Chancellor's office, very clearly heard the pain, the anger and the grief on the Fresno State campus, not just by community Members, but by faculty, staff, and administrators as well. And I think there's a small conflation of two issues. One being conduct by an administrator who engaged in sexual harassment and conduct by an administrator who did not respond appropriately to the report of sexual harassment.

And I want to be clear that I'm speaking about the first. I'm speaking about how we give integrity to an underlying finding of sexual harassment to support our policies and procedures and to make good ethical, judgment decisions based on the facts that are gathered.

I still find this an incongruous outcome when you have somebody that did something. And by the way, I was the mayor of Fresno for 8 years. I've served up here now for 10 years, and I'm very close to Fresno State. And this has been very troubling for me, very troubling. And it's just very difficult to see an outcome like this. And by the way, there were undercurrents of this kind of behavior long before it became so evident with this one individual. All right.

I mean, I heard from people, and some of them are here today, years ago, about the kind of mistreatment that was coming out of this particular individual's conduct. So hasn't been just since the newspaper got a hold of it. So we really have an issue here that I just think when we talk about integrity, the outcome has to be complete and transparent. Integrity, no excuse making. And please, let's not lawyer the thing.

Then you have to change the law.

We've heard that loud and clear here. Thank you, Mr. Patterson. Thank you. We have everybody listed, just so you know. But I've taken folks in the order that I saw hand. So Mr. Wood is our next thank.

You to both of the chairs and appreciate that. This is the second day in a row we've heard audits related, and there are some similarities here that are pretty disturbing. And it makes me wonder how many other issues are lingering out there that may come out in future audits. But going back to the audit 2013 124, while that was obviously looking at students, there were recommendations there.

So I'm curious, from the auditor's perspective, and I apologize for not being here at the very beginning, I was at another hearing. Was there any progress made between the recommendations and that to where we went, you know, where we are with this audit.

And and one of the things that's really troubling is there was a call for data to be collected, and it appears from your audit, the most recent audit, that CSU didn't begin collecting some of that sexual harassment data until 20, 21, 22, even though the report in 2014 recommended that. So what progress was made and how seriously, from your perspective, was the university taking that recommendations of that audit?

I think with all of our recommendations, obviously the CSU system has to make decisions about what they can implement and when they can implement them. And I'd also caution that one of the challenges with following up with agencies post an audit is you never really know for sure if they have implemented your recommendations almost until you go back and you do another audit.

We follow up with these agencies once an audit is released, and we ask for evidence like policies and procedures, maybe some examples of compliance with those policies and procedures. But until you're actually on the ground and you see whether or not they've done what you've asked them to do through a more comprehensive audit, do you really understand if they've made progress or not?

My key takeaway from this experience has been, I believe it was in that audit where we were recommending pretty strongly that they do campus oversight reviews for compliance with Title IX. And I think the value of that recommendation is evident by the fact that when we did this audit and we were looking at correspondence between the chancellor's, Title IX coordinator, the General counsel, and the Executive vice chancellor, I believe they were noting the exact same problems that would later be uncovered in this audit.

Which speaks to, had the Chancellor's office, and had the CSU system as a whole been implementing that recommendation, perhaps they would have been better placed to A know that they had a problem, and B be better positioned to try and address it.

So I think the direct answer to your question, and I think it's the case with several audits that tend to happen, is the audit is issued, we issue the recommendations, there's a lot of attention on it for a while, and then over time, other priorities come up.

We can't audit everybody all the time, unfortunately, and then something happens, and we go back and we do another audit, and we find that, okay, they may have implemented stuff for a while, but now we're doing it over again, and it turns they've moved on to something else, and now we still have a problem. And that seems to be what we have here.

Yeah, that's exactly what it seems to have happened. Know, and you know, Ms.. Gomez spoke know, we have wide variations in campuses and different leadership styles and different cultures and different levels of being able to function high functioning and those that are struggling so much.

And I appreciate that, and I understand the need for autonomy in these campuses, but in this instance here with these policies, this just, in my mind, emphasizes the need for basic, centralized guidelines, which are clearly lacking oversight and accountability by the individual campuses. And that clearly hasn't happened. And we saw that yesterday with the issues regarding Native Americans and remains and artifacts. Once again, campuses kind of doing their own thing, not reporting the data. I don't know. It's like a nursery school.

All the students are there, but hell, nobody knows what anybody's doing, and there's no accountability because everybody's got their own thing going on. So what assurance do we have that there will be centralized at the Chancellor's level guidelines for these things, that there will be accountability, and how they do it on campuses is still up to the President and the leadership there. But how do we know that we're going to see improvement here? Because you had ten years based on the student part of it.

And from we're hearing from the auditor, once the fuhrer of that audit died down, not much changed because it took almost 9 years to start collecting the data that was recommended. So what assurances do we get that we're not going to be here? Look, none of the people sitting on this dais were here when that audit was done. And in 10 years from now, none of the people sitting on this dais are going to be here. And that's a huge problem as well.

We could get into that all day long. What kind of assurances we get that this is going to change? At what point do you really take this seriously? Two audits in two days. Same basic problem a lack of leadership at the top and a lack of accountability and a lack of oversight.

May I jump in?

Please

There are a number of things that have changed. First, we've committed resources to creating the infrastructure of staff around both compliance and care within the Chancellor's office staff so that there are people and processes that will be in place that will carry out this work. Two, I think the overall times have changed, not just in the California State University system, but in the world that we are in. And the shape and the force of that is also going to be very strong.

Three, I've made some personal commitments. I'm not going to be Chancellor for much longer, but I do fairly and honestly, authentically say to you that Chancellors Select Garcia has a career in which she is committed to the values that underlie what it is we're talking about here today. And she has already indicated publicly in lots of news articles and media interviews, and she will continue to carry this effort forward. The CSU is not going to back away from this.

The CSU is going to go forward with all of.

Thank you, I just one final comment. I kind of want to bring it back to the human piece of this, that these are policies and we're looking at ways of setting up things, but real harm has been done to real people, and many lives have been gravely damaged because of the inability of the university to act in a timely manner and protect people from sexual harassers. And that's on you all.

