An ad-hoc faculty committee has stopped its investigation of the University of Arizona’s campus safety protocols, saying university officials were unsupportive and dismissive of its preliminary findings.
The investigation came in response to the Oct. 5 death of Thomas Meixner, a professor who was shot and killed on campus.
“The committee has determined that certain recent statements and actions of the university leadership have materially impacted our ability to complete our inquiry,” says a letter the General Faculty Committee on General Safety For All sent to the Faculty Senate on March 3.
“Additionally, the university leadership’s public statement about the legitimacy and integrity of the committee created concerns that committee members might experience negative consequences for serving on the committee,” the letter continues. “We asked the university leadership to diffuse the concerns. We have not received any direct response to this request. The university leadership’s disregard for such concerns has naturally exacerbated the concerns.”
As a result of the UA’s “chilling” response, the letter says, the committee “unanimously agreed to conclude our inquiry at this point.”
In response to the committee’s announcement, Jon Dudas, the UA’s senior vice president and chief of staff, said in an email: “We appreciate the work the committee put into their report and that the committee’s entire record has been made available to the Pax Group — the third party safety and security experts conducting an independent review of the events leading up to the tragic killing of our colleague Thomas Meixner and campus security in general.”
The UA, Dudas added, “will continue to implement actions to advance campus safety and security and looks forward to reviewing and responding to the Pax Group’s findings and recommendations.”
The UA did not respond to questions about when PAX’s report would be complete and available to the public.
The premature end to the faculty committee’s campus safety investigation comes about a month after the panel released its interim report, which concluded the UA’s “approach to violence risks, established an administrative culture that consciously and consistently disregards employee and students’ safety concerns.”
The committee was investigating campus safety as a whole, but its formation late last year was in direct response to the killing of Meixner in the UA hydrology building. Murad Dervish, a former graduate student in the hydrology and atmospheric sciences department who had been expelled and barred from campus by early 2022, was arrested and is being held in jail on a first-degree murder charge. He pleaded not guilty.
University officials had been aware of Dervish as a potential threat long before the shooting. Dervish, who had a violent criminal past, had been sending Meixner and others disturbing messages for months. All of those targeted individuals made several attempts to report Dervish’s behavior to various university departments, including the Office of General Counsel, UA Police Department, Office of Institutional Equity and the Dean of Students.
Campus safety probes
After Meixner’s death, the UA vowed to examine its campus safety protocols and announced it had hired Chicago-based consulting firm PAX Group, LLC to complete that investigation. The university has yet to release any results from that report.
At the same time, the group of faculty members created the separate committee to investigate campus safety, which released its interim findings on Feb. 1.
The faculty-led investigation relied on numerous interviews with people who had been aware of Dervish’s behavior before the killing. Committee members also combed through public records and gathered feedback from numerous listening sessions with relevant stakeholder groups, including members of the hydrology department.
Those preliminary findings identified four systemic failures within the UA’s campus safety operation: A chronic trust problem, lack of a comprehensive risk management system, excessive bureaucratization and barriers to accessing services, and insufficient units to address safety concerns.
The General Faculty Committee on General Safety For All, which was created after the on-campus shooting death of Tom Meixner last fall, releas…
In response to the faculty report’s criticisms, UA spokeswoman Pam Scott raised questions about its credibility. The report “represents the work of a subset of faculty that has reached sweeping conclusions based in large part on misleading characterizations and the selective use of facts and quotations,” Scott said on Feb. 1.
That response didn’t sit well with many in the UA community, and received condemnation from Meixner’s family, the Associated Students of the University of Arizona and the full UA Faculty Senate, which unanimously passed a resolution in support of the interim report’s findings.
At that meeting, UA President Robert C. Robbins told the Faculty Senate that despite not being aware of Dervish as a potential threat, “I am the sole person you can hold accountable for this.” He also said he hoped the UA could merge the faculty report and the PAX report because “we all have the same objectives, and that is to provide safety for faculty, staff and students.”
At the University of Arizona Faculty Senate meeting on Feb. 6, 2023, UA President takes "full responsibility" for campus safety breakdown before Meixner shooting.
‘Withdrawal of cooperation’
But, according to the letter the faculty-led safety committee wrote explaining its decision to stop investigating, communication between its members and the UA and PAX hasn’t been productive over the past month. “Until the release of the (faculty) report, university offices charged with safety-related responsibilities communicated with the committee and answered questions,” the letter reads.
It also details how, after the UA characterized the interim report as misleading, the committee made an attempt to address the allegedly incorrect pieces of the report by reaching out to UA administrators. They were deferred, however, to Phil Andrew, principal of PAX, who, according to the report, has not responded to the committee’s request to collaborate.
“Together, the university leadership’s dismissive approach to the committee and withdrawal of cooperation with the committee have undermined the committee’s ability to complete its inquiry,” the committee said.
Moreover, the committee wrote, it “sent a strong message to the entire community that only external experts selected by the university leadership and who report to the university leadership are positioned to engage in scrutiny and criticism.”
The “chilling” effect of the university’s response, according to the committee, “will likely affect the willingness of other individuals to serve on committees and willingness to share valuable information and concerns.”
As for the last word before it closes its investigation, the committee said UA leadership’s dismissive reaction to the interim report is “consistent” with the report’s conclusions: “They raise meaningful concerns regarding the university leadership’s attitudes toward safety, organizational culture, stakeholders, and accountability.”
UA President Robbins talks about faculty safety report, which criticized the UA's campus safety protocols in place at the time of Tom Meixner's death.
Family of slain U of A professor ‘disgusted’ by school's response to faculty-led safety probe
