Faculty senators at a meeting Friday said they felt “deceived” by the lack of information given to them during the Board of Trustees’ decision-making process to arm the GW Police Department in 2023.

University President Ellen Granberg briefed the Faculty Senate on the findings from a third-party investigation of the GW Police Department’s arming rollout that she released last week and said officials need to ensure better engagement and communication with the campus community on issues of “importance.” Faculty senators said not having “all the facts” on the trustees’ decision process to arm GWPD brewed confusion around who proposed the idea to the trustees and who to speak to about the idea to arm, and that officials should consult the University community going forward when making decisions that impact everyone. 

Granberg said officials are reviewing recommendations from the report for potential implementation, like engaging the University community in decision-making processes.

“The key findings were that there were serious issues in the early implementation of the decision to arm GWPD,” Granberg said. “Since those issues were identified and resolved, GWPD has been in compliance with all requirements regarding firearms and the Office of Ethics, Compliance and Risk independently tracks and verifies that compliance.”

Granberg reiterated plans for the department outlined in her email announcing the investigation’s results last week, saying that officials integrated GWPD into a larger campus safety unit with offices like Emergency Management and GWorld. She said the University is also preparing to launch a national search for the next GWPD chief and a permanent associate vice president for campus safety.

Officials on Wednesday named Assistant Vice President of University Resilience Katie McDonald the interim associate vice president for campus safety, after creating the position per the report’s recommendations.

Philip Wirtz, a faculty senator and professor of decision sciences and psychological and brain sciences, said the administration should restart the process of arming GWPD because it initially didn’t do an “adequate” job working with the University community.

Former GWPD Chief James Tate resigned from his role in October 2024 following former officers’ reports of gun safety violations and inadequate training the month before. Just before his departure, officials placed Tate on leave and commissioned an investigation into the department.

Officials’ failure to “meaningfully and adequately” engage the GW community before and after trustees’ decision to arm GWPD as a “common and consistent theme” of the investigation’s findings, Granberg said in her announcement last week.

“I’m wondering at this point where we ended up at the end because it was a kind of a flawed process, and I appreciate your candor on that, leads us to the conclusion that we really ought to just restart the process, do it right,” Wirtz said.

Granberg said revisiting the decision to arm GWPD is not something she “foresees.”

“I’m not surprised that there are people in the community who feel that that would be the right thing to do in this situation,” Granberg said. “The Board’s not inclined to revisit this decision.”

Heather Bamford, a faculty senator and a professor of Spanish literature, asked Granberg if the University plans on arming additional GWPD officers.

Granberg said the University is not considering arming additional officers.

Ilana Feldman, the Faculty Senate Executive Committee chair and a professor of anthropology, said officials did not tell the Faculty Senate how the decision to arm GWPD was made in April 2023 and did not explain how the decision was brought to trustees.

The GWPD investigation report states that officials chose not to seek community feedback before the trustees directed GWPD to arm about 20 officers in April 2023 because they expected opposition to the controversial decision.

The report also states that there was a proposed timeline for engagement with the GW community when Tate raised the possibility of arming GWPD officers with trustees in September 2021 but that “very few steps toward such engagement were taken.” The report continues that officials ultimately “decided not to” engage the community before announcing the arming plan in April 2023 because they believed members would disagree with the decision.

“Not only was there not the consultation that people would have liked, not only was a decision different than many people might have wanted but actually we were not told in honesty about how the decision process was being made,” Feldman said. “And that, I think, is not great.”

Faculty senators shared concerns in October 2023 about officials’ lack of community consultation on the arming decision, alleging trustees violated shared governance principles, which senators approved in April 2022 to outline expectations for communication and collaboration between officials, trustees and faculty on University issues.

Jim Tielsch, a faculty senator and a professor of global health, said the senate was “deceived” by the initiation to arm GWPD and that the University needs to consider evidence on both sides of a policy before deciding on it.

The investigation report states that trustees voted to arm officers in February 2023, two months before announcing the decision to the community, after a mass shooting on Michigan State University’s campus where armed campus police were “widely credited with saving lives.”

Increasing the presence of firearms in any environment results in a higher likelihood of fatal violence, according to the American Public Health Association. Armed guards in school settings are not associated with a decrease in injury or death during mass shootings, according to research reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Trustees’ decision to arm the force was met with protests, a faculty dissent letter, criticism of the lack of community consultation and demands to see the data that backed the decision.

“We spend a lot of time teaching our students to use an evidence-based strategy and completely lacking in this decision-making process was any kind of consideration of evidence,” Tielsch said.

Granberg also said she is launching a weekly update for the University community about federal policy changes, which will be sent out in an email. She said members of the GW community can send in questions by replying to the email, which she said will give officials a sense of what the University community is interested in concerning federal policy.

“This will provide a regularly scheduled, easily accessible mechanism for faculty, staff and students to track what is changing and how it does or does not affect our University,” Ganberg said.

The Faculty Senate also passed a resolution to reduce barriers for transfer students. Eric Grynaviski, a member of the Subcommittee on Future Enrollment Planning and an associate professor of political science and international affairs introduced the resolution on behalf of the Educational Policy and Technology Committee.

The resolution recommends that Granberg and Bracey form a University-level working group to enhance the transfer student experience by providing students with tools to identify transfer course credit equivalencies.

Grynaviski said the first barrier transfer students face when trying to enroll at the University is around course credit equivalencies and how a course can fulfill GW-specific requirements. He said the Office of Undergraduate Admissions and the Office of the Registrar are developing an equivalency table that will provide transfer students with information on what specific courses from other institutions are equivalent to GW classes.

“In many cases, those equivalencies are not already established, and so students have to go through a petition process once they arrive. And that petition process sometimes is very clear, and sometimes it’s very cumbersome,” Grynaviski said.

Grynaviski said the purpose of the working group the EPT Committee is proposing would be to develop a “one size fits all” process for students that would allow them to easily figure out what credits will count at GW and how long they can expect to remain at the University before they can graduate.

The resolution passed with unanimous consent from the body.

Fiona Riley, Hannah Marr, Jenna Lee and contributed reporting.