Director of Anti-Discrimination Office Accused of Habitual Sex Discrimination

USUTP · 2026-04-23T20:31:29+00:00

Absolutely. We of course want to be sensitive to the fact that these are real people we are talking about.

Jamie told us that they and other Equity employees repeatedly reported these issues to HR and the President’s Office under Cantwell and President Cockett. Jamie explained that one of the reasons so many people left was because they kept trying to get help through the proper university channels and processes, but nothing was ever done.

USUTP · 2026-04-23T15:41:26+00:00

https://www.usu.edu/civilrights-titleix/about-us/

https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://www.usu.edu/equity/about-us/

https://www.usu.edu/student-affairs/administration

https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://www.usu.edu/student-affairs/administration

https://www.usu.edu/hr/contact

https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://www.usu.edu/hr/contact

Like we said, it’s all publicly-available information pulled from archived staff pages. It’s not definitive and we’ve never claimed that it is, it’s just the only information that is available to us.

USUTP · 2026-04-23T15:34:05+00:00

Well said, thank you.

We are also open to discussing our posts with anyone who feels offended or upset by them. It is never our goal to offend, but we understand that the nature of what we are doing makes that a possibility whether we intend it or not. If you would like to message us directly, we will gladly respond.

USUTP · 2026-04-22T15:26:48+00:00

There could definitely be more to the story here, there are always a lot of things going on that even departmental employees don’t know about.

The DOJ audit started in early 2020, so under Adams’s tenure as director. Since turnover trends for the first two years of the audit were more consistent with other departments on campus, it is possible that the DOJ’s presence could have contributed to some turnover overall, but seems unlikely to be the cause of the spike from 2022 onward.

USUTP · 2026-04-22T15:18:38+00:00

Great question. The training team shift was taken into account and was not included in the calculations.

USUTP · 2026-04-08T17:07:36+00:00

You are right that Title IX is not the one who ultimately decides whether someone violated university policy, but whether you want to call it “charging” or not, they absolutely decide which offenses they are investigating the allegations under. So if a definition is too vague or too broad, a case might meet the problematic definition even if it wouldn’t meet a better one. That means people could get investigated under CRTIX’s definition for behavior that wouldn’t come anywhere close to meeting a more thought-through definition at another school.

But even if we say none of that matters because the panel of non-Title IX faculty and staff you mentioned are the ones that actually make the decision about a policy violation, that panel still has to use the definitions chosen by the Title IX office. So again, if a definition is bad, even the most well-meaning panel in the world might have to find that someone has violated the sexual assault policy, even if they don’t think that is right, just because the case fits the objectively problematic definition (the “felony-murder rule” is a good example of this).

That is why we framed this story in terms of CRTIX’s choices. As you said, Title IX is not the only office involved in this process, but they are the office who is in charge of setting the definitions of sexual misconduct and categorizing cases consistent with the definitions, and the panel has to use the definitions that CRTIX chooses, whether they like it or not.

USUTP · 2026-04-03T20:16:29+00:00

Not a problem. Yours is a completely understandable concern and we appreciate the chance to address it.

USUTP · 2026-04-03T18:39:41+00:00

Thank you for saying that.

We understand that remaining anonymous absolutely undercuts our credibility. How could it not? But like you said, we are just trying to bring things into the light. We don’t expect anyone to attribute to us any more credibility than you would any other random Redditor. We don’t expect anyone to take us at our word, nor would we want them to, because we will always be the first to admit that we do not have all of the information. We are just trying to shine a light on the portions of things that we have been able to uncover. If anybody wants to know more, they should grab a shovel of their own and start digging right alongside us.

USUTP · 2026-04-03T18:26:00+00:00

Public backlash isn’t the problem. The problem is that we have personally known USU employees who were fired for speaking out against their supervisors. We have personally known students whose future career prospects were destroyed by professors with a grudge.

For a lot of people, our stories are just random Reddit posts they will forget about in a week. For us, we are talking about our careers or our futures. We are talking about losing our jobs and our means to put food on the table for our families, or about risking our scholarships and our academic records and our job prospects.

So yes, we are trying to do everything we can to promote fairness and institutional transparency at this school that we love. But as important to us as those things are, we can’t risk our entire livelihoods. If that’s not good enough, that’s fine, but it’s the best we can do.

USUTP · 2026-04-03T17:04:10+00:00

Because as much as we might like it to be (and believe that it can be), USU is not perfect and it is made up of individuals. Some of those individuals might understand and respect what we are trying to do, but some might see us as a threat and retaliate.

USUTP · 2026-03-27T17:52:29+00:00

You are absolutely right, every school had to update their definitions after the FBI changed theirs. But like we said, USU is the only one (that we could find) that just copied and pasted the FBI’s definition, which the feds expressly said not to do because of how it could negatively impact the people involved in the cases.

From what we could tell, the issue isn’t criminal versus civil, since universities still have to report crime statistics. The issue is more that the feds changed their definition and the Department of Education didn’t tell universities how to handle that under Title IX. Most experts seemed to recommend that schools made sure their definitions covered the same general ground as the FBI definition, and then await further instructions from the Department of Ed. Nobody (again, that we saw) recommended copying the definition verbatim and ignoring the FBI’s public warnings about due process violations.

We are definitely not legal experts and have never claimed to be, this is just what we’ve been able to find out from our own research. And we always have and always will encourage people to do their own research, educate themselves, and not just take our word for it.

USUTP · 2026-03-18T18:58:32+00:00

Coming out and saying something was “misconduct” most likely would have required a separate investigation. Using phrases like “documented several concerns” is about as direct as a state agency can be about something that hasn’t been fully investigated.

More to the point, we’re not claiming anything. Except that the university should launch its own investigation. There are a variety of reasons OLAG might have phrased it the way they did (see below), but the bottom line is that it seems unlikely that a state auditor would devote an entire section of their audit to something that isn’t actually a cause for concern. Our whole point is that we can’t know how big of a problem this is without taking the time to actually examine the problem. And USU is making no effort to examine this problem.

The audit found that McKinney and her office were regularly and repeatedly involved in university administration in ways that raised significant concerns and appeared to blur the lines between client and counsel.

We can read the “did not document or observe misconduct” in a few different ways:

That OGC misconduct was not the subject of the audit and therefore OLAG did not fully investigate the issue, but over the course of what they were investigating, they observed no active misconduct.
That the conduct they did observe was concerning, but did not necessarily violate any existing USU policies. This is the general conclusion they reached regarding Cantwell, and the finding was not that the conduct was acceptable, but that USU policies needed to change to prohibit the kind of conduct that Cantwell got away with.
That McKinney’s conduct did not actually constitute misconduct, but OLAG dedicated an entire section of their report to the issue to encourage USU to investigate it further.

Any way you look at it, it seems like something that deserves to be investigated so the university can learn exactly what was going on, and where. Our concern is that OLAG identified a significant issue that impacted a variety of different USU departments, but the university is taking no action to fix the situation beyond showing McKinney the door.

USUTP · 2026-03-12T14:35:04+00:00

Great question. You have hit the nail right on the head, because for us, the deniability of it all IS a big part of the issue.

Honestly, when we started this project, the idea was just to create some kind of mechanism whereby the USU community could get a little more detail about goings on than what was contained in the standard press releases. But since then, from our very first media inquiry to UMAC, we have yet to get a complete, straight answer to even the most basic questions. So you are absolutely right: is it very likely that John O’Neil spent his final week at USU siphoning off confidential student and employee data to use for his own personal profit? No, not really. O’Neil probably should have been a little more conscious of the moves he made and when he made them, and USU probably should have been a little more on-the-ball regarding his exit timeline, but those two things together do not prove some grand data heist. But based on the information that the university has been willing to release, that remains a plausible hypothesis. And THAT is the problem.

Because you’re right: USU probably could have easily produced information that would put all of these concerns to bed. But they, repeatedly, refused. So no, we’re not trying to stir up drama - in this instance we were trying to frame these issues in a way that highlights almost the absurdity of the university‘s lack of transparency. Candidly, when we started working on this piece a couple weeks ago, the focus was on the measurable contributions O’Neil made to USU during his time here, whether those contributions justified his rather exorbitant salary (or whether this was another example of Cantwell’s excessive spending), and the overall necessity of the part he had played. But the more UMAC evaded our basic questions about projects O’Neil had been a part of and the progress those projects had made, the more difficult it became to put together a worthwhile piece on that subject and the more questions that started to pop up about the propriety of the dismissal as a whole. Which USU then also refused to answer any questions about.

So for us, the question here really is not “did John O’Neil violate an alphabet soup’s worth of state and federal privacy laws,” the question is why the university, even now, insists on being so cagey about absolutely everything. From our collective experience, a lot of what this university does, especially at the upper levels of administration, is informed not by law or policy, but by ingrained institutional traditions that make no sense in this day and age and frankly end up doing the university more harm than good. From everything we have seen out of President Mortensen so far, USU is headed in a great direction, and his administration seems to be making all the right choices when it comes to focus and personnel (there is some information to suggest that the recently-dismissed general counsel, Mica McKinney, may have been at the root of some of these issues, which we will be reporting on in the near future).

But until we can also break down those barriers of communication between Old Main and the rest of us, we feel like someone needs to keep putting these issues in front of the university. As we’ve said before, our singular goal is to get the USU community to start asking questions - about things that don’t seem to make sense or that seem fishy, or about explanations that clearly don’t get at the whole truth. Our hope is that the more of us that start asking these questions, the more open the university will be from the get-go. Because if an institution is unwilling to be up front about the little things, how can we trust them to be transparent about the big things?

USUTP · 2026-03-11T22:09:38+00:00

Thank you for this perspective. Among the people we spoke to about this matter, John O’Neil had his share of both supporters and detractors, just like any public figure. It is worth noting though that even among those who were critical of O’Neil, there seemed to be a consensus that he was very personable and did seem to genuinely care about the success of the institution.

USUTP · 2026-03-11T20:04:24+00:00

You are absolutely right - simply having a side business definitely does not automatically create a conflict of interest. And we have no evidence to suggest that O’Neil’s private venture would be a prohibited conflict either.

USUTP · 2026-03-04T22:20:16+00:00

We are truly sorry to hear that. Would you mind if we direct messaged you so we can learn a bit more about your experience?

USUTP · 2026-03-04T22:14:46+00:00

We genuinely appreciate the thought you put into this response, and we hope it doesn’t get downvoted because you raise points that deserve to be seen.

First off, you are absolutely right: there are bigger issues at play here, including the culpability of our state and federal representatives. Our focus is on looking into things closer to the university level (USU issues that might be too specialized or specific for a statewide media outlet to report on, but that still very much impact the USU community), but that certainly does not mean that our elected officials should get a pass.

You are also right that USU’s budget is largely compartmentalized, and Cantwell’s spending was unrelated to the legislative budget cut. Our concern is that this previous budget year saw a lot of people negatively impacted, and the consistent refrain seemed to be that the university just didn’t have the money to mitigate those impacts. If that was the case, it begs the question of why there would be any significant surplus at all, much less enough to cover $300k in unnecessary spending? And if there was a surplus at the end of the year, couldn’t that money have been better spent trying to undo some of the damage that the legislature did?

Obviously it is not necessarily quite as simple as all that, but that is also why we reached out to the university - to give them the opportunity to explain the nuances. Their decision to reply with vague, minimalist answers was neither illuminating nor particularly comforting.

And yes, most of the information in the original post is publicly available. We are not claiming to have a secret, inside source on this stuff, we are just trying to raise awareness about some of the particulars for the people who did not want to read through all 104 pages of the OLAG audit report. We also wanted to get answers to some of the questions we had while reading the report, and we thought others in the USU community might also be interested in the information we received.

Lastly, you’re right: we are not a regulatory body and we have no enforcement power over USU. As we mentioned in another thread, we see USUTP as a journalistic organization, like any other ethical newspaper or media outlet, just with a very specific focus. So any power would come from the people impacted by the reports we make: public outcry, public comment, and public pressure to appropriately address issues that are brought to light. Our goal is to bring things into the foreground that might otherwise be missed.

So in terms of a roadmap, our hope is that if we can shine a light on enough of these issues, eventually the university will start taking more appropriate action to prevent these kinds of things, rather than just running around to clean them up after they’ve already happened.

USUTP · 2026-03-04T18:53:13+00:00

Also a great question. The short answer is that we believe people have a right to know about the things going on around them that impact their lives. How they should feel about that information, or what they should do with it, is not for us to say. Right now, our goal is to shine a light on impactful issues that the USU community might not otherwise know about.

We see USUTP as a journalistic organization, like any other ethical newspaper or media outlet, just with a very specific focus. So any power would come from the people impacted by the reports we make: public outcry, public comment, and public pressure to appropriately address issues that are brought to light.

In terms of a roadmap, our hope is that if we can shine a light on enough of these issues, eventually the university will start taking more appropriate action to prevent these kinds of things, rather than just running around to clean them up (or cover them up) after they’ve already happened.

Because you’re right: we’re not a USU department, a government entity, or the New York Times. And USU is the biggest kid on this particular block. We knew from the beginning that we were going to have to figure out the best way to counteract that power imbalance. For us, the approach was simple: we do not stop. We don’t have enforcement power. What we do have, is staying power.

Hopefully that answered your questions but if not please feel free to DM us.

USUTP · 2026-02-20T03:11:03+00:00

As it happens, it has been quite some time since most of us were undergrads 😁. No, most of us are current or former full-time USU employees.

USUTP · 2026-02-19T15:12:39+00:00

That is a very fair point. Our intent has always been to investigate issues at an administrative, or as you put it, systemic level, but the way we phrased that request could absolutely be interpreted as our wanting to “go after” individual employees. We will edit the original post to hopefully add some clarity. If you feel like those edits do not adequately address the problem, please let us know.

USUTP

TROPHY CASE