Oregon Health & Science University lacks clear policies on handling, documenting and investigating reported misconduct, leading to inconsistent discipline and a lack of trust among staff and students, an inquiry by former Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm found.
Portland’s largest employer has failed to create an inclusive environment where people feel welcome or safe, investigators said in the $6.5 million review released Thursday.
Holder’s firm received on a hotline created this spring hundreds of reports from staff or students describing alleged sexual harassment, gender harassment, bullying and racial discrimination or relating to the university’s failure to hold violators accountable.
“We’re certainly sorry and apologize that there are so many of our members that have experienced things that we don’t want them to experience,” OHSU President Dr. Danny Jacobs said in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive. “It’s just redoubled our attention and senior leadership’s attention to continue to address those concerns and do them as quickly as possible.’’
Holder and his partner shared their findings with Jacobs and OHSU board members during a virtual conference in the morning and the university released the report in the afternoon.
Jacobs said he hadn’t had a chance to read it fully yet.
OHSU has more than 19,000 staff members, including teachers and researchers, and about 4,000 students. It offers schools in medicine, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy and public health, runs two hospitals and research centers and clinics.
OHSU hired Holder and his Washington, D.C.-based firm Covington & Burling to investigate the university’s response to sexual misconduct and discrimination claims in the wake of a high-profile harassment lawsuit filed against the school and former anesthesiology resident Dr. Jason Campbell, who had gained social media fame as the “TikTok Doc” for his viral dance videos in hospital scrubs.
OHSU in May agreed to pay $585,000 to settle the suit brought by a social worker who accused Campbell of sexually assaulting her and the school of failing to take action.
The suit led to fallout against OHSU’s Dr. Esther Choo, a founding member of the now-defunct TIME’S UP Healthcare group formed to combat sex harassment in the medical field.
The social worker alleged Choo had failed to report her allegations to the school’s Title IX coordinator. Choo said she wasn’t a mandatory reporter because Campbell wasn’t under her immediate supervision.
The law firm’s 51-page report said the university must strengthen its policies on mandatory reporting, revise procedures to clarify who must report alleged sexual assault or harassment and adopt “strong non-retaliation provisions.”
The university’s current mandatory reporting policies conflict with one another and aren’t enforced, the firm found.
For instance, one of the policies says supervisors, managers, department heads, faculty or administrative staff members “most directly involved” must report allegations. But another policy says anyone who receives a report must take it to the Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Office or the Title IX coordinator. Title IX is a 1972 law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded schools.
The investigators said mandatory reporters shouldn’t be limited to only those “most directly involved.”
Both the university’s deputy general counsel and the former director of its Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employment Office told investigators the mandatory reporting policies have “never been fully enforced, meaning individuals have not been disciplined for failing to report misconduct.”
These gaps became glaringly evident in the Campbell case, the investigation said.
Six OHSU employees were aware of allegations of sexual misconduct by Campbell but didn’t report what they learned and “we identified at least five other employees who may have known about possible misconduct by Dr. Campbell but did not report those allegations,” the report said.
The firm, though, concluded that only one person violated the letter of the university’s confusing policies because she was Campbell’s direct supervisor.
The supervisor, who wasn’t named by investigators, knew of allegations of improper conduct by Campbell toward four women, but didn’t report any of the complaints, the report said.
“She instead independently assessed and addressed these individual situations,” according to the investigation. In April, OHSU removed the doctor from her supervisory position, the report said.
Campbell’s direct supervisor was Dr. Emily J. Baird, according to the attorneys who sued OHSU.
The investigation also found that the university’s human resources division can’t handle the volume of complaints it receives and has lacked experience and sustained leadership for more than a decade.
“The inability of HR to implement discipline, and the ease with which its recommendations can be disregarded, marginalizes the function,” the report said.
The firm recommended the school hire a vice president or senior vice president of human resources to bring professionalism to the office. That would include centralizing personnel functions and ensuring those who conduct internal investigations receive mandatory training on investigative and Title IX procedures.
Human resource investigators with little formal training misidentified discrimination and harassment complaints and failed to send them to the affirmative action office, for example.
Because the university lacks a centralized database to track complaints and reports of misconduct, “things fall through the cracks,” according to the report.
For example, a doctor faced repeated, undisclosed discipline for misconduct, but affirmative action officials “could not factor in all of the physician’s prior misconduct when making disciplinary recommendations” because they didn’t have documentation on earlier cases, the firm said.
Over a quarter of the complaint files from 2018 through early this year didn’t clearly identify the gender of the person reporting the complaint or the victim, the report noted. In about half of the complaint files, the firm couldn’t determine when an investigation closed.
And for complaints that had been closed, “nearly half of them did not indicate a clear investigation outcome,” the report said.
The university also doesn’t document why someone leaves the institution, investigators found.
Holder’s investigative team interviewed nearly 300 current and former OHSU staff members and students who contacted the team through the hotline.
The investigators reviewed records of past complaints provided by OHSU and interviewed leaders of employee and student groups on campus as well as members of OHSU’s executive staff, human resource staff, affirmative action and equal opportunity staff and other administrators. It also had a company conduct random online focus groups with OHSU staff and students.
The report noted that university leaders began drafting a discipline matrix for different misconduct cases that was supposed to be ready at the beginning of this year. But it hasn’t been shared throughout the institution or adopted into a code of conduct. At the start of this year, when disputes arose between an employee’s manager and human resources over an appropriate level of discipline, the president “would step in and act as a ‘tie-breaker,’ ‘‘’ the report said.
The investigation found that OHSU managers routinely disregard human resource’s disciplinary recommendations, resulting in inconsistent discipline across departments, leading to a perception of favoritism and lack of accountability.
“[T]here is a great deal of tolerance of bad behavior from high-flying [or] long-standing folks. It takes a long time for stuff to happen, if anything, to these people,” one senior leader told investigators.
“Many in the OHSU community believe that employment decisions such as hiring, promotion, and firing are made based on factors other than merit, such as connections, power, status, position, and influence in the organization,” the report said.
One executive leader told investigators that “academic health centers have too much tolerance for brilliant jerks…and tolerate egregious behavior from those most well-respected professionally.”
Some OHSU employees and students perceive “significant risks and few benefits from reporting misconduct’’ and believe the school views complaints with skepticism and doubt, the report said.
One focus group participant remarked, “I have made reports in the past that were not taken seriously and I was forced into a meeting where I was told I was imagining the problem.”
One manager told investigators that when she reported sexual harassment to the Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Office, she was asked a series of questions about her clothing, suggesting she elicited the behavior.
The investigators also found a lack of clear or cohesive priorities for diversity, equity and inclusion.
Personnel at OHSU’s Center for Diversity and Inclusion don’t have an understanding of those priorities, “leading to a failure of execution,” the report said.
Only 42% of focus group participants said they feel OHSU values diversity, saying the university’s communications on the subject haven’t changed the culture of the institution.
The report said women, Latinos and Black people are underrepresented in OHSU’s labor force compared with their representation in the overall Portland health care labor force as of 2018, the most recent data available.
Holder, who charges an hourly rate of $2,295, agreed to “discount” the rate by 10% for the university. Jacobs acknowledged the high cost of the investigation.
“It certainly is expensive, but it’s a critically important investment,” he said. The university’s board selected Holder because it wanted an independent and thorough investigation done by a firm with national experience doing similar inquiries, Jacobs said.
The firm, when selected to do the inquiry, said it would invite the woman who sued the school in the Campbell case to participate. In response to an email from Holder’s partner, the woman told the investigators to read through all the emails, reports and legal documents involving the complaints against Campbell to get a “disturbing dissertation on victim blaming 101,” according to her email obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive.
But she added in her email that she’ll wait to see if the university ever achieves true accountability.
OHSU must go beyond “allowing the upper echelon to play musical chairs with the jobs or have quite timely retirements,” she wrote to Holder’s partner Nancy Kestenbaum.
— Maxine Bernstein
Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com; 503-221-8212
Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian