Group Says CSU System Won’t Halt Retaliation

Seven California State University current and former employees, including two professors who once headed their departments, filed a complaint Tuesday contending that the university system’s whistle-blower program repeatedly has failed to protect workers from retaliation after they reported wrongdoing.

The employee group, in its filing with the California Bureau of State Audits, also said the CSU program has spent millions of dollars on investigations, litigation and legal settlements while operating without direct oversight or even a separate budget. The complaint seeks “to blow the whistle on the CSU whistle-blower program.”

All of the seven current and former employees say they endured workplace retaliation -- including demotions and ostracism -- after bringing to light improper activities on various campuses. Most have lodged formal complaints of retaliation and separately have filed lawsuits against the university system.

“The CSU whistle-blower program is fraught with the very problems that it is supposed to expose and eliminate: incompetence, bad faith and gross mismanagement of taxpayer funds,” the complaint asserts.

CSU officials, who have not yet received the complaint, maintain that the university’s whistle-blower administrators fairly and successfully manage competing demands.

These officials do “an excellent job of balancing the interest of the public to have efficient and ethical public entities, the rights of individuals to ‘blow the whistle’ and not be retaliated against, and the right of all employees to have substantive and procedural due process when they are accused of wrongdoing,” CSU said in a written statement.

Spearheading the employee group is Maria Carreira, an associate professor of Spanish who has taught at Cal State Long Beach since 1991.

Carreira, scheduled to speak today as a member of the public before the Cal State Board of Trustees, filed a 99-page whistle-blower report in January 2003. It alleged, among many other things, that a previous department head allowed a family au pair to teach an undergraduate Italian class while permitting a colleague to receive teaching credit for the work.

Three months later, a CSU investigator confirmed, copies of Carreira’s supposedly confidential report, with critical comments written on them, were stuffed into the mailboxes of department faculty. The report was accompanied by letters and a memo critical of Carreira -- all distributed, the CSU investigator said, by the then-department chairperson. One accused Carreira of creating a “poisonous atmosphere.”

Carreira said that incident, and other alleged retaliation that she endured, are emblematic of problems with the whistle-blower program. “I either want the system to be reformed or I want people to know what’s going to happen to them,” she said.

At issue is a program set up in 1997 ostensibly to provide a safe way for CSU’s 40,000-plus employees to report on “improper governmental activities,” such as fraud or waste, under the California Whistleblower Protection Act. The program also enables whistle-blowers to file retaliation claims and win compensation if, despite the safeguards, they suffer job-related punishment.

Maria Santos, who handles whistle-blower cases as CSU’s senior director for employee relations, said the university system “does a good job of encouraging our employees to come forward with reports of improper activities.” She characterized Carreira as being unrealistic in some of her contentions.

“She wants an internal advocate that will quote ‘go to bat’ for people who report improper activities, and the reality is that for every report of improper activities that one employee makes, another employee is being accused of an improper activity. So our balance is in between that,” Santos said.

Officials with CSU added that they wrote Carreira a check for $5,000 as partial compensation for the retaliation -- a proposed payment that the professor has declined. Carreira, who plans to sue the university, characterized the $5,000 offer as no match for the damage caused to her reputation and the time and money she has spent fighting CSU.

University officials acknowledged that some of the Carreira group’s points were accurate. In particular, they said the whistle-blower operation at Cal State’s headquarters in Long Beach has no dedicated budget and does not provide a regular accounting of what it spends or the outcome of its investigations.

“It’s very hard for us to quantify how much are we spending responding to one piece of what our overall responsibility is,” said Santos, who with a staff of 4 1/2 workers also supervises such areas as union grievances and discrimination complaints.

Though many whistle-blower complaints are handled at the system’s 23 campuses, claims of retaliation are directed to CSU headquarters. In all, Santos said, she has recorded 38 such complaints, including Carreira’s case, which is one of the three in which a finding of retaliation was found.

The Bureau of State Audits, which received the complaint from the employee group, conducts investigations and issues public reports, but has no enforcement authority. However, it can make referrals to enforcement agencies and prosecutors.

Carreira is joined in her complaint by Richard Runyon, a faculty member at Cal State Long Beach for 38 years. He is suing the university, saying he was unjustifiably removed as chairman of the department of finance, real estate and law in April 2004, after 13 years, though he remains a professor of finance.

The ouster, Runyon has contended, came as retaliation after he raised objections about his dean’s alleged “excessive absence” and disregard for student complaints of faculty mistreatment, among other issues. CSU’s whistle-blower officials turned down Runyon’s claim of retaliation, based partly on an investigator’s finding that he was removed as chairman because he failed to meet a deadline for completing a curriculum proposal.

Another member of the group suing his campus is David Ohton, a strength coach at San Diego State University. He has said he was approached by a CSU auditor about alleged problems in the school’s athletic department.

After providing information that reportedly contributed to the departure of the school’s then-athletic director, Ohton was removed in August 2003 from his position as a strength coach with the football team after 18 years in that role, though he was retained to work elsewhere in the athletic program.

CSU determined later that year that Ohton had suffered some retaliation. But it also found that his removal as a strength coach was made for legitimate reasons.

The university system has acknowledged spending $727,000 in its ongoing legal battle with Ohton -- an amount it blames on the aggressive tactics of his lawyer. CSU was turned down by a judge in its attempt to recover that money from Ohton, but was awarded slightly over $60,000 in legal costs in a previous round of the battle.