For the Deans’ Designees, Reese recommended that additional training and skills — such as basic counseling techniques and knowledge of specific University policies — be implemented. Reese wrote that the wide variety of positions held by Deans’ Designees means they have different levels of training and noted in his report that designees and their colleagues agreed that differences existed in how each approached the role.

Conklin, who joined Yale in September 2020, provided a statement to the News on behalf of herself, the OIEA and Stanley and nine Deans’ Designees — including Deputy Dean and Chief Diversity Officer Darin Latimore. Conklin wrote to the News that Deans’ Designees can take advantage of professional development workshops, “based in part on the Reese report and on requests from the Deans’ Designees themselves.” She added the workshops cover informal and formal options for resolving student complaints, communicating on community issues and a wide range of other areas.

“Deans’ Designees can provide individualized support to students in the context of their own schools,” Conklin wrote. “Many Deans’ Designees are deans of student affairs or in other highly visible roles involved in student support, and they work to be accessible and well-known within their schools so that students know where to turn and how to reach them.”

Two first-year students, Joaquin Soto ’24 and Jade Villegas ’24, expressed unfamiliarity with the existence of Deans’ Designees and their role.

That role, Conklin said, includes “[mediating] difficult conversations” between students and those whose behavior has affected them, having conversations on a student’s behalf and occasionally making academic and other arrangements, including switching class or discussion sections. Deans’ Designees also work with other administrators, including the dean of students’ respective schools, heads of residential colleges and cultural center directors, to address issues related to discrimination and harassment.

“Overall, we want students to turn to staff with whom they feel comfortable to initially sort through their concerns,” Burgwell Howard — associate vice president of student life and one of two Deans’ Designees for undergraduates — wrote in an email to the News.

Howard and Melanie Boyd — Yale College Dean of Student Affairs and the other Deans’ Designee for undergraduates — process about a dozen “more complex” cases each year, according to Howard. He added that the Deans’ Designees across schools meet monthly to “talk through scenarios,” such as how they might have addressed incidents at another institution.

Informal resolutions at Yale vary from case to case, Howard said. For “classroom-related concerns,” the Deans’ Designees may connect the undergraduate student with a departmental director of undergraduate studies or faculty chair, or “simply the classroom professor where the incident occurred,” Howard wrote.

For incidents involving someone outside the Yale community, like a visitor or Yale applicant, Howard said the Deans’ Designees will occasionally “follow up” with the home institution or the admissions office, so that they are aware that an incident has occurred. In a phone interview with the News, Howard added that Conklin was attempting to set up an online reporting process for people such as prospective and recently admitted students, who may not know who to turn to when an incident has occurred. According to Howard, similar systems had proven successful at universities such as Dartmouth, where he worked from 1988 to 1994.

On the cases he has seen, Howard wrote that he is sure “not everyone is always satisfied with outcomes” from contacting the Deans’ Designees, in part due to definitions of discrimination and harassment and University policies.

The University defines harassment as the subjection of a student to “objectively offensive, unwelcome conduct” based on any protected characteristic, when that conduct is “severe, persistent or pervasive.” Yale’s definition of “protected characteristics” includes those covered by Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as well as sex, religion, age, disability, veteran status, gender identity and sexual orientation.

But the University’s definition of harassment does not include all forms of offensive speech. University policies state that all students are “generally free to express their views,” and so are visiting speakers, even if the view is “unpopular or controversial.”

“Some students would like to see the other student ‘punished’ for their offensive behavior, but our system is not set up to prevent people from being offended or even to manage people’s speech,” Howard wrote in the email. “However, if we are able to facilitate a conversation where these concerns could be heard by the offending party, that is a significant step towards being understood and seeing behavior stop and not repeated.”

Although both parties have the right to refuse conversation, Howard said in the phone interview that “most people, when they cause offense, want to repair those harms.” He added that simply informing the Deans’ Designees for students can be helpful, and encouraged students to bring forward any concerns they had.

Howard characterized students’ understanding of Deans’ Designees and the reporting process as still developing. He said that “students don’t fully understand” the resources available.

“You don’t read the safety manual until you actually need it,” he said.

Stanley did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and her automatic email reply noted that she has started “phased retirement” and stopped working on Mondays starting on Jan. 4, 2021. Conklin wrote to the News that Stanley will retire at the end of this calendar year after 45 years of service at Yale.

In February 2019, Tanis provided a written statement and a list of people to contact, all but one of whom Stanley had contacted by mid-March, according to emails provided by Tanis to the News. Come July, Stanley was still waiting on that final interview but would close out the investigation if she was unable to get it — an update Tanis only learned after reaching out.

The two spoke again in August, when according to Tanis, Stanley said that she would be meeting with Kurth to discuss the findings and recommendations of her report. Two months later, on Oct. 15, Stanley emailed that she had met with Kurth and Associate Dean for Global Affairs and Planetary Health LaRon Nelson, and she and Tanis scheduled to meet in person 10 days later.

“Sometime after Oct. 15, basically what she [Stanley] told me then was that it was my word against [the professor’s] … and because of that they can’t do any disciplinary action,” Tanis told the News. “I was disappointed because it’s like, it took you guys eight months to say this?”

According to Tanis, what Stanley told her about her recommendations more broadly focused on the “culture at the YSN” that would allow the incident to happen, which was something YSN leaders could address. Still, Tanis expressed frustration with not being in the meeting with Stanley, Nelson and Kurth, nor seeing or hearing what “exact recommendations” Stanley made to YSN leadership.

“[Stanley] wouldn’t give me that sort of transparency … if I’m the one who filed the complaint, I should have access to that information,” Tanis said. For its part, YSN cooperates with information gathering, Kurth said, noting that the process is confidential and directed by OIEA.

Karina Medved-Wu, a former Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence program manager who resigned in March 2019, also expressed similar sentiments to Tanis in her own interactions with Stanley and the OIEA.

Richner-Maldonado and Medved-Wu co-authored a letter to Stanley with three other former YCEI employees on July 16, 2020, in response to a Zoom bombing that occurred the same day. At the virtual event, curse words and racial slurs targeted former YCEI Assistant Director Dena Simmons.

In the letter, the former employees wrote that they were leaving the YCEI because they could “no longer face the racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, body shaming, bullying, conflicts of interest, and retaliatory patterns inflicted on us, on our coworkers with protected status, on the schools and families YCEI claimed to serve, and on Dr. Dena Simmons.” For Medved-Wu, such instances included revising YCEI RULER — a social and emotional learning program — curriculum to incorporate an alternative to “The Other Boy” by M.G. Hennessey, a novel about a transgender child’s journey to acceptance. She was told by YCEI leaders her inclusion of the novel in the original curriculum could be viewed as “controversial.”

According to Medved-Wu and emails obtained by the News, the former employees received an email response from Stanley in August 2020, a little under a month after they sent the letter, detailing that the OIEA would follow up on the information Latimore provided, but they may be unable to share actions taken once the review was complete and apologizing for the “delayed response.”

“While we cannot comment on specific cases or matters due to federal privacy laws, as a general matter, the outcomes of investigations are discussed with the individual who filed the complaint and, where appropriate, with the individual who was the subject of the complaint as well as faculty or other administrative leadership,” Conklin wrote to the News. “They are not available publicly given individuals’ right to privacy and the need to maintain the confidentiality of the process.”

Medved-Wu called the response “inadequate with no sense of urgency.” She and Richner-Maldonado also noted that Stanley and Latimore never followed up with them about a September 2019 climate assessment of the YCEI workplace, which was conducted by the School of Medicine’s Office of Academic and Professional Development in collaboration with OIEA in response to employee complaints and recent resignations.

Medved-Wu said that in her climate assessment interview with Latimore, Yale School of Medicine’s chief diversity officer, she was asked if there was anything she would change about YCEI or in general.

“I told him [Latimore] that I wished someone would design a new system at Yale specific to supporting employees from marginalized groups experiencing racial/gender-based discrimination and to be provided with a more efficient mediation process to hold perpetrators (of discrimination) accountable for their actions,” Medved-Wu wrote to the News in an email.

Both Richner-Maldonado — former YCEI director of technology and communications — and Medved-Wu said that they had limited knowledge of the OIEA and the complaint process during their time of employment. Richner-Maldonado said that he would have utilized the OIEA resources and the ability “to talk through these complex issues” — if he had known that those resources existed. Neither Richner-Maldonado nor Medved-Wu remained in touch with Stanley after her August 2020 response.

In a phone interview with the News, Howard said he was “not concerned” about overlap between his role as a Deans’ Designee and his other positions, which include senior associate dean of Yale College and associate vice president of student life. He said in the event that there was a conflict of interest, he would recuse himself from the discrimination or harassment case. He added that students can go to any of the Deans’ Designees listed on the website.

Petersburg said that the GSA had been advocating for a University-wide ombuds office since 2017, but just as they had spoken with members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate and heard that a meeting would be set up in spring 2020, the onset of the pandemic interrupted their progress.

“There’s a very clear way the pandemic affected this,” Petersburg said, adding that he hoped these meetings could be rescheduled for some time this year.

Still, some students called for additional improvements to how the University thinks about and addresses racial discrimination and harassment.

For Sei, while it is important to have structures in place to address what he called “the big cases” of racial discrimination and harassment, he felt the conversation should shift to microaggressions students experience on a day-to-day basis.

“No one’s going to call you the N-word, no one’s going to do anything especially egregious,” Sei told the News. “But instead it can feel sometimes like a ‘death by a thousand cuts,’ like this is the little things that we interact with on the day-to-day. So in that regard, I definitely personally prioritize the microaggressions, just because that’s the kind of racism we experience.”

Sei said that possible solutions could be working towards making an environment where students feel comfortable to talk about these microaggressions with faculty members and emphasizing the sources of peer support.

Rhee called on the University administration to do better in understanding the experiences of Black, Indigenous and people of color on a local level and national scale.

“I feel like sometimes there’s kind of a demonstrated lack of awareness or lack of acknowledgement of a lot of traumatic things that have happened,” Rhee said. “Sometimes there’s no mention of obvious violence going on in the world and on campus, so more transparency about that. … There’s a lot of people on the admin talking about anti-Asian hate, and that’s been recognized as an event that’s happened recently. But that type of violence and vitriol is always present for Black and brown communities … so I think there’s a lot of recognition that still needs to be done.”

Zaporah Price | zaporah.price@yale.edu

Correction, April 14: The story has been updated to include that the OIEA active recruitment is currently happening and that the new hires will begin in early summer, according to Conklin.