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Wendy Hensel, the City University of New York provost vying to be the next president of the University of Hawaii, is not telling the public the truth about retaliation and discrimination against a Georgia State University law professor, the law professor and her attorney say.

Georgia State law professor Tanya Washington and her attorney, Julie Oinonen, sat down with Civil Beat for a lengthy interview Monday to counter statements Hensel has been making over the past week about complaints filed in 2019 against Hensel and the former interim Georgia State law school dean, Leslie Wolf.

The accusations by Washington were reported by Civil Beat last week along with a follow-up story that included a lengthy interview with Hensel. Since then Hensel has been speaking widely to the media about the stories, insisting that they were wrong.

Now, Washington says she is reluctantly speaking out to rebut repeated inaccurate public concerning the complaints against Hensel and Wolf.

Hensel’s statements that Hensel was never the subject of a complaint by Washington are simply false, Oinonen said.

“To deny or dispute that Hensel was the subject of a complaint is absolutely inaccurate,” Oinonen said. “Stop the gaslighting.”

Washington says Hensel and Wolf targeted her after a faculty meeting at which she openly questioned a proposal by Hensel, then the dean of the law school, to appoint Wolf to replace her as dean. Hensel had been named provost of Georgia State.

“Tanya spoke out against what was happening,” Oinonen said.

The result, Oinonen said, was something Black women in academia face far too often when standing up to those in power: retaliation and gaslighting.

“We see this time and time again throughout society,” she said. “The accomplishments of Black women are routinely denigrated. They are either retaliated against or gaslit.”

Washington’s complaints against Hensel are surfacing as Hensel prepares for a final job interview with the University of Hawaii Board of Regents on Wednesday. She is one of two finalists for the job; the other is Western Michigan University Provost Julian Vasquez Heilig.

Hensel has been arguing that a formal grievance filed by Washington was against Wolf, who was then interim dean of the law school, and had nothing to do with Hensel.

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

On Monday, Washington described the grievance as the continuation of a series of struggles in the face of what Oinonen previously called “a tag-team of patronizing, implicit bias hand in hand with explicit disparate treatment” committed by Hensel and Wolf.

“She wasn’t just opposing the acts of Wolf,” Oinonen told Civil Beat. “That’s a lie.”

The Faculty Meeting

Washington and Oinonen say the tensions began when Washington spoke up at a law school faculty meeting, attended by about 50 people. Hensel, who was leaving as law school dean to take the provost job, wanted to appoint Wolf to take her spot.

The problem as Washington saw it was that Hensel did not want to consider other candidates, involve the faculty or conduct a search. It also ran counter to the university’s commitment to diversity, she said.

“She was affirmatively and strongly proposing that we not conduct a search,” Washington said. She said Hensel maintained the school was “not going to find anyone better in the pool” and that it would cost $100,000 to conduct a search.

“I raised my hand and I said if we don’t do a search how is that aligned with the university’s expressed commitment to diversity,” Washington said.

She said Hensel yelled at her during the meeting — “I considered it yelling” — and argued that women had been underrepresented and overlooked as leaders of the law school.

“She was angry that I was challenging her,” Washington said.

Washington told Civil Beat that four of the previous six law school deans were women so she considered that a poor argument. None were women of color, however.

“Maybe out there in the world women are underrepresented, but not at the Georgia State College of Law,” Washington said.

Hensel disagrees with Washington’s characterization of the faculty meeting and what transpired. She said last week that she merely “proposed giving them the option to do either” — hire Wolf without a search or conduct a search. She also denied raising her voice or speaking loudly to Washington at the meeting.

The day after the meeting, Washington said, she received an email from Hensel’s office telling her she’d been turned down for a university fellowship, despite the unanimous recommendation of a fellowship review committee.  

Every other fellowship applicant that that been recommended had been awarded one, Washington said.

Hensel told Civil Beat she didn’t reject the fellowship although she conceded a letter might have been sent to Washington from her office.

Washington said she was advised by university counsel to pursue an appeal of the fellowship rejection with the university provost — Hensel. Washington sent Hensel emails seeking an explanation.

She never received an answer in writing, she said. But Hensel eventually told her the reason.

“The oral justification she gave me was, ‘You’re not a scholar,’ which was so insulting to me because of what I’d been doing for 18 years,” Washington said. “It felt very retaliatory to me.”

Washington said she didn’t file a formal complaint against Hensel because that was not allowed in the case of someone being denied a fellowship.

The Job Review

The next blow, Washington says, came in the form of a job review, known as a faculty post-tenure review written by Wolf.

Washington had announced she also would be applying for the permanent law school dean position, putting her in competition with Wolf.

Despite a stellar review from a faculty review committee, Washington says Wolf’s review was underwhelming. It left out mention of a campus-wide award and categorized amicus briefs submitted in U.S. and Georgia Supreme Court cases as “service” rather than “scholarship.” Yet one of Washington’s briefs had been cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark supporting same-sex marriage.

During a hearing on the review, Oinonen used metadata from the document that suggested it was Hensel who created the document, even though Hensel now says she had nothing to do with it. She has said it may have been a template that she’d created years earlier, but the metadata suggested it had been drafted just three weeks before the review was given to Washington, Washington said Monday.

Washington filed a grievance against Wolf that was upheld by a college of law panel, which found Wolf’s decisions to leave out campus-wide review and classify the amicus briefs as service were arbitrary and hurt Washington’s professional reputation.

On appeal, the new provost who had replaced Hensel, Nicolle Parsons-Pollard, determined Wolf had not acted arbitrarily when she excluded the award and amicus briefs from the job review and that Washington hadn’t been harmed by the bad review. 

But Parsons-Pollard said, “Dr. Washington provided a compelling argument that the work she presented constituted substantial scholarly work product as provided by the College of Law Workload Policy Guidelines.”

A new law school dean replaced Wolf and gave Washington a new post-tenure review that included the credit she said she deserved for the amicus briefs and awards.

“They started on this media spree that present inaccuracies about her tenure. The public statements that Hensel and Wolf have made have forced her hand to respond.”

Julie Oinonen, attorney for law professor Tanya Washington

Washington said she didn’t pursue the matter further because she ultimately got she wanted: credit for her work, which she said has been key to advancing her academic career. She recently landed a $2 million grant to study the legal rights of children, along with colleagues from another university, she said.

“Tanya moved past this,” Oinonen said Monday. “She won her grievance hearing, she hasn’t thought about this for years. … Then they started on this media spree that present inaccuracies about her tenure. The public statements that Hensel and Wolf have made have forced her hand to respond.”

Washington said she is focused on teaching and scholarship these days. But she was disturbed to read in Civil Beat that Hensel called the situation with Washington “a non-event.”

“Of all the things reported, calling this ‘a non-event’ … speaks to the seriousness — or lack thereof — with which an administrator would regard this kind of unfair treatment targeting a retaliatory event.”

“That’s why we have DEI initiatives and priorities,” Washington said. “When you’re calling it ‘a non-event’ you’re negating the significance.”