At the time of the Gaza protests on New York City campuses earlier this year, the incoming president of the University of Hawaii was facing accusations of discrimination by a Jewish faculty member — concerns that followed similar allegations by a Black law professor in Georgia.

It remains unclear whether the UH Board of Regents knew about either complaint when it chose City University of New York Provost Wendy Hensel as a finalist to lead its 10-campus system.

The allegations at CUNY and Georgia State University raise questions about the vetting the UH regents conducted before they hired Hensel for a job paying $675,000 a year, plus a $7,000 monthly housing allowance. UH continues to downplay the two incidents while declining to say whether the executive search firm WittKieffer, paid nearly $148,000 for the search so far, knew about them or brought them to the regents.

But documents and interviews show that Hensel was clearly the subject of serious accusations at both universities. And WittKieffer’s contract with UH specifically required the firm to screen candidates for all “prior allegations of harassment or discrimination.” The contract does not define what constitutes an allegation.

UH won’t say what WittKieffer’s vetting produced, but one thing is clear: the two accusers, City University of New York business professor Jeffrey Lax and Georgia State law professor Tanya Washington, say they were never contacted by WittKieffer — or anyone else — until Civil Beat reached out.

“No,” Lax said in an email, “they did not contact me.”

“No,” Washington said. “I was never contacted by WittKieffer or anyone else regarding Wendy’s candidacy for the presidency of the University of Hawaii.”

Board of Regents Chair Gabe Lee staunchly defends the search firm’s work.

“WittKieffer conducted thorough and comprehensive due diligence aligned with national best practices on all finalist candidates for the UH president search,” Lee said in a written statement. “Regarding issues of harassment and discrimination, WittKieffer asked all finalist candidates about harassment and discrimination claims. They also asked all references these same questions.”

Reached by email, the WittKieffer executive who led the search, Zachary Smith, declined to be interviewed for this story. The UH contract with WittKieffer requires it to take “extensive measures to mitigate risks inherent in any search process.” That included “sophisticated” reference checks.

Judith Wilde, who studies academic executive searches at George Mason University, said failing to contact the people who had complained about Hensel does not follow best practices. But she said it’s not uncommon.

Search firms often limit their due diligence in the early phases of searches because there are too many applicants to vet thoroughly, she said. Then, once a pool of candidates has been winnowed to one or two candidates, the firm may avoid unearthing last-minute surprises that could doom a search.

“By the time it gets to that, the search firms aren’t going to find anything out,” she said. “They don’t want to hear it.”

University boards, Wilde added, rarely step in.

CUNY Complaint Preceded N.Y. Governor’s Report

Wendy Fritzen Hensel is a Harvard-educated lawyer, who served as provost and executive vice chancellor of CUNY, one of the nation’s largest university systems. Before that, Hensel rose from law professor to provost at Georgia State University, a large research university in Atlanta.

As a finalist for the UH president job, Hensel had more high-level administrative experience than her competition, Julian Vasquez Heilig. A Stanford-trained education scholar, Vasquez Heilig’s top post came in 2023, when he was named provost of Western Michigan University, a smaller research university.

As part of the interview process, both candidates visited Oahu, Maui, Kauai and Hawaii island for forums where members of the public submitted written questions.

On Sept. 23, the day Hensel visited Maui, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul released a scathing report about antisemitism at CUNY.

The inquiry by Jonathan Lippman, former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, found significant antisemitism on the campuses and said the university’s policies failed to adequately address “the levels of antisemitism and discrimination that exist on CUNY’s campuses today.”

CUNY was hardly the only New York university embroiled in controversy. Israel’s military operations in Gaza had sparked large-scale protests at campuses across the city, and administrators had struggled to protect students while allowing free expression. Protests at Columbia University had led President Minouche Shafik to take the dramatic step of calling in the New York Police Department to remove protesters who had set up a camp in Hamilton Hall, a university academic building.

By August, Shafik had stepped down, citing “a period of turmoil where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.”

Protests against Israel were at the center of Lippman’s report, but the retired judge determined that CUNY protesters went beyond criticizing Israel by cruelly taunting Jewish students with antisemitic tropes and threatening them with violence.

The report did not name Hensel or any other administrator. But Lax, a business school professor at CUNY’s Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, had foreshadowed Lippman’s findings in op-ed pieces and public statements criticizing CUNY administrators.

Lax had filed a grievance against Hensel alleging discrimination on July 14, 2023. He claimed she had blocked his efforts to bring a complaint against her boss, Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez.

In an interview and opinion pieces published in the New York Post, including one published the day after Lippman’s report was released, Lax accused CUNY leaders of allowing antisemitism that created a hostile environment for Jewish students and of expunging Jews from CUNY’s senior leadership positions.

Hensel had blocked him, he told Civil Beat, by “making up all kinds of ridiculous stories,” and “sending me to ludicrous places.”

His grievance, filed with the City University of New York Central Office, accused several CUNY administrators, including Hensel, of “Retaliatory, discriminatory, and improper refusal to accept for filing a well-documented, good faith complaint of discrimination, retaliation, harassment, and hostile work environment based on religion and ethnicity.”

That matter is now in arbitration with the American Arbitration Association, Lax said. An association spokesman did not respond to a request for comment and the association’s website said it doesn’t discuss pending cases.

Hensel did not respond to requests for an interview sent to her CUNY email addresses. A CUNY spokesman said the university “does not comment on confidential personnel matters.”