And so we do expect, and you will likely see, legislation, because at this point, it's clear audits don't seem to have that much of an input or an impact on getting things done. Real people have suffered. And that's the thing you need to think about every day when you're looking at these policies, because we don't want any more people to suffer because of this.

I do think about this every day.

And so do I.

Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Wood. Dr. Weber.

Thank you, Chair Alvarez. I want to start by, first of all thanking everyone who's here, everyone who's on the panel. This is a very important subject, and our CSUS do great things right, but when a parent, and I'm a parent myself, sends their child to a university or someone chooses to work at a university, they do it not just for the great education that they may receive. The parents are actually entrusting the university and the state to keep their children safe.

And a lot of these things in the report are very concerning. I want to thank the auditor for once again providing an amazing report. As was stated, none of us were here in 2014, but luckily I did get that report. So I read that one along with this one, and I have some very specific questions that I have for you all. What prompted the policy change in 2022 for investigations to be completed? Not in 70 days, but in 100 days?

Are you talking about the nondiscrimination policy?

So no, you had initially 70 days to complete your investigations. It's on page 32 of the report and then it was pushed back to 100 days. And I'm just wondering what was the thought and the rationale behind that.

I'm going to have to get back to you on that. Okay.

I also read that external investigators are used. Why and what kind of training do you require external investigators to have before you hire them?

Well, we require external investigators to have title 9 training. There are certain state requirements to be an investigator. In addition to those, we require that they have title 9 training and we vet them to ensure that they have experience in this area. Most of them are lawyers who have done this work before.

What is the policy that you all have for repeat offenders? Because we've heard about this a lot that oftentimes these individuals won't just do it to one person, but when you look into it, they've had multiple complaints over the years. So what is the policy and how you deal with those when you're starting up a new investigation?

Well, it's complicated. There are different kinds of repeat offenders. So if there is an offender and a complaint was made and there was a finding, then you definitely consider in the discipline part, if they weren't terminated the first time, you would consider the history of this person's behavior and the sanction would reflect that. What's trickier is when you have repeat offenders who know just how to offend, so that a complaint. Maybe the complainant doesn't want to actually report, doesn't want an investigation.

They want a report, but they don't want an investigation. And that's where we have fallen short, because when we learn about conduct that is unacceptable, but perhaps doesn't rise to the level of a policy violation. This is what we call other conduct of concern. We have not done a good job of tracking that, dealing with it as a disciplinary matter that maybe isn't a policy violation, and then at looking at the cumulative effect of all of these incidents.

And we are committed to doing that differently now. But we do have to have a data management system that will allow us and we also will have to require that other divisions, faculty affairs, human resources, student conduct, everybody's really going to have to share information in that same database so that you can pick up those other incidents that maybe didn't result in an investigation.

Okay, well, I look forward to hearing the implementation of that, because I do know that you all can still investigate, even if the person who reported it states that they don't want an investigation. CSU does have that discretion. Now, I just want to go back to your retreat policy and just be very clear. So with the revision that you referred to or the update, if someone was found to have a positive finding of sexual harassment, sexual misconduct, would that individual today qualify for retreat?

So are you asking me if the policy applies retroactively?

I'm saying with the changing in whatever language you have, would someone who has the finding of sexual harassment or sexual misconduct qualify for a retreat?

I think that if we denied retreat to that, we put in the policy that it was prospective, because the individuals who were given this retreat right, relied on a policy that has been changed. And they would say, well, you can't change the policy on us. But we did say that we could revisit cases retrospectively in cases of egregious conduct.

So would sexual a finding of sexual misconduct or sexual harassment qualify as egregious misconduct?

I think that it would depend on the circumstances. Sexual misconduct, it depends on how you define those terms. I mean, we had a President, okay? We had a President who was seen to have kissed people on the forehead or smelled their hair. I'm just going to give you an example that could be determined to be sexual harassment. That's not the same kind of sexual harassment as other kinds of touching, as other kinds of behavior.

And I'm not judging what should be the consequences of each of these things, but what I am saying is that it is a very broad group of behaviors.

Yeah, I'm very troubled by that answer. I'm just being very honest with you. The 2014 report clearly discussed the need to educate students, faculty, staff about the definition of sexual misconduct, what people should or should not be doing. They should be doing this training on an annual basis. And so there should not be a question as to whether or not kissing someone on the forehead is sexual harassment or sexual misconduct. I'm very troubled.

So I think we're going to have to really look into that, because you're telling people what is sexual misconduct, but then at the same time you're saying, well, we don't really know. There's different variations.

It has to be unwelcome.

Well, I think someone kissing and touching is both unwelcome.

Not necessarily.

Why would you say that?

Because people sometimes embrace each other when they greet, and it is welcome conduct.

Well, but if it's welcome, would I file a complaint?

No, but somebody else might have seen it.

Okay, but when you do like the investigation, it would end up being closed because the individual specifically states, that wasn't bothersome to me. I welcome that, and I reciprocated it. Correct. Okay, so then that wouldn't necessarily apply in what I'm saying. I do think that we need to discuss this further legislatively, because you allowing this kind of grace space, I think, is allowing for people to slip through, and unfortunately, you're allowing for unintentionally more victims to occur on our campuses.

I want to go specifically to the 2014 audit versus now. So the 2014 audit noted that CSU needed to improve communications with those involved in the complaint, and this audit noted that as well. So why was this not fixed over the nine years?

I'm sorry, could you repeat that?

The 2014 audit noted that CSU needed to improve communications with those involved in the complaint, meaning contact them, let them know what's going on, where it is, is it closed? Are we still investigating? And this audit mentioned that need as well.

Yes.

So clearly it wasn't fixed. Why?

Well, I wasn't in this position in 2014, but I can tell you that it definitely needs to be fixed. It needed to be fixed back then, and we're going to use this opportunity to fix it, and I can't explain why.

Okay. The 2014 this has been mentioned a couple of times. The 2014 audit mentioned that there needed to be routine Title 9 review of campuses to determine compliance, which is a huge thing to be compliant with Title 9. You started it. You stopped it in 2018, I think you said, because of staffing. Why was that particular decision made to stop ensuring compliance with Title 9?

