Investigation finds no evidence of gender discrimination against former WSU provost

An investigation by an outside lawyer has found no evidence of gender discrimination against the former provost and executive vice president of Washington State University, who served in that position for less than two months last fall.

Rather, the investigation found, both male and female administrators viewed Mitzi Montoya as domineering and impatient with the pace of change at WSU, particularly in the university’s administrative structure, which she believed was clunky and disjointed.

Administrators said Montoya insisted on eliminating or curtailing the role of chancellors, who oversee WSU’s branch campuses, even after President Kirk Schulz told her no such changes would be made.

The investigation found Montoya’s gender was not a factor in her termination from the provost position, which the university has described as a mutual decision. It found Montoya interpreted as sexist advice that a female consultant had given to both male and female administrators.

The investigation was conducted by Kathy Feldman, an employment attorney with the Seattle firm Karr Tuttle Campbell. WSU announced the findings Monday and provided the investigation report to The Spokesman-Review on Tuesday in response to a public records request.

Montoya had a reputation as a “change agent” when she started at WSU on Aug. 1, 2019. She was previously the dean of Oregon State University’s business college, where she was credited with boosting enrollment and making strides toward gender equity in the college’s MBA program.

Upon leaving the provost position in September, Montoya reached a legal settlement with WSU and briefly joined the faculty of the university’s business school. Last month, she started a new job as dean of the University of New Mexico’s management school.

Through a UNM spokesman, Montoya declined to comment on the findings of the WSU investigation.

WSU hired the law firm in March, at the request of faculty senate leaders, after a local news website, Whitman County Watch, published emails that Montoya had exchanged with Schulz.

Those included a Sept. 22 email in which Montoya appeared to offer her resignation, saying she wasn’t a good “fit” at WSU. She also described meeting with a consultant, Jean Frankel, who had been hired to guide the university’s strategic planning efforts.

“I had another session with Jean today wherein I learned that there are major concerns about me – I need a personality transplant, I need to be more feminine and conforming in my communication style, and I need to be less intelligent,” Montoya wrote to Schulz.

According to the report, Montoya echoed that sentiment in a written response to questions about her leadership style – part of an assessment Frankel used as part of her “executive coaching” services.

“I have been advised to stop providing critique, but that would be dereliction of duty,” Montoya wrote. “When I communicate with specific people whose feelings are easily hurt, I am working to speak indirectly, with more flowery language, upspeak and smiles (as women are so often advised to behave).”

Frankel denied telling Montoya to do any of those things, and Montoya told the investigator “she used those words herself in the analysis response based on her interpretation of Frankel’s advice,” the report states.

Montoya also accused Frankel of yelling at her during a meeting last August, which Frankel denied. Frankel told the investigator Montoya became “very combative, challenging me, questioning me, asking me if I thought the feedback was true, trying to pull me into the politics and attacking me when I refused” during their meeting in September.

Frankel and Montoya gave other conflicting accounts of their conversations to the investigator. Frankel reported she discarded her own notes from one meeting with Montoya after using those notes to craft a summary for the investigator.

“Some witnesses were critical of Frankel’s role at WSU, her coaching methods and/or her interpersonal interactions. That said, none of the female cabinet members interviewed said that Frankel provided them with gender-based advice,” the report states. “In addition, the advice Frankel gave to male members of the leadership team was not substantially different from advice given to females.”

In an email Tuesday, WSU spokesman Phil Weiler said Frankel “still works on occasion as a consultant for WSU.”

Montoya also apologized to Schulz’s chief of staff, Chris Hoyt, after a Zoom meeting in August that included Schulz and Frankel. The subject of the meeting was the university’s effort to craft a five-year strategic plan, aspects of which Montoya opposed.

“Hoyt said when she tried to provide Montoya with historical context to the committee’s work on establishing system design, Montoya told her she already knew that,” the report states. “Schulz described the meeting as tense and felt that Montoya was dismissive of the work that Hoyt and Frankel had done.”

Hoyt told the investigator she felt “offended,” “annoyed” and “intimidated” by Montoya at the meeting, according to the report.

According to the report, Montoya felt she was tasked with streamlining WSU’s management structure but met resistance from other administrators. She was especially focused on the university’s chancellors, whom she viewed as redundant, and often compared WSU to Arizona State University, which eliminated the chancellor position.

The dean of each WSU college based in Pullman reports to the provost. At the Spokane campus, the deans of WSU’s nursing, pharmacy and medicine colleges report to Chancellor Daryll DeWald, who was given the additional role of vice president for health sciences shortly before Montoya joined the university.

According to the report, Montoya said there needed to be more clarity about whom the deans take orders from, and she suggested to Schulz that chancellors should focus on fundraising, not academics. Schulz told the investigator “Montoya was disparaging of DeWald and referred to him as a ‘super dean’ instead of acknowledging his role as a vice president.”

On Sept. 3, Schulz emailed Montoya urging her to slow down and take a collaborative approach.

“Give yourself some time to get to know all of us,” Schulz wrote. “No one is looking for you to bring a miracle to cure all of our ills in the first 30 days.”

Schulz recommended that Montoya prepare a report on WSU’s management problems and her proposed solutions.

Over the next few weeks, “Schulz continued to take a measured response to Montoya’s effort to fast-track structural changes by counseling her to slow down her pace,” the report states. “Schulz continued to tell Montoya in several meetings and emails that he was not going to change the role of the chancellors or the reporting structure of the three health science deans.”

On Sept. 12, however, Montoya and Chris Keane, WSU’s vice president for research, met with a budget committee and presented a proposal that would have taken spending authority away from the chancellors and given it to the deans. Chancellors complained about the proposal in a memo to Schulz.

“When Schulz received the memo, he felt that Montoya was again trying to change the structure” by cutting the chancellors’ budget, the report states.

On Sept. 20, two days before Montoya offered her resignation, two administrators met with Schulz to discuss their concerns about Montoya.

According to the report, one administrator told Schulz that “Montoya believes she was hired to institute an ASU model at WSU and that she planned to organize deans and faculty against Schulz’s direction,” and that she “organized people as players, partners, blockers and soldiers and used information she learned to her advantage.”

The two administrators also told Schulz “about incidents where Montoya was disrespectful to her colleagues and did not want to collaborate and work together.”

Some administrators told the investigator that Schulz treated Montoya just as he had treated former Provost Dan Bernardo, who disagreed with Schulz’s decisions about the role of chancellors but accepted them anyway. The investigator said that cast further doubt on Montoya’s claim of gender bias.

WSU’s current provost, Elizabeth Chilton, was selected after a nationwide search from Binghamton University in New York, where she was dean of the Harpur College of Arts and Sciences. She started the job in mid-July.