In a statement emailed by the UH communications department in response to Civil Beat’s questions, Lee acknowledged the Lax situation without naming him. Lee said that “an individual filed a complaint of discrimination to the office of Provost Hensel about perceived antisemitic behavior at one of the 25 CUNY campuses.”

“He was informed that the Provost’s office did not have jurisdiction over the complaint and was referred to the appropriate office,” the statement continued. “This is the extent of personal interaction with this individual.”

Georgia State Complaints Started Over Search For New Dean

The dispute involving Tanya Washington stretched on for two years and is documented in more than 1,600 pages of related documents that Civil Beat unearthed through public records requests.

Washington says her issues with Hensel began in March 2020 at a faculty meeting where she spoke out against a proposal by Hensel to appoint interim law school dean Leslie Wolf as permanent dean without a search. Hensel and Wolf were friends.

Hensel has said she never proposed making Wolf permanent dean without a search. She later launched a national search for which, documents show, the university paid WittKieffer — the firm that would later recruit Hensel to UH — up to $100,000. Washington and Wolf both applied for the job.

The search ended in the hiring of LaVonda Reed as Georgia State’s first Black law school dean, a development that Hensel has said should lay to rest any suggestions that she is racist.

But Washington says that after she pushed for the national search, Hensel and Wolf engaged in a pattern of discrimination and retaliation. In a Sept. 10, 2021, letter to Georgia State University Attorney Kerry Heyward, Washington said that Hensel overruled the unanimous recommendation of a fellowship review committee and turned her down for a provost’s fellowship – later telling Washington that she was “not a scholar.”

Meanwhile, documents show Wolf overruled the findings of a post-tenure job review panel when refusing to define as scholarship law papers produced by Washington.

Documents show that Washington was not allowed to formally object to being rejected for the provost’s fellowship. Instead, Washington filed a grievance against Wolf, in a memo to Wolf as required by Georgia State University bylaws.

“This complaint formally requests that your report, which is incomplete, inaccurate, and mischaracterizes and denigrates my scholarly contributions, be amended before it is submitted to the Provost,” Washington wrote.

Hensel has denied being named in a formal complaint or being the subject of an investigation.

“I was completely uninvolved in that entire case that you’re talking about,” Hensel told Civil Beat in October.

“The critical facts are simple: I have never been the subject of a discrimination or retaliation investigation, and no one has ever filed a complaint of discrimination or retaliation against me,” Hensel wrote in an opinion piece published in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Oct. 14.

Yet Hensel was at the center of Washington’s allegations: a role documented in emails, text messages and other communications, as well as video footage from Washington’s grievance hearing.

Although Hensel was not named in Washington’s grievance, her relationship with Wolf surfaced during the grievance hearing, as Washington’s lawyer sought to show Wolf was personally biased against her client. 

During the hearing, attorney Julie Oinonen produced metadata from the job review showing that Hensel appeared to be its original author. The data indicated that Hensel had created the document on Feb. 9, 2021, just three days before Wolf modified it and a few weeks before Wolf eventually emailed it to Washington under her name.

Hensel has denied drafting the job review but said she might have created the document as a template years before.

Hensel On Washington: ‘She Looks Like An Ass’

By March 2021, Georgia State had decided to hire an outside candidate for the dean’s post. Washington found out and shared that news at meetings. Text messages that day between Hensel and Wolf show the two of them were not pleased.

“Tanya just announced in the Student Affairs committee there will be an external dean,” Wolf wrote in one message at 10:41 a.m.

“Grossly inappropriate,” Hensel wrote back.

“I know,” Wolf wrote.

“She apparently has no low beyond which she will fall,” Hensel replied.

That afternoon, Wolf texted Hensel again to say Washington had shared the news with more colleagues at a faculty meeting.

“She looks like an ass,” Hensel responded.

Five months later, Oinonen, an Atlanta employment lawyer, sent a letter to Hensel indicating Washington was considering “potential legal claims” in state or federal court. Oinonen made clear those claims concerned “specific acts committed by Professor Leslie Wolf and Provost Wendy Hensel in their individual and professional capacities.”

Washington emailed Heyward, the Georgia State University attorney, soon after, further clarifying that her issues were not with the university.

“My grievance is focused on the actions of former Interim Dean Leslie Wolf and Provost Wendy Hensel, two white women, who continue (including the last 48 hours) to denigrate my professional reputation with a barrage of patronizing disparate treatment in violation of University and College of Law policies,” Washington wrote.

When Heyward sent Washington a letter in late October, telling her to preserve records in the event of litigation, she also indicated Hensel was at the center of the dispute, using the subject heading “Tanya Washington v. Provost Wendy Hensel and Professor Leslie Wolf in their Individual and Professional Capacities.”

Despite all of this, the UH regents firmly maintain no accusations were made against Hensel. Senior leaders at Georgia State, Lee said, confirmed that Hensel “was never accused of harassment or discrimination during her employment at the institution.”

In a written response to Civil Beat on Nov. 13, Lee also appears to narrow what the regents would consider relevant allegations — a definition narrow enough that Washington’s accusations would not qualify.

“The fact remains that there have been no formal allegations, complaints or lawsuits regarding discrimination or harassment brought against Ms. Hensel at Georgia State (with over 5,000 employees),” Lee wrote. “Furthermore, there is no filed or adjudicated complaint of discrimination or harassment against Ms. Hensel personally at Georgia State.”

Read Civil Beat’s questions to the Board of Regents and Chair Gabe Lee’s answers: