It's Thursday, October 19. And this is the 1909, the state news weekly podcast featuring our reporters talking about the news. I'm your host, Alex Walters. This week, I'm all alone for a deep dive. We're looking at a loophole in the Title Nine sexual misconduct investigation system that allows professors, administrators and students to avoid consequences by moving from one institution to another. It's a well known phenomena that goes by a few names. You may have heard it described as past the harasser or past the trash. It's a national issue without a simple solution in sight. But today, we're going to zoom in and examine it through just two cases right here at Michigan State. They both involve sexual misconduct, Title Nine investigations and workplace politics influencing the process. But once he's Michigan State as an importer of a bad actor, hiring someone for a high profile position without knowledge of past sexual assault allegations. And the other involves MSU as an exporter, allowing an employee to move to a new job at another university despite a title nine investigation into his conduct with students.
But before we get into those cases, I should be more specific about how exactly this all works. Under Title Nine, the federal statute that seeks to guarantee equality of opportunity for men and women in education, colleges, like MSU are empowered to investigate and discipline sexual misconduct. That can be confusing because sometimes these investigations and the university hearings cover conduct that could also be criminally charged and tried in a court through the criminal legal system. But experts say that overlap is important, because survivors may prefer to report to the university instead of law enforcement. Elizabeth Abner former MSU Title Nine investigator who now represents survivors in civil cases that her law firm told the state news that during her time at MSU, she often encountered survivors who felt going through the criminal legal process would be too much. Both the threat both the stress they thought they would feel dealing with police and the potential consequences for the accused. Abner said she encountered survivors who often didn't want to send their abuser to jail, but just wanted to not work with them or not see them in classes. But that's supposed lower stress of a university investigation isn't the only difference. Unlike cases that move to the criminal legal system. These title nine cases don't show up in background checks. There isn't a nationally standardized system for information sharing like there is with arrest charges and convictions. That's where our loophole opens up. Let's say you're a university professor who's just been accused of sexual assault, the investigation is going to take a while
if you're at MSU, for example, it'll take an average of 361 days. If the investigation finishes, a letter summarizing the findings will be added to your personnel file. There may be consequences like suspension or firing. And if you someday want to get a new job, it could show up in a records request or be voluntarily shared with the new employer by the school. So what do you do? If you ask Joshua angle, a lawyer who represents faculty members and students accused of harassment, he would say you find a new gig as soon as you can. In 2019, he told the Chronicle of Higher Education, quote, We advise people when there's an allegation to get out and start looking for a new school before there's a finding and quote, that's past the harasser. It's an employee known to have engaged in misconduct, moving from one place to another sheltering the employee from consequences and the institutions from scrutiny in the process. But that's all hypothetical. Let's get into the real cases. We're going to start a few years ago at Grand Valley State University with Anthony Williams, Jr. He was the director of Student Conduct working to educate students on issues like consent. And that all got complicated in April 2021, when a student came into GVS, US title nine office and said that Williams sexually assaulted them had the case end. It never did, because Williams got a new gig at MSU. Before it could, I should say now how this account of Williams conduct was assembled. I'm mainly relying on three documents. The hiring paperwork for Williams moved to MSU, the GVSU title nine offices case file on Williams, and an outside investigation into how they handled that case from the global law firm Husch Blackwell. That outside investigation doesn't explicitly named Williams, but the circumstances and date of each event in it line up with those in the case file. And two people with intimate knowledge of the matter told me that the Husch Blackwell report is about Williams, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose that information.
Through those documents, we can see that the thread of Williams moving to a new job during the investigation was talked about constantly by investigators. He had already applied for the job at MSU and the investigation began. And as he moved through the various interviewer interviews GVSU investigators held multiple meetings to discuss if they could finish the case before he left. There was also tension over whether GVSU was investigators could ethically look into Williams conduct at all, because Williams staff and the title nine staff reported to the same person and collaborated frequently. Regardless, the case moved on until it suddenly ended in July 2020. In one when Williams accepted the job as MSU as dean of students and the title nine office had to close their case without a final decision. It was at the second the last step in the process. So all that was left was a hearing. But Williams got out in time and at MSU. He was making 60,000 More than before, and he was the university's chief Conduct Officer, overseeing student behavior and advising embassies Title Nine office. He didn't last long. Earlier this year. He resigned after his supervisor learned of different incident of sexual misconduct, this time at a conference in Chicago and 2022. And the resignation agreement he made with MSU included three months of Transitional Pay and a condition of confidentiality. The document summarizing his conduct was also shielded from the disclosure to future employers. Vinnie Gore, the MSU vice president, who oversaw Williams did not agree to an interview with the state news and did not answer written questions, asking why Williams was allowed to resign and why the resignation was structured with so much secrecy. Now well, it could seem like the case had little effect on Williams career back at GVSU. It was creating shockwaves. In the months after he left nearly the entire title line office staff resigned in protest that left the university out of compliance with T
Title Nine statute for weeks as they struggled to restart the office. Eventually, the university would order the Husch Blackwell investigation into the matter and then adopt numerous reforms. One of them investigations that GVSU no longer end when someone leaves the university. That's the same at MSU, too, because in the words of a spokesperson, quote, We don't want to incentivize resignation as a motive for getting rid of a title nine investigation. So with that change the past the harasser problem was solved, right? Well, no, it's not because without a system of proactively tracking where people go after they leave your university and sharing that information, it's effectively no different than before. I'll give you another example. To make that a bit clearer. Let's look at the case of Charles Hadlock. He was a broke college professor at MSU and an associate dean and last spring at a gala for graduating MBA students had like became intoxicated and sexually harassed and assaulted multiple students while dancing. Then he did what Williams did. He quickly got a new job. For him. It was a professorship at the University of Pittsburgh Business School. had luck was long gone by the time his case finished last December. But unlike Williams, as you just heard, it did finish and misused Title Nine Office found that had like a violated university policy. But what happened wasn't that different from Williams case as far as we can tell, nothing happened had luck is still employed at Pitt teaching undergrad classes. And the only reason Pitt ever found out that anything happened in the first place, according to their spokesperson was because major Michigan news outlets were reporting heavily on Catlett how blacks conduct because of its connection to the ousting of former business Dean Sanjay Gupta. Now I'm not going to get into the Gupta saga, that's its own matter altogether, probably deserving of its own episode.
But what you should know for now is that if it weren't for all the attention given to have ducks case, thanks to his connection to the Gupta scandal, it's hard to know if Pitt would have ever found out what happened at all. Now, it might be easy to look at that example and say, Well, why doesn't MSU just share the findings with where employees go? But if you ask them, they'll tell you that's not easy. A spokesperson told me that MSU can't share findings in part because of legal and privacy reasons. But mainly because they simply don't know where everyone goes after leaving, they don't have a way of keeping track of that. So even with investigations now continuing after people find a new job. They just sit in old personnel files with a small chance that an employer may someday find out about them. So that's a simplified explanation of our reporting on past the harasser. I wanted to condense multiple stories into one podcast for you to listen to. But for all the details, I'd encourage you to check out the stories that supported this episode of state news.com. And it also recommend that you give a read to the Chronicle of Higher Education
The investigation into passive harasser. I'll link all those in description of this week's episode so you can easily find them if you're interested. That's all for this week. We're off next week during MSUs fall break but the 1909 will return November 2 with more stories. Until then there'll be fresh news every day at state news.com Thank you to our incredible podcast director Anthony Brinson aunty you for listening for the 1909 I'm Alex Walters.