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A finalist for the top job at the University of Hawaii on Wednesday says she is being wrongly accused of engaging in bias against a Black law professor while provost of Georgia State University.

Wendy Hensel, now provost of the City University of New York and one of two finalists to be president of the University of Hawaii, sat down with Civil Beat on Wednesday to talk about a story reporting that she had retaliated against the professor, Tanya Washington, who had questioned how Hensel handled finding a new interim law school dean.

Hensel had declined to be interviewed before the story was published but contended Wednesday that the story was misleading because Washington’s formal complaint was made against Leslie Wolf, then the interim Georgia State law school dean selected by Hensel, not against Hensel herself.

“No complaint has ever been filed against me for discrimination,” Hensel said during the 45-minute interview in which she defended her record in the face of allegations made by Washington in documents obtained by Civil Beat.

In a formal complaint against Wolf as well as concerns raised in other documents, Washington alleged that Wolf and Hensel mistreated Washington after she raised questions about Hensel’s appointment of Wolf to the interim dean position. Washington’s concerns included that Hensel had loudly addressed her during a faculty meeting and that soon after the meeting Washington received notice from Hensel rejecting her for a fellowship that a selection committee had unanimously recommended she receive. She also alleged that Wolf later gave her a negative job review.

Washington declined to comment for this article as well as the previous piece.

But Hensel said in the interview with Civil Beat that she had not raised her voice when responding to Washington’s questions about Wolf at a faculty meeting. She also said she did not inform Washington that she would not be receiving the fellowship that day after the faculty meeting.

In addition, Hensel said she never recommended that Wolf be appointed permanent dean of the law school without an open search, as Washington’s lawyer, Julie Oinonen, had asserted in an August 2021 “Open Records Demand and Preservation Notice” sent to Wolf, Hensel and Georgia State Counsel Kerry Heyward. 

Oinonen linked the provost and interim dean in her letter, saying Washington’s “civil rights claims concern specific acts committed by Professor Leslie Wolf and Provost Wendy Hensel in their individual and professional capacities,” the letter said.

It alleged Wolf and Hensel had “subjected Professor Washington to a tag-team of patronizing, implicit bias hand in hand with explicit disparate treatment.” 

“They sought to undermine her professionally and then engaged in gaslighting when called out on their conduct,” the letter added.

Eventually, Washington challenged the negative job review conducted by Wolf. Washington objected to the fact that Wolf had not cited five  briefs to the U.S. and Georgia supreme courts that Washington had co-authored, including one that the court cited in its landmark  supporting same-sex marriage.

A law school hearing panel found that Wolf’s report had improperly failed to credit Washington’s amicus briefs as scholarship and had also arbitrarily failed to mention a university-wide award Washington had won. On appeal, Nicolle Parsons-Pollard, who was Georgia State’s Interim Provost, determined Wolf had not acted arbitrarily when excluding the award and amicus briefs from the job review and that Washington hadn’t been harmed by the bad review. 

However, Parsons-Pollard said her decision “should not be construed as a conclusion about amicus briefs” and that “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.”

While Washington’s grievance was against Wolf, not Hensel, Washington’s lawyer tied Hensel to the job review during the law school grievance hearing. Oinonen said document metadata showed Hensel had created the document containing the report a few weeks before the report was completed.

On Wednesday, Hensel stressed that Washington’s grievance was filed against Wolf, not Hensel. 

“I was completely uninvolved in that entire case that you’re talking about,” Hensel said. 

Hensel said she was never called as a witness. And she said it was “completely false” that she had created the document used by Wolf for Washington’s job review, although she said it was possible that a template “came from me years before” when she was the law school dean.

Hensel acknowledged she and Wolf were friends, and in fact had traveled together to Hawaii, where Hensel owns a vacation home on the Big Island. But Hensel said the trip was a “group trip,” and that she has a number of friends at the law school where she served as dean.

In addition to reviewing a number of documents related to Washington’s concerns about Hensel and Wolf, Civil Beat interviewed several current and former Georgia State faculty, who spoke on the condition of anonymity saying they feared backlash from academic peers. The documents outlining Washington’s dispute had been widely circulated on campus, they said.

For her part, Hensel stressed that Washington’s complaint had nothing to do with Hensel and that such disputes are commonplace at universities. 

“It was a non-event,” she said.