Well, I can't speak to the leaders who were there at the time, but I can tell you that I believe that because of the relationship between the campus and the Chancellor's office that I discussed earlier, I think that kind of decision was more easily made than it would be now. It's not. Okay. I don't condone what happened. What I am trying to do is move forward and make sure it gets done right now.

Yeah. I have a list of other things that were stated in the 2014 audit that were restated in the 2023 audit. I won't go through those. I think there are a couple of things that are concerning. One, in 2014, there were agreements made. There was probably people sitting where you are now saying, we're going to fix this. We're going to fix this. It's egregious. However, when we look at it, we've had failure to implement or to continue recommendations from the 2014 audit.

Failure to keep up with some of the federal guidelines out there, the failure to think outside the box, be innovative, look at best practices around the country, and try to adopt those here in California, failure to collect data and analyze it for the safety of the students and faculty and other workers. You know. I appreciate the fact that you are here, Vice Chancellor. I hear what you were saying initially about what you're changing. I appreciate the fact that the interim Chancellor was here.

I'm not 100% sure why the new Chancellor is not here as well to hear our concerns, since she will be taking over in October. And I think Dr. Wood asked this, and I didn't really get a good, clear explanation, but why exactly should we believe that now all of a sudden we're going to implement these things when there was clearly a problem in 2014, probably before that?

Yeah, that's a very fair question, and that's what our community says to us also. Why should we believe that you're committed to changing and we have to rebuild trust with our community and with you? And so I have to just tell you that I'm committed to doing this. The institution is but I understand if you don't believe that yet.

So let me ask you, given the fact that we are here and we did not do what we said we were going to do completely in 2014, how often do you think we need to come back and revisit this? How much oversight and do you think that the state needs to give to the CSUS to ensure that what you say now is actually done appropriately and expeditiously?

Well, I've thought about assemblymember, let me answer that because there's a couple of things let me just jump in. I'm interrupting, Leora. But first, I want to say that Chancellor Select Garcia was asked to participate with Governor Newsom today in a set of activities. So she is even though she doesn't officially begin work until October 1, she is with the Governor at his specific request.

Secondly, let me say that we have committed very specifically to the timelines in the state Auditors report, and there are specific dates that we have to and that we have committed to reporting on their recommendations, and we will do so. So you and other Members of the elected legislative community serving the state of California and the Members of the California State University community will have very visible methods by which to hold us accountable. And I appreciate the question. Thank you.

I would also add that we're going to be reporting frequently to the board in public session on our work, and we'd be happy to report annually to the Legislature.

Thank you. We don't always get an offer for annual report, but I think we would all love that appear. And thank you very much, Chancellor, for informing us where Chancellor Garcia is. I hope that she understands the significance of this. And even though she's not here today, we'll watch the entire hearing know we will be holding her accountable to everything that we are discussing today as well. So thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Weber. So, Member Ortega, thank you for your patience.

Thank you. Thank you to the auditors. I have a CSU in my district that I'm very proud of, and I have a daughter who's looking at colleges and is looking at CSUS, and it's something that I'm also very excited about. But I'm very concerned. I'm very concerned. And coming into this hearing, I actually had a list of questions. But unfortunately, I agree with my colleague who walked out a little while ago who said, this conversation is going nowhere fast.

And just like I tell my kids, I don't want excuses. I want to see change. And I am looking forward to that and actually taking on that challenge. Earlier, I heard one of you mention, yeah, the Legislature needs to do something. We absolutely need to do something, because it's clear that executives at the CSU cannot do it themselves, especially when some of the folks who have committed the most horrendous sexual harassment have been high level administrators who have left with huge payouts and letters of recommendation.

I also want to be on record of saying that I find it very shameful that I continue to hear union blaming the collective bargaining agreements as being the problem, when again, the people who committed some of the most horrendous sexual harassments at the campuses were high level executives who do not have collective bargaining agreements, who have nothing to do with being in a union.

So I will absolutely be working with my colleagues to make sure that we take a look at the recommendations and ensure that before we continue discussing increasing tuition, that we consider transparency, that we consider more reports, and that we do something to make sure that the perpetrators of sexual harassment don't continue on the same track.

Thank you. Ms. Ortega. Senator Smallwood-Cuevas. Thank you.

Thank you so much. And I want to echo the good Assembly Member from Oakland on that, as well as the Assembly Members who spoke before me and my colleague, that this was going nowhere fast. I am concerned when we talk a lot about accountability, but we don't have any methodology discussed in terms of enforcement. How will these plans move forward if there isn't not at the Chancellor's office, but a system wide model of enforcement that prioritizes students, staff, and, I will say, your labor partners?

There are a number of models where unions who represent thousands of workers across different classifications have prioritized, highlighted, trained, and helped reduce issues of sexual harassment. I think about the partnerships with some of the commercial building owners and janitors, for example, and a Bill that we helped to move in the state Legislature some years ago, stopping rape on the night shift.

And it was about not scapegoating workers and collective bargaining, but figuring out how to turn those thousands of workers into reporters, training them on how to document, helping them understand how to support each other and then having some real systems of enforcements that bring in our civil rights departments and organizations who know how to ensure ways to build real cases and how to ensure that there is continued oversight. As the colleagues talked about 2014. And now here we are, ten years later.

There, have been none of these innovations talked about. There has been no opportunity to bring the workers, the students and the administrators together to tackle this issue. But what I hear is a lot of blame and finger pointing. And I agree with my colleague from the Assembly Member from the Monterey area about having coming back and looking for 0 findings.

One of the things being on education and on education budget sub is that we have been able to deal with enrollment by tying enrollment to the state's investment. And where we don't see an increase, we may not see an increase in how the funding moves forward. I think we need to think about creative ways in the Legislature to help with this oversight and accountability in this particular area.

One, because we know, particularly when we think about women and women of color, the audit was clear and the findings were clear. Who's the most impacted by these violations? Typically women of color. We know who is missing from a number of industries because we don't have a pathway for women of color into them. Why? Because they can't even get the basic education and skills and tools. They've already had sexual harassment. They've already experienced discrimination, and they've already stepped out, bowed out of the process.

So when you talk about creating a safe environment for workers and particularly the most vulnerable, this has a very chilling effect across all of the crises that we're trying to struggle with here at the state Legislature. How do we ensure equity in key industries? How do we ensure that we are elevating marginalized groups that have been disenfranchised from systems? How do we increase enrollment of women, and particularly women of color and black women in particular?

Well, we can't do that if these institutions become bastions for predators and violators. And so I agree that we have to take action so that we aren't here ten years later. And I think that starts with an intentional effort by the Administration to come to some real terms about who is to blame for this. And I think this focus on the workers is deeply problematic.

But it's the failure of the Administration, it's the failure of the leadership to give safe haven to these kinds of violations and to come back ten years later and to say it's okay. So I have a series of questions that I have laid out that I want to raise as well related to the report.

But I want to say as long as I am a part of the Education Committee on the education budget sub, I want to make sure that these places are safe, particularly for our most vulnerable populations. If CSU isn't a safe place for black, brown API women, then we might as well throw our hands up, because where are we in real ways in other systems? You all have to get this together, because if we don't, this vital pathway will not exist.

And we will continue to see more and more absence of these students, many of them coming from working poor communities, many of them young parents, many of them juggling so many of the other challenges that exist in our society and trying to get to this campus to have an education or trying to get their first faculty appointment, but then stopped in their tracks by the issue of sexual harassment and discrimination.

And I know this in my previous work, because one of the leading causes of absenteeism for women is sexual harassment and discrimination. And that ultimately leads to them stepping out of the industry so you know, we don't need CSU to be part of this deeper problem when they need to focus and build a solution for protecting women in our community and working with all of the centers of power within the university, particularly your collective bargaining units where there's relationship trust and deep reach into every classification on campuses.

So I want to just add that to the record. My question has to do with page 29, where it said that in some of these instances, documentation that was missing from the case files was available outside of those files, such as in campus officials own records or in employees personal files. And in other instances, campuses were not able to provide us with key documentation. Is there a reason why in these initial intake case files, why were they missing?

And how is it that they were not included in the campus's official record as a related or in an employee's personal file directly? How is it that these critical pieces of documentation? Because we can train all day long, but if there isn't a system of being able to record and maintain documentation, then every single worker is at risk.

Absolutely.

So when we reviewed the files, we looked to see what kind of system do they have, what kind of expectations do they have when they perform intake, what evidence they review, who they talk to. And we found it was inconsistent among the three campuses that we looked at. And what we found is that CSU lacked some kind of expectation, whether it's a checklist or some kind of guidance that indicates that when you perform an intake evaluation, you need to look at these types of evidence.

You need to document this type of evidence, and then you're supposed to document the rationale. And that has several important components, because not only does it make sure that they evaluate the case appropriately, but when they perform these campus reviews or when someone else comes in to make sure that they handle it appropriately, the documentation is there to evaluate.

And why were they missing? Would someone from CSU like to answer that?

Well, I did not see the files that the auditors looked at, so I can't explain why they were missing in any given case. But I agree that they absolutely have to be there, and that if we have a we need to have more rigorous expectations about how that's done. The policy expects it, but doesn't give enough specificity. And so we will be revising the policy. And also with a case management system, we will have a list.

And we've already agreed there's a list of documents that we discussed with the Department of Justice at San Jose, and we agreed that those are documents that are necessary parts of the file. And that is the kind of thing that we're going to have to make more explicit.

And I think that speaks to the Assembly Members comments from San Diego. In terms of findings, if you don't have the documentation, you can't have a finding. And so it is critical. I mean, the documentation is what tells the story. It's the I cannot understand how an institution as old as CSU does not have adequate systems for keeping track of such critical information.

Certainly when I've been representing workers who are being brought up on some technical sort of personnel issue, particularly some of the lower wage workers, not the Chancellors, not the faculty, there is overwhelming documentation over documentation of those workers. But I think it seems that at the higher level, at the administrative Chancellor levels, where some of these incidences are happening, certainly that is not the case. It seems another question that I had is on page 48.

It talks about that CSU does not have a system wide policy that explicitly prohibits unprofessional conduct. I was surprised by that. And my question is, since the CSU does not have a system wide policy pertaining to unprofessional conduct, do any individual campuses have this policy? Are you starting to look at what are best practices? How do you begin to build a regime of policies and practices that can help better protect the employees?

Staff and students.

There is a policy that prohibits unprofessional conduct. It's edcode 89535. It's pretty bare bones. What it says is that is a basis for taking disciplinary action. There's a list of things. What we don't have and what we actually already have started to develop is a process for enforcing that. And this is when we talk about the other conduct of concern. If the unprofessional conduct constitutes a policy violation, title IX or other policy violation, then the process for enforcing that would be that policy.

But if it doesn't, then we don't have a process because traditionally that was just sort of HR 101. If somebody's behaving unprofessionally, you look into it, you take appropriate action and you document it. And that work has atrophied some that HR work has atrophied in the face of other compliance requirements, and we have to revive that and we're going to make that a more explicit process.

You have to be careful about defining unprofessional conduct because there are free speech rights and academic freedom rights that sometimes make the interpretation complicated, but that doesn't stop us from prohibiting unprofessional conduct and taking action in response.

And what is the timeline? Because in my experience with discrimination, there's escalation, and it often starts with the unprofessional conduct. To the comments that were made about the campus on Fresno, the issues on Fresno State's campus, what is the timeline for developing this? And I particularly think it's important because a lot of these lawless actions are intersectional. So we need more antiracism policies, things like microaggression, microassault in addition to sort of the more egregious and direct sexual harassment.

So what is the timeline and how are you thinking about this unprofessional conduct? What is our guarantee that, like everything that we talked about, that this is going to be prioritized because this is where we catch the behavior before it turns into such a liability as what took place on the Fresno campus?

I agree. I think that it is that a lot of the frustration and disappointment from the community has to do with that unprofessional behavior. Also, it's not just the Title IX conduct. And it's especially frustrating when you actually have the courage to report something like that and then you're told, oh, it doesn't rise to the level of a policy violation. So we need to address that. And that is a priority. We have a procedure process in draft form, and we will be prioritizing that.

We are also right now trying to help the campuses move forward on their implementation work. We need more staff. We have authorization to recruit and to hire, and we're trying to identify the priorities that have to happen first. And I agree that's a very important one.

And I have one final question. And I hope Mr. Chair, we will be collecting these responses so that we can help support the timelines and deadlines for these things and see the progress made. And my final report has to do with a statement on page 52 about the Chancellor's office. It says the Chancellor's office has not issued any guidance in its sexual harassment policy for the specific data the campuses should document in their case management systems.

I want to talk a little bit about guidance, because I've spent some time in a large system, and what struck me about your response to the Assembly Member from San Diego was how plex and a little convoluted your response was to her answer. And then how do you then put that in the system and you communicate down the guidance. So what is the guidance vehicle that helps to push down these directives? Whether it be the document collection process, whether it be the unprofessional conduct policy?

What is going to be the communication vehicle that pushes downward so that it is not deconstructed, but it is consolidated in terms of the campus and campus wide, what is that communication system that you're building, particularly to be able to move these complex sort of enforcement frameworks around data collection and around overall guidance?

So it depends on the particular guidance. In the case of what documents should be maintained in a file, that's easy. You make a list of those documents and you share that list and say, this is what we expect you to put in a file. In terms of what is unprofessional conduct, that requires judgment and analysis. And so we can give more guidance. And we talked with the auditors about the kind of guidance we could give.

And specifically, we talked about examples, giving examples of what does constitute unprofessional conduct so that you get the professionals who are applying the facts to the policy thinking about it, and then more oversight from the Chancellor's office.

So if you have somebody at the Chancellor's office who's overseeing the work, and we're hoping to have five people who will be doing that so they can consult daily, frequently with the campuses about particular cases, that's a way to ensure that we're helping people develop the analytical skills and the judgment that's consistent and that's reasonable.

Well, I appreciate that. And I think when you have such a broad system, it's also thinking about ways to use new technology that helps to communicate downward across a system, be it apps, be It alerts, be it online training modules. I think CSU needs to invest in those sorts of systems, communication systems that really press down and can go wide. Otherwise, we are not going to reach the number, the scale of employees and students that need to be reached and certainly be able to change this culture. So we're not here ten years later. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

May I just say one thing in response to that? An enterprise level system, as you're describing, is exactly what's needed. It needs to be designed in a way that allows individuals on the ground to follow the protocols, to follow the documentation requirements, to follow the communication requirements on the ground in the individual case. It also needs to be designed in a way that the managers can assure the quality that that's happening.

Thank you.

So weekly they're looking at cases and they're seeing Dr. Weber, the timeframe question, they're seeing, are we on track in this case with the appropriate time frame? And I'll speak to that in a minute. And then finally, we need a higher level quality assurance of the Chancellor's office.

So we need to be able to show our work, we need to be able to document it, we need to be able to control the quality of it and then report out the assurance that these recommendations are baked into the enterprise level system. I agree with you wholeheartedly that technology is a leverage point to the earlier question.

I just wanted to say about the timeframes that has happened all over the country with the imposition of the new regulations, the Trump era regulations that withdrew all of the Obama era guidance had many more requirements that included a new category of evidence called directly related evidence. That ensured that everything got turned over to both parties, that ensured that lawyers were allowed in the process. There were things that slowed down. Incredibly, the process that campuses across the nation, not just the CSU, expanded their timeframes.

And we saw this in policy development after those regs and after trying to stay with the time frames they originally had, just seeing that the step by step by step process and the new regulations, just you could never meet it. And in fact, campuses across the nation struggle with that. It is a problem, it is slow. Many cases go way beyond where they should, and in our review, we saw that as well. But it was not unusual for campuses in their policy to expand the days to create reasonable expectations for both parties.

Thank you so much and thank you for the comments. Also, on the enterprise level system, I believe the University of California has that type of system as well, to capture the data. So we definitely want to get a report back on this. So thank you. Assembly Member Addis.

Thank you for your grace and letting me ask one more question, thank you, Chair. I'm even more stunned than when I walked in here, I think over the past two and a half hours. What I've heard is we just didn't prioritize this. Since 2014, when the first findings were made, I think I've heard we don't know when we're going to fix this because it's really hard. I think I've heard the Chancellor's office says they're going to fix things, but really has failed us.

And I want to talk about a very specific situation in which the Chancellor's office has failed us. There was a President of Fresno State University who was uplifted to Chancellor after mismanagement of dealing with sexual harassment issues, was then given retreat rights, not just any retreat rights, though, retreat rights to be a professor of leadership and public policy. And so I find that astounding that that could happen in this system.

I find it astounding that our colleagues have mentioned, and I really appreciate all of our colleagues from Southern California, northern California, Central California, mentioning this issue of retreat rights, but also this issue of it's not about the general membership, collective bargaining. This is a failure from the top down that has happened over. So but my real question is you mentioned you're making changes to the retreat right policy and you also mentioned that this has to be a culture of change.

It's not just going to be one person who's going to create change. So in the policies that you've changed around retreat rights, would someone like this, who mishandled sexual harassment from the top and then was given a position to teach leadership and public policy, would that person still maintain retreat rights under your new policy?

Well, they shouldn't, right? But I'd have to look at the policy and I get your point. I understand that this is very troubling.

Well, it's not just a point. I mean, it's that we've spent almost 3 hours talking about culture of change, why things didn't happen. We're all going to work together. It's somewhat kumbaya, we're going to have accountability. Yet I don't see anything in place, like many of my colleagues, that really speaks to accountability. I don't see how people at the top are going to be held accountable. I don't see timelines and I don't see a commitment to getting this done. And so it's not really about the point. It's about what is it that's going to actually make the change?

Well, I just want to clarify, there is a difference between somebody who engages in sexual misconduct and someone who doesn't do their job properly by overseeing a matter.

There is correct. Anyway, not to be argumentative, but one enables, the other. And when we talk about a culture of change, we have to talk about both. And so I'll just reiterate that if the policy on retreat rights doesn't address both, it's not getting us where we need to be. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Assembly Member Addis, Assembly Member Weber.

I wasn't planning on asking another question. But I am a little confused. Because when we're talking about retreat rights, and if we're talking about those at the very, very top, so not the people who are a part of unions and collective bargaining, then why are we having such an intense conversation about not allowing them to get it? Even if they were initially, I mean, told, but they were then found to have sexual misconduct or sexual harassment. Like, what is the issue there?

Well, first of all, we are talking about people in unions exclusively. So these are faculty. It only applies to faculty. They were in a union. They gave up their union membership and their tenure. They gave up permanency to take a job as an administrator. And the data shows that administrators don't stay very long sometimes in the position. And so most tenured faculty will say, I'm not going to take that job unless I can retreat and go back to my tenured position. So we are talking about represented employees.

But at the time when we're talking about whether or not they can retreat, they are no longer a part of the union, correct?

At the time they accept the job, that's when they're given the retreat right. So if you say to a professor, if you take this administrative job, we will let you retreat to the faculty, and then we later change the rule, they would challenge that in court, and they would say, you breached your promise to me to let me retreat. You never told me that there were any qualifications. We've now put those qualifications in place. So going forward, we can enforce that. We're just talking about retroactively people who got retreat right.

Okay. So it's not an issue of would the unions come after you, it's more of an issue of the individuals taking it to court.

Okay. And so I think one of the things that we, thank you for clarifying that, and I think one of the things that would be a little bit more comforting is if there was some assurance that policies going forward would include if you have retreat rights, that they can be revoked if you are found, if the findings were positive for sexual harassment or sexual misconduct. And I don't think I've heard that, and I don't know if anybody else has heard that, but I understand the issue of retroactive, but going forward, so that this is not an issue for future administrators, that would be nice if we can have that assured.

Correct.

The problem just with that is that once you retreat, you're a Member of the collective bargaining unit. So if we then try to write, you're a faculty Member again, and so if someone were to say, we're going to fire you from that position, then they would have rights under the collective bargaining agreement, and they would probably prevail because they would say the misconduct didn't happen while I was a represented employee. It gets very complicated.

I think I heard a slightly different question, though, and I want to make sure I understood the question correctly. And I actually wanted to clarify this with the auditor as well, because I wasn't hearing the concern that the auditor expressed. If I look at the retreat right policy, it says, "administrators are ineligible to exercise their option to retreat to faculty positions under the following circumstances. One, a finding has been made that resulted in the administrator being non retained, terminated, or separated through mutually agreed upon separate."

So any way that you are no longer an administrator, and the only place that retreat would ever come up or be relevant is if the person was no longer going to hold their position as administrator. So we've made the decision jointly fired whatever word we want to use, that you're no longer administrator.

You would then have the ability to exercise retreat rights, except for the purposes of this, you're ineligible if finding is a determination that an administrator engaged in misconduct or a policy violation that renders the administrator unsuitable to have continued direct interactions with CSU students or employees. So that's the language. Right?

And my initial question when I started is whether or not someone with a finding of sexual misconduct or sexual harassment would qualify under that. And the answer that I got was, well, it depends, may or may not. So. Yes, I understand that. And my initial question was, these individuals that we're referring to or that we're talking about right now in this audit report, would they qualify under that definition? And we did not get an answer of yes.

Yes, if they engaged in sexual misconduct and there was a finding, they could not retreat.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Weber. Any further questions? All right, thank you so much. We will now move on to our final panel perspectives on the audit. I'd like to welcome the third and final panel to the table represents from Cal State Student Association, California State University Employees Union, and California Faculty Association, Galilea Pompa, Vicky McLeod, and Anne Luna-Gordinier. Welcome. I'm sorry. Terrence Wilson as well. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for your patience. Each representative will have five minutes for your presentation. Thank you. Please proceed.

Can you hear me? Testing. Good afternoon, chair and Members. My name is Genesis Galilea Pompa and I am the Cal State Student Association vice President of system wide affairs, representing the nearly half a million students in the CSU system. I am also a student at Cal Poly Pomona. I am humbled to be here to provide the students perspective on the current state of Title IX across all CSU campuses.

As a Cal State Student Association, we had an in depth discussion on the findings of the Cozen O'Connor report in relation to Title IX at last month's Plenary meeting. All 23 campuses were represented at that discussion, and the majority consensus was that the grievance procedures on campuses do not provide a fair and reasonable process with equitable outcomes for survivors of sexual violence. This varies on case by case scenario.

However, many students spoke to the lived experiences of grievances being dismissed due to reasons such as the perpetrator being too close to graduation, the case not being deemed high priority, or the case simply not being investigated properly. In some cases, there is also a lack of discipline for perpetrators, and survivors have to endure continuously seeing the person that caused them harm around campus.

Many of these reasons create a lack of trust in Title IX and the grievance process, oftentimes leading to survivors staying quiet and not filing a formal grievance. We also do recognize that sometimes grievances that are reported do not fall under Title Nine, hence their dismissal. But this is not an adequate process. Harmful behavior still needs to be addressed even at the moment. Excuse me? It does not constitute a Title IX violation because harmful behavior can eventually lead to such a violation.

This is a practice that may require a new policy to address such harmful behavior and should be seen as a preventative measure for future Title IX violations. Such inadequacy in the grievance processes that are not handled through a lens of equity and empathy adds to the trauma that survivors are already experiencing. We do recognize that this can be due to numerous reasons, such as campus is not having the necessary staff and resources to be more responsive to grievances.

However, this just speaks to the need for the CSU system to intervene and ensure the efficiency of all Title IX departments across the entire system. Students are generally aware of the grievance procedures due to the Title IX mandatory training. Nevertheless, reliance on the training as well as educating on the Title IX grievance process is simply not enough. Several campuses at our last Plenary meeting spoke to the need to promote and advertise Title IX services in a more easily accessible manner.

We cannot expect students who have already gone through a traumatic experience to have to go out of their way to find themselves support and resources through the process. We also cannot base the accessibility of such information off of the usual overly participated student.

While the majority of the student body still does not have access to Title IX information and services, this education and promotion of Title IX processes can be done via flyers around campus having its own app or chiclet on students canvas portal, including an all class syllabi. And these are just naming a few options. As the Cal State Student Association, we believe Title IX should be considered a top budget priority due to the systematic failure of these departments across many campuses.

The funding will ensure that each Title IX campus Department has sufficient staff and resources to respond to grievances in a timely and most importantly, empathetic manner. In addition, there needs to be a complete system wide plan on how each Title IX Department should be structured and how they should operate. This kind of oversight will ensure that all CSU students are receiving the adequate care that they deserve at each of the campuses.

Most of all, we believe it is imperative that students are considered as equal stakeholders in the creation of this new plan. When Cozen O'Connor conducted focus groups at each of the campuses to gather information on Title IX services, it was brought to our attention that not all of these groups had a student at the table.

Now that the issues have been brought to light, and now that you all as a state want to intervene, we hope that you ensure that students are involved in this implementation or implementation of any and all recommendations to Title IX services across the CSU system. As the Cal State Student Association, we appreciate the invitation to speak on such an important issue affecting so many of our students, and we look forward to future collaborations on how to best improve Title IX services.

And most importantly, we look forward to the day that CSU students can say that Title IX services and the grievance process are equitable and result in fair and reasonable outcomes. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Mr. Wilson. Welcome.

Hello. Good afternoon, chairs and Members of the committee. My name is Terry Wilson, and I'm the vice President for Finance for the California State University Employees Union, representing nearly 16,000 nonstaff or non faculty staff at the CSU. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today on this incredibly important issue. CSU Members are in a unique position on CSU campuses. Not only are we targets of sexual harassment ourselves, but our Members also perform the intake on reports of sexual harassment.

So our Members both witnessed and personally experienced issues with the Title IX system. The state audit of the CSU's Title IX procedures confirmed problems that our Members have been observing and experiencing for years, including outrageous case delays, lack of discipline for those who violate Title Nine policies, and refusal to investigate allegations without providing a rationale. The audit also noted lack of standardized data collection and analysis across campuses, preventing the CSU from identifying and addressing problematic trends.

NSUE and CFA have been working closely with the Legislature on to rectify. The recommendations presented in the audit, such as providing clear guidelines to ensure consistent interpretation of sexual harassment and establishing consistent methods for addressing sexual harassment are steps we must take if we hope to foster a safe environment on our campuses. Implementing these recommendations, among others provided in the report, will begin to change the culture of the CSU that has allowed systemic abuses and harassment to persist unchecked.

We understand that the Legislature plans to reform and standardize Title IX procedures across all three higher education segments, which we appreciate the opportunity to participate in. We look forward to working together to address these systemic issues to build a better, safer CSU for student and employees alike. Thank you, and I'm happy to answer any questions at the end.

Thank you so much. Welcome, Ms. Luna-Gordinier.

Good afternoon, chairs and Members. Thank you for all of your leadership on this critical issue that deeply impacts so many people every day. My name is Anne Luna-Gordinier, and I'm honored to be able to speak here today. I'm an associate professor at Sacramento State, one of the trichairs of the Women's Caucus for the California Faculty Association, and I'm a survivor of sexual assault.

CFA represents 29,000 professors, lecturer, faculty, counselors, coaches, and librarians who've been on the front lines of the Title IX process for many years. The confluence of the Cozen O'Connor report. This audit and legislative inquiries into the massive failures at several CSU campuses have created a rupture in CSU management's business as usual approach to Title IX compliance. We're at a crossroads where we can affect change at a more profound level. There are many constructive recommendations in this audit in which we hope to continue to engage.

We would like to call on all of us to take this opportunity to reimagine the institutional processes that led to these systemic failures and to create real cultural change centered on our students, faculty and staff, past and present. There are three issues I would like to highlight for this purpose today. First, it is critical that investigations are consistent and independent, as well as implemented through an antiracism and social justice lens.

We seek to build on some of the recommendations in the audit to have an independent voice. Inherently, the University Administration, from legal counsel to vice presidents, have an obligation to protect the institution. The reality is that there are too many cross interests and power dynamics at play on each campus that lead to inequitable solutions and situations. The Fox cannot continue to guard the chicken coop. The Cozen O'Connor Report helpfully identifies the need to improve trust and accountability.

Focusing on the need for non campusbased, independent oversight is essential. We appreciate that the lack of resources for Title IX offices was identified as a problem. However, we are also concerned with the potential for more resources to flow into and perpetuate a flawed system. Second, we appreciate the call for more streamlined data. We need to not only understand which cases are falling through the cracks, but also be cognizant of the patterns.

The data can reveal why they came to be and how best resolve the challenges identified. The audit identifies the inconsistencies with which cases are handled. It is critical we take an intersectional approach and recognize racial, gender, disability, bias and power dynamics. We need to capture patterns of discrimination and ensure this process is not used to further bias and reinforce power dynamics that perpetuate violence against vulnerable communities. Finally, let's ground ourselves in why we are here having this discussion. It is to prevent sexual assault and harassment.

To do this, we need to address the twin issues of funding and consistent implementation across all campuses. The lack of these things has led to a reliance on punitive approaches established through decades of public policy, which has not proven to prevent harm. Instead of wasting time on bandaid solutions, we need to focus on building new norms and systems of accountability.

We're calling for a working group of diverse intersectional stakeholders who are faculty, students and staff, as well as Members of the university community who have been directly harmed. The stakeholders would receive ongoing skill building, coaching and bias intervention and cultural competency. Their charge would be to look into ways to make long term cultural impact. Some ways of doing this can include peer educator workshops, analyzing hiring and orientation practices, and further supporting survivor advocates. We look forward to a continued partnership.

And thank you for your commitment to the CSU system. The thoughtful reforms we're beginning to embark on today can be a model for our state and country. Thank you, and I'm happy to take questions.

Thank you so much to all of our presenters. And thank you for bravely representing the organization on what is a difficult day. In terms of the recommendations in the state audit and the Cozen O'Connor report, do you feel that those are enough to change the nature of how sexual harassment complaints are handled at the CSU system?

