Abstract: In 2022, the Chancellor of the California State University (CSU) system, the largest public university system in the US, resigned in response to a widely publicized sexual harassment scandal. The CSU Board of Trustees, news media accounts, and scores of faculty and staff blamed the chancellor for bureaucratic failures that allowed an administrator to escape meaningful corrective action for alleged harassing behavior that spanned years. This article examines the CSU’s reform efforts led by a legal consulting firm with a long history of advising educational institutions. Drawing on socio-economic examinations of the consulting industry, feminist philosophical and legal criticism of organizational approaches to sexual harassment, and sociological understandings of bureaucracy, we show that the CSU’s use of consultants did more to obscure the failings of the institution’s legal apparatus than reform the practices that led to the chancellor’s resignation. Our analysis contributes to research on the ways the consulting industry feeds off dysfunctionalities in public institutions. It also contributes to sociological studies of the ways organizations use internal dispute resolution processes to reproduce existing institutional hierarchies.
Forbes et al. (Mon,) studied this question.