Faculty leaders said they appreciate officials’ transparency in sharing the findings of the third-party investigation into the GW Police Department’s arming rollout but said acknowledging flaws within the process doesn’t assuage their concerns about the future of arming.
University President Ellen Granberg earlier this month released findings of a law firm’s investigation into GWPD, which confirmed reports of departmental gun safety violations and concluded that officials chose not to seek community input before trustees’ contentious April 2023 decision to arm GWPD officers because they anticipated opposition. Faculty leaders said they appreciated that Granberg took accountability for GWPD and the lack of consultation on the decision but some said officials should now solicit feedback on and reconsider arming officers in light of safety concerns.
“I appreciate that President Granberg came out and issued an apology. I think that’s a good first step, and she’s expressed interest in consulting better in the future,” Eli McCarthy, a peace studies lecturer and a member of the Campus Safety Advisory Committee, said. “But I don’t think that’s sufficient for the egregiousness of the situation where you have intentional deception and exclusion and disregard for the data.”
GW retained Willkie Farr & Gallagher in October to investigate GWPD’s arming implementation, training protocols and “several new questions” raised after a September Hatchet investigation found undisclosed firearm safety violations and internal tumult, which appeared to spark former Chief James Tate’s resignation in October. The firm’s report confirmed the gun safety violations and echoed former officers’ reports of high turnover due to a poor workplace culture.
Granberg said in an email to community members announcing the findings earlier this month that the law firm conducted the investigation under privilege and that certain findings, like those related to personnel matters, would remain confidential. She said only “select senior administrators” have seen the whole report.
Three days after she released the report, Granberg said at a Faculty Senate meeting that the Board is “not inclined” to revisit its decision to arm police.
Officials are considering implementing recommendations for GWPD issued by the law firm, including moving campus security services under GWPD and adding a mental health response team, rapid response unit and dedicated training officer, Granberg said.
McCarthy said the findings of the investigation highlight repeated “breach[es] of honesty” among officials, pointing to how former interim University President Mark Wrighton supported arming and brought it to the Board, according to the report, despite telling him and other faculty in spring 2023 that arming was solely trustees’ decision.
He said officials also weren’t honest when they said they reviewed all relevant data, as the report revealed officials didn’t consult subject-matter experts in the Milken Institute School of Public Health. Community members repeatedly called on officials to publicize the data used to inform the arming decision, including in a Faculty Senate resolution in October 2023 and in a letter signed by more than 450 Milken community members.
McCarthy said the report emphasizes an ongoing toxic workplace environment at GWPD, evidenced by the top six officers leaving the department in less than a year, which he said signifies that officials should reverse the arming decision and develop a collective strategy for campus safety.
“The degree of dishonesty, power abuse and corruption has just reached new heights, and the decision in the process of arming should, I believe, be stopped and ideally reversed,” McCarthy said.
University spokesperson Shannon McClendon said “selected senior administrators” charged with responding to the report’s findings have started to adopt recommendations for structural changes, including by bringing GWPD and other “mission-aligned” departments under the supervision of a new associate vice president of campus safety.
She said GWPD “continues” to engage with the community members and the Campus Safety Advisory Committee, which is also working to develop an engagement strategy and improve community safety overall.
The committee didn’t meet until July 2024, almost 11 months after GWPD commenced its first arming phase in late August 2023. Committee members said in October that the group doesn’t play a role in the department’s oversight or operations, instead broadly advising officials on GW’s safety initiatives.
McClendon declined to comment on which officials failed to collect community feedback as the report concluded, if the University has looked into why they didn’t and if officials think soliciting feedback from the community before making the decision would’ve changed the decision or implementation process.
She also declined to comment on the reasoning behind officials’ pledge to not reevaluate the arming decision.
“We are committed to increased engagement with key university stakeholders and the broader community to produce better input and better decision making,” McClendon said in an email.
Guillermo Orti, the chair of the biology department and a faculty senator who has repeatedly voiced concerns about GWPD arming at senate meetings, said he is “satisfied” overall with the report’s transparency.
He said it was “kind of a miracle” that Granberg candidly admitted that officials made a mistake by not openly discussing GWPD’s arming plans with community members ahead of the decision.
He said there’s been a pattern of officials making “top-down” decisions without consulting the broader GW community, punctuated by former University President Thomas LeBlanc’s decision to implement a plan to cut undergraduate enrollment by 20 percent over five years and boost the number of students in STEM departments.
The report found issues with how officials and trustees made the decision to arm GWPD and with the safety of the rollout, so the University should reevaluate whether campus police should continue carrying firearms, Orti said.
He said he and other faculty members urge officials to reopen the debate about arming, even though Granberg said trustees aren’t inclined to reverse course.