And secondly, what additional recommendations would he have beyond what is stated in these reports to help really create that safe campus environment where all reports are taken seriously and handled with confidentiality and competence?

Thank you. I think that's a great question, and I think that no, to answer that directly, no, I don't think it's enough. And I think what I was touching on in terms of a working group where we'd actually engage those people who've already been harmed, the people who are part of that community, would be very productive in terms of really advancing this forward.

Thank you. Any of the presenters like to answer that question?

I think from a student's perspective, I can also agree it's not enough. And the implementation groups that they have on campus, our students are not aware of those. Our students don't know information, don't know resources. And I feel like that's the root of the problem, is that our students are confused on where to go or don't have that understanding of that there is help and there is support. So I think that's the root of the issue, at least from my perspective as a student.

Thank you. Ms. Pompa, sir?

Yes. I would add, on behalf of CSUEU, that we're concerned, I think CFA raised it that there's no independent investigators in this process. So to simplify things, most employees don't investigate somebody above them in the chain of command. So if you're having investigations and trying to improve tracking devices and have a system wide database, but you're missing the fundamental power dynamic, then that's a big problem. I think the CFA rep brought that up effectively.

And then secondly, I was shocked to hear the Cozen O'Connor consultants talk about the collective bargaining agreements and the due process and state personnel board. They had zero interaction with the leadership of CSUEU. It's almost malpractice to talk about collective bargaining agreement without talking to the collective bargaining agent. But I think that the representatives brought that up effectively, so I appreciate that. So I would say number one is there has to be an independent investigation process.

And number two, I think the stakeholder idea that CFA laid out was something that we could work with. But there has to be some systematic engagement with the unions, because right. Now it's just campus by campus. In some cases, it's almost a violation of the collective bargaining process. Other cases we have to find out through the grapevine what's happening.

Thank you so much for sharing. I really appreciate those responses. And there's a lot more work to be done. Assembly Member Addis.

I want to thank you for bringing that up about the power dynamic, especially when so much of these issues are coming from very, very high up. And I hear you asking for independent investigator or investigation. Are you suggesting completely take it out of the Chancellor's office and off of the CSU campuses to an independent investigation or in addition to the Chancellor? And if you're not sure yet, that's okay too. I'm just kind of thinking out loud as I ask the question.

We just think at CSUEU there has to be some mechanism to recognize the power dynamic and take some of these investigations outside. The Chancellor's office is part of the chain of command with the campus, even though they have a lot of autonomy. If you're an employee on the campus, you don't really see that as an independent force. And so far, the track record has not established itself as an independent force. I think there does need to be much more thought put into an independent process.

And the Cozan O'Connor report did actually list it as one of the options was having independent investigation as opposed to having it done within the CSU. So I think that's a good idea.

I actually had that thought myself. I'm glad to hear it from those of you that are experts and have experienced and lived this, because that was my initial reaction to all of this anyway, is how can executives and folks at the top and people all throughout be investigating themselves? That piece of this makes no sense to me at all. And I haven't really heard anything in this hearing that makes that sensical to me. So I appreciate hearing it from those that are living it.

Yeah, in regards to that was my biggest obstacle at Fresno State was the centralized of the reporting mechanisms. That was the biggest obstacle there.

Can you flesh that out a tiny bit.

Just how the structure is set up, meaning sometimes it depends on what campus you're at. Where the vice Presidents for Human Resources, they sit on the President's cabinet. And like Jim was saying, it's very difficult if you have to report against a high level administrator that sits on that cabinet and then you're reporting to the Vice President for Human Resources that sits on the cabinet, that they then get their performance evaluation from the President. Just the dynamics. It's very difficult to work with. And that was one of the things I've brought up as to where how can you put space between that so you can get a fair investigation or just even a fair intake? Thank you.

Yes, please.

And I would just add when we think about what we're going to do and we're talking about resources, we don't want it to just go to business as usual. This is an opportunity to stop and think about how we really make change and to just want to be cautious and think really careful of just giving money to the Chancellor's office. Let's make sure that our resources are going to the right place to actually help our staff Members and students.

Thank you so much. Any further questions from colleagues? Thank you so much to all of you for bravely sharing your presentations here today and for all the enlightenment here today. It's been very helpful and sharing the information going forward. And there's a lot of work to be done at this time. We're going to go into public comments. If you'd like to make a public comment, please come to the mic and you'll have two minutes. Thank you to our presenters. All right.

Seeing no public comment today, I really want to thank all the presenters who have come here today. To all my colleagues who have stayed for entire hearing, to all my colleagues who've participated here today and to chair Alvarez and to the joint legislative audit committee, the Assembly higher education committee, the Senate education committee for all the robust conversations here today. And as you've heard from my colleagues, we are deeply committed to addressing systemic issues on issues on sexual harassment and on post secondary education campuses.

There's a lot of work to be done here, as you've heard from a number of the presentations, as Chair of the Assembly Higher Education Committee, along with my colleagues, very deeply committed to addressing these very issues. And the staff of the Assembly Higher Education Committee, in collaboration with the Senate Education Committee, are meeting with the various parties to help the state ascertain how we can best address and help ensure that sexual harassment issues are being addressed.

Whether it's oversight and accountability, additional resources, looking at many different issues retreat, rights, creating that culture of change. There's a lot of work to be done going forward. And should anyone, whether they're Members of the public, Members of the Legislature, or colleagues, wish to offer counsel or perspective as to how we can best address sexual harassment issues regarding trust and accountability and many others, please contact Assembly Higher Education Committee staff.

We're deeply committed to resolving and tackling these complex issues in a collaborative, thoughtful, and thorough manner. And our committee is currently working on legislation to address these issues. And I welcome input and collaboration from other Members as we continue to proceed on these very serious issues going forward and look forward to future conversations and collaboration with each and every one of you as we continue to hold and to keep our students, faculty and staff safe on our higher education campuses.

At the CSU campuses, there's a lot of work to be done. So with that, thank you so much. This meeting is adjourned.