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An independent investigator today handed Oregon Health & Science University’s board of directors an 87-page report faulting the school’s handling of allegations that a top doctor had secretly taken photos of female students.
In October 2022, a medical student told school administrators that a professor, Daniel Marks, was secretly taking photos of women in his graduate school classroom. It would take more than a year for the school to show him the door, during which it fumbled the investigation and paid Marks a $46,000 bonus.
The fallout has cost the medical school dean who first heard the complaint, David Jacoby, his position. But the independent report released today, conducted by Schneider Education & Employment Law at the behest of the school’s board of directors, largely lays blame elsewhere.
“The root cause of the issues which necessitated this review, caused a campus maelstrom, and, most importantly, negatively impacted students is that [the Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Department’s] handling of this matter from November 2022–February 2023 was replete with fundamental errors,” it says.
The school’s president Danny Jacobs “unfairly pinned too much of the blame” for the scandal on Jacoby, the report says, in an apparent effort to dispel further scrutiny of school administrators’ myriad failures.
Dr. Jeffrey Jensen, vice chair of research in obstetrics and gynecology, and a vocal critic of OHSU’s top management, said the report shows that OHSU wrongfully dismissed Jacoby from his position as dean. Jensen organized a protest in support of Jacoby in February.
“My hope is that Danny Jacobs will take responsibility for this and resign so that OHSU can heal,” Jensen said in an interview. “There needs to be change.”
The AAEO’s struggles were well documented at the time. In 2021, the school hired former Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm to review its sexual misconduct complaint processes in the wake of a lawsuit. It found the AAEO was understaffed and that investigations took too long. The board paid Holder’s firm $6.5 million and promised to “commit to culture change.”
Instead, Schneider found, short-staffing at the division grew worse as experienced investigators fled. The school was forced to bring in a consulting firm, Grand River Solutions, to handle the backlog of complaints.
It was those consultants who first reviewed and ultimately dismissed the early complaint against Marks, finding “no substantial violations” despite being given a photo showing Marks with his phone under a table aimed at two female students wearing skirts.
“As an experienced investigator interviewed as part of this review aptly put it, the photo is ‘as close to a smoking gun as we ever get in any of these cases,’” Schneider’s report says. Still, AAEO closed the case, citing “no substantiated violations” without attempting to retrieve photos from Marks’ OHSU-supplied phone or even interview the two victims. The recent law school graduate initially put in charge of the investigation “had no experience investigating discrimination reports,” the report found.
AAEO investigators did Marks other favors. They notified him, but not the student who complained, of his right to have an attorney present at interviews, and claimed later that the student had not formally requested an investigation, despite telling the student otherwise.
Under pressure from students and faculty understandably outraged by the investigation’s dismissal, school administrators realized their mistake. AAEO reopened the investigation and, this time, demanded Marks’ phone. He handed it over, but someone, presumably him or his wife, had remotely wiped it prior to investigators reviewing its contents.
Ultimately, in September 2023, AAEO found it “more likely than not” that Marks was guilty of the accusations and recommended he be fired.
Still, Marks wasn’t immediately shown the door, nor was he put on administrative leave. In fact, he continued presiding over a student dissertation defense and earned a Presidential Recognition Award, with a hefty financial bonus, before finally resigning in November, the report notes.
Amid the uproar, the report found, top school administrators attempted to shift blame onto Dean Jacoby, who had fielded the original complaint and approved a list of employees eligible for the bonus. In January, Jacobs told Jacoby “it is clear we have a crisis on hand related to your handling of the Marks matter” and shortly thereafter asked him to step down.
But, the report finds, Jacob’s claim “was inappropriate and unfairly pinned too much of the blame for the institutional mishandling of this matter on Dr. Jacoby.” While Jacoby didn’t immediately forward the report to AAEO, he wasn’t the only school administrator that initially failed to classify the complaint as potential sex-based discrimination—so too did the AAEO initially after another administrator reported students’ complaints. “The university should not blame others when AAEO/OCIC missteps,” the report says.
The report issued a series of recommendations to fix flaws in the complaint process. They include hiring new investigators for the AAEO, which is now called the Office of Civil Rights Investigations and Compliance, and having the office report directly to the school president.
“We also want to pause and apologize for all that happened to get us to this point,” Jacobs and board chair Wayne Monfries said in a statement in response to the report. “We will continue to change and improve; we are not there yet.”