“We already know that most people think this was a wrong decision,” Orti said. “And then when they go ahead and implement it, they make all these mistakes along the way. So why am I going to be convinced that this is what we need, or this is the right thing to do?”
Orti said he wishes the report clarified which people were responsible for the decision not to consult community members, as Granberg’s apology “exonerates” the Board by saying trustees deserved better.
Because the Board made the decision and trustees told faculty senators that they had consulted experts to drive the decision, there appears to be a contradiction as the report doesn’t fault them for not consulting community members, Orti said — an observation that he called “unsettling.”
Wrighton said in April 2023 that the University was working with 21CP Solutions, Inc. — a law enforcement consulting group consisting of police chiefs, lawyers and academics — “to help guide its planning” to arm officers.
Orti said going forward, officials should adhere to the shared governance principles — which faculty senators approved in April 2022 to outline expectations for communication and collaboration between officials, trustees and faculty on University issues. He said before trustees decided to arm the force, officials should have mirrored American University’s strategy of collecting community feedback to inform the decision, which ultimately guided American’s administration against arming campus police.
“They could have called for town halls or made the faculty debate this at the senate, form a special committee that collects information, make surveys,” Orti said. “There’s tons of different ways of doing this.”
Dwayne Kwaysee Wright, a member of the Campus Safety Advisory Committee and professor of higher education administration, said the report’s findings included issues that he and several faculty members had warned Wrighton’s administration about at the time of the arming announcement.
“My initial reaction was intense disappointment,” Wright said. “Many of the issues that the findings brought to fruition were issues that several faculty members, including myself, some that are no longer here and some that are still here, tried to warn the administration.”
Wright said Granberg’s presentation of the report was “refreshing,” and while he hasn’t seen the full version, what was released was “very transparent” and a shift from the “modus operandi” of past University presidents.
GW needs a more proactive form of engagement, Wright said, suggesting there could be University-hosted town halls to solicit community feedback and in general more input on decisions that will affect everybody.
“If they are dedicated to keeping us in mind when they’re contemplating things prior to the decision, not after the decision, I think we can go more on the right path,” Wright said.
Jamie Cohen-Cole, an associate professor of American studies and former faculty senator, said he was disappointed to learn that the process of deciding to arm campus police seems to have replicated “major concerns” found in a 2021 faculty-wide survey on LeBlanc’s leadership.
The survey found that a majority of respondents believed LeBlanc’s leadership lacked transparency and trust and did not involve consultation with faculty and staff during major decision-making.
“A university is supposed to [be] a place that upholds a search for truth, fosters fulsome debate, and promotes evaluation of evidence,” Cohen-Cole said in an email. “The University administration and Board of Trustees should hold themselves to these standards, not blind themselves to evidence which does not fit pre-conceived ideas, and be open to reevaluating decisions that were made using processes that failed to reach those standards.”
Scott White, a member of the Faculty Senate Physical Facilities and Campus Safety Committee and director of the Cybersecurity Program, said the report responded to community concerns, providing accountability and oversight over GWPD.
There is still an issue with the transparency surrounding the motivations behind gun safety concerns among GWPD officers, based on conversations he’s had with faculty and students, White said. People have questions about Tate’s “motivation” to initially bring unregistered firearms onto campus and the period of time between when safety violations happened and when they became public knowledge from The Hatchet’s reporting, White said.
“What was his intent, his motivation and ultimately, then, why he chose that particular course?” White said. “And the the third element to me would be, why was that course of action not more readily identified? Why was there a lag time between the course of action they chose and before it became public knowledge?”
White said he disagreed with the report’s finding that the decision lacked community engagement, as officials were acting in the community’s “best interests.” Trustees decided to arm the force due to heightened nationwide gun violence, particularly in schools, and their decision was met with protests, dissenting letters and criticism of the lack of community consultation.
“The University was sympathetic to the concerns and engaging in their due diligence,” White said. “They accepted the report, and they saw the value in the recommendations.”
Drew Dodd, a senior studying international affairs, said he met with Tate before officials announced to the community that they’d decided to arm officers, but after officials made the decision, because he served as the Black Student Union’s executive vice president at the time. Tate said in April 2023 that he discussed arming with the BSU, Student Government Association and Fraternity and Sorority Life leaders ahead of the announcement.
Dodd said he wished Tate had consulted him before officials decided they would arm officers, but he tried to put his own views aside during the conversation because Tate was honest with him and shared the concerns that Dodd and other members of the Black community at GW had about guns on campus.
Dodd said he doesn’t believe that officials would have changed their decision if they heard from community members before it was final because they armed officers for security purposes.
“I can for sure say that they were definitely concerned about what the fallout was going to be, which is why they met with people,” Dodd said. “I mean, that’s why they didn’t have us a part of this decision because they understood where it could go.”
