Family of slain U of A professor ‘disgusted’ by school's response to faculty-led safety probe

The family of a slain University of Arizona professor says it wants the school to take seriously a recent faculty report scrutinizing the campus safety protocols in place before the killing last fall.

“We are deeply appreciative of the U of A Faculty Senate committee’s safety report and are disgusted by the U of A administration’s response,” reads the first line of a statement from Tom Meixner’s in-laws, the Cotter family, obtained by the Arizona Daily Star over the weekend. “The conclusions of the report affirm our experiences both before and after Tom’s murder about problems that the University of Arizona needs to address moving forward.”

Meixner served as department head of the UA’s Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences Department. For the better part of last year, he and some of his colleagues received disturbing communication from Murad Dervish, a former graduate student who had already been expelled and barred from campus by February 2022. On Oct. 5, Dervish shot Meixner in the hydrology building on campus. Dervish is now facing a first-degree murder charge, to which he pleaded not guilty.

In the aftermath of Meixner’s death, the UA pledged to examine its campus safety protocols. It hired the consulting firm PAX, LLC, to help, though it’s unclear when that report will be released to the public. Separately, the UA Faculty Senate formed the General Faculty Committee on General Safety For All and did its own campus safety analysis.

According to the committee’s interim report released about two weeks ago — the 30-page report relied on related documents, interviews with the people who were aware of Dervish’s behavior and multiple listening sessions with campus constituency groups — the investigation into campus safety found “a glaring institutional failure that has severely compromised safety, safety perceptions, and community trust in the university administration and university officials.”

The report detailed how Mexiner and some of his colleagues, who were also receiving unwanted and increasingly alarming communication from Dervish, made multiple attempts to get him to stop. The report identified a breakdown in communication between various administrative channels, UA Police Department and even the Pima County Attorney’s Office.

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In one example, the report explains how UAPD learned about Dervish’s prior criminal record — San Diego State University Police were investigating him for the harassment of a female student there and he’d also assaulted his mother years earlier — but did not communicate that to members of the hydrology department. It’s unclear, according to the report, if other administrative offices involved in the case were made aware.

Further, documents referenced in the report show that UAPD did make two separate attempts to file criminal charges against Dervish. In the weeks after the shooting, the county prosecutor’s office released a statement that the evidence UAPD supplied in both reports did not meet the legal definition of misdemeanor threats and intimidation, therefore it did not charge him.

In response to the faculty committee’s release of the interim report, the UA downplayed the findings as representative of “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,” and encouraged the public to wait for the PAX report before drawing a final conclusion.

That response, however, didn’t stand up for longer than a few days.

Students, faculty, family support report

One day before the Faculty Senate unanimously approved a resolution supporting the report last Monday, the Associated Students of the University of Arizona and the Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences Student Association also released a joint statement in support of the interim report’s findings.

“The interim report makes one fact clear: the murder of Dr. Meixner was not a random act of violence, but the result of glairing institutional failures to sufficiently protect the students, faculty and staff of the (hydrology department) for nearly a year prior to the murder on Oct. 5,” the news release said. “The efforts from university administration to delegitimize the experiences of the students, faculty and staff described in this report will not be tolerated.”

And at its meeting last week, the UA Faculty Senate unanimously voted to endorse the report and its findings.

“The fact that the report was unanimously approved by the UA Faculty Senate speaks volumes about the importance of the committee’s work,” reads the statement from the Cotter family.

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“There is inherent value in having both an internal and external investigation of how threats are handled at the U of A. We don’t understand why the U of A would try to delegitimize the report. We can only imagine how this response has affected faculty, staff and students. Personally, it has increased our anxiety about whether there will ever be any accountability and ownership by the U of A regarding the mistakes that were made leading up to Tom’s murder.”

Robbins: ‘Hold me accountable’

At the Faculty Senate meeting last week, UA President Robert C. Robbins said the UA administration has no influence over the PAX’s scope of work in developing the forthcoming report and hopes “we can merge the two reports at the end of the day” because “we all have the same objectives, and that is to provide safety for faculty, staff and students.”

But the “idea that I wouldn’t take this seriously,” he said in response to such insinuations, “it’s my No. 1 job! … As many of you know, there are many other people that are threatening faculty members and others on this campus. (I) am very frustrated that I don’t have the tools to be able to do something about that.”

Robbins added that working together can help “mitigate” these problems, “but you can never ever fully prevent an act like this.”

That’s the plan moving forward, but when one faculty senator asked about accountability for Meixner’s death, Robbins offered up a mea culpa.

“I am the sole person you can hold accountable for this. I take responsibility for it, you can hold me accountable. Even though I did not know these threats were going on for a long time,” he said. “And so, whether it’s a lack of commission or omission – I am the one that’s accountable for this. So, if anyone is looking for someone to hold accountable, it’d be me.”

But that’s not the response Meixner’s family is looking for either.

“Our family does not accept Robbins’ taking sole responsibility, given that he did not know about the threats ahead of time,” the Cotter family statement reads. “Legitimate accountability needs to occur in all of the specific areas of incompetence and weakness in the system.”

For them, that means the UA should metabolize the information found in both the faculty’s report and the consulting group’s report.

“The University of Arizona needs courageous leadership at this moment,” the statement said. “We implore President Robbins and the UA administration to support the Faculty Senate in its work to ensure the safety and well-being of the Wildcat community. It would be the most meaningful way to honor Tom’s legacy.”

In a statement from the UA Monday afternoon in response to the Cotter Family’s letter, the university said: “Our entire community is devastated by the shooting Oct. 5 that took the life of Dr. Tom Meixner.

We want the Mexiner family to know that safety on this campus is a top priority for President Robbins. We have implemented meaningful changes, reviewed the Safety For All report and look forward to the release of the interim report by the PAX Group to understand what steps we can take as a campus community to improve.”