A report finds CSUMB’s office in charge of investigating sexual harassment to be ‘broken and nonfunctional.’

For two years, CSU Monterey Bay’s office of Title IX/Discrimination, Retaliation and Harassment conducted no formal investigations or hearings. Students reported never receiving acknowledgment of the complaints they filed. Some waited months or as much as a year to hear how a complaint was resolved. Student distrust, combined with interpersonal “oil and water” conflicts between administrators, led to a dysfunctional office that ceased to fulfill its original purpose to help students, faculty and staff feel safe and welcome.

Those are just a few of the issues uncovered by the Cozen O’Connor Institutional Response Group, consultants hired by California State University to assess all 23 of its campuses, including CSUMB, in the wake of sexual harassment scandals at other campuses that revealed serious gaps in the CSU’s handling of such issues. CSUMB is not alone in the problems the consultants uncovered, but they did find problems unique to the campus. They reported CSUMB President Vanya Quiñones is taking steps to address the problems less than a year into her position, after replacing retired president Eduardo Ochoa.

“Quiñones inherited [a Title IX/DHR office] that was, in many ways, broken and nonfunctional and has prioritized institutional efforts to address these deficiencies,” the Cozen O’Connor report states. It said the current office is in a “state of flux” and is improving under the interim leadership of Title IX/DHR Senior Administrator Raquel Bonilla.

The office was overseen by senior administrator Wendy Smith, who, on Feb. 24, Quiñones announced was “no longer with the university,” just one week after consultants completed interviews with numerous students, faculty and staff. Without referring to her by name, consultants noted that in the last couple of years of her tenure, which began in 2014, Smith was often on personal leave or working part time. The office was already under-resourced and understaffed, they said, describing it as essentially an “office of one.”

In a letter to the campus community, Quiñones said she agreed that the consultants’ findings were “serious in nature.” She listed a number of actions taken since the consultants’ visit, including restructuring the Title IX office and hiring an ombudsperson, who will start in September. The ombudsperson was described as an additional resource to help with conflict resolution and managing what is referred to as “conduct of concern,” which doesn’t rise to the level of violating regulations. Consultants said CSUMB and other campuses were lacking in ways to handle such conduct. In addition, Bonilla has recently embarked on a listening tour with the campus community through Zoom meetings.

The report echoed the experience of a group of students who alleged a Liberal Studies professor, Miguel Lopez, was violating harassment and discrimination regulations. They conducted an academic study of their peers’ experiences with Lopez and presented their findings to Smith and another administrator in October 2022. They went public with their research out of frustration not long before Smith left. The students say they’ve been told there is an investigation underway. A CSUMB spokesperson says they cannot talk about personnel issues, but confirms Lopez is not scheduled to teach this fall.