After-Action Review: Report to the Wake Forest Community

This report is also available as a PDF.

August 12, 2024

Overview

At the end of the 2023–24 academic year, the Wake Forest University community experienced a period of intensity, marked by a demonstration and encampment on Hearn Plaza and Manchester Plaza from April 30 – May 3, 2024. At the conclusion of those events, President Susan R. Wente charged the administration with undertaking an after-action review, for the purpose of assessing the University’s actions and response and providing recommendations for improvement.

With input and assistance from the Faculty Senate, the University appointed six members to the After-Action Review Committee to lead the review. The members are:

• Arjun (Raja) Chatterjee (Co-Chair), School of Medicine faculty, current Faculty Senate executive committee member, past president, University Faculty Senate
• Corey D. B. Walker (Co-Chair), Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity, Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities, and Director of the Program in African American Studies
• Emily Austin, Professor of Philosophy, Member of the Faculty Senate
• Mary Jones, Executive Director of Finance and Administration in Information Systems
• Marianne Magjuka, Assistant Vice President of Campus Life
• John Sumanth, Associate Professor of Management, School of Business, Faculty Senate Executive Committee member

Over approximately seven weeks, the Committee, assisted by Ropes & Gray LLP, worked to gather relevant facts and data; to develop a textured and multidimensional understanding of community members’ perspectives of what occurred; and to provide University leadership with specific recommendations for future improvement. While the Committee sought to gain a deep and holistic understanding of events that occurred, it was not the Committee’s purpose or responsibility to investigate or adjudicate the conduct of individual faculty, staff, or students. Thus, the Committee was not punitive in nature, nor was its review. Rather, the purpose of the Committee and the review it led, was to discover ways to strengthen the Wake Forest University community through reflective assessment of the University’s actions and response.

The Committee prepared a detailed and confidential report for University leadership’s review and follow-up. Consistent with its purpose, the report does not attribute perspectives or findings to any specific individuals, but does, however, capture a breadth of individual perspectives. The Committee has thus prepared this report to share its work with the broader Wake Forest community.

The Committee appreciated a broad and profound variety of perspectives voluntarily raised by various members of the University community. These conversations revealed several areas for improvement, as well as areas of agreement and disagreement about the University’s approach and decisions with respect to the demonstration. At the same time, the conversations also revealed the devotion of administrators, professional staff, faculty, and students who, despite operating under stressful and difficult circumstances, sincerely sought to act with the best interests of our University’s community in mind.

Summary of the Committee’s Work

The Committee used multiple methods to conduct its review:

• Established a website and email to communicate with and solicit direct input from campus community members.

• Thoroughly reviewed a breadth of documents and other media, including:
  • Policies, procedures, guidelines, and standards;
  • University statements, leadership team briefing materials, and faculty statements and resolutions;
  • Photographs, social media posts, reports, and various materials received from administrators, faculty, staff, and students, including emails between community members;
  • Video footage from police body cameras, demonstrator video footage of the police’s arrival, campus security video footage, and media footage of incidents.
• Identified a wide variety of community members to join in conversations to offer a breadth of perspective by:
  • Extending a voluntary, community-wide invitation to anyone who wanted to have a conversation.
  • Extending individual invitations to 54 community members.
  • Conducting conversations with 43 individuals involved in the events on campus. These individuals included University administrators, faculty, staff, and students.
  • Encouraging community members to participate who were hesitant to join in conversations.
  • Reading memoranda from each conversation for the full Committee to understand the facts, perspectives, and recommendations shared in each one.
• Developed a detailed narrative timeline of events, identifying the key decisions, actions, and inactions, and the variety of perspectives around each.
• Developed and discussed comprehensive observations and recommendations.
• Incorporated broad input across the Committee for the final report.3

Narrative Timeline and Threads

As the Committee developed a narrative timeline of events through conversations with community members, it became clear that members of the Wake Forest community experienced the events very differently, and described and discussed the events in disparate narrative contexts. The views of different individuals of course varied, but a few identifiable narrative themes or threads emerged. In some cases, these themes overlapped, and in others differed significantly.

The narrative threads that emerged follow:

• One described that the administration’s response to the student demonstration was measured and appropriate given the context.
• Another expressed that the University’s statement on May 2 and subsequent deployment of law enforcement were significant deviations from the culture and norms that prevail at Wake Forest and that should guide leadership decisions at an academic institution.
• Another held that, from October 7 onwards, the administration, through actions and communications, has shown a bias in favor of those who support Israel and against those who support the Palestinian cause.
• Another described that the demonstration and encampment became a visible expression of the experiences of underrepresented students at Wake Forest.

The Committee appreciates how these narrative threads describe, in some cases, sharply different perspectives of the events. The Committee does not endorse any one perspective as the sole truth—to do so would fail to appreciate the diversity of opinion within the community and is not the Committee’s charge. The Committee also acknowledges that each of these narrative threads is sincerely held by many members of the community, and that no group within the community (e.g., faculty, students, administrators) is monolithic.

Committee Recommendations

The Committee made four formal recommendations to the University administration:

I. Adopt a written protocol to guide decision-making on the deployment of law enforcement in the context of campus demonstrations.

A protocol to guide decision-making would have several benefits. First, it would provide the President and her advisors with a pre-existing set of factors and decision considerations, including a risk and threat assessment that must be considered before deploying law enforcement. In so doing, this would ensure that the many relevant and consequential factors are considered prior to the deployment of law enforcement. Second, it would assure community members that the administration had, in fact, considered specific factors they consider important. Third, it would provide the President with a tool for more effectively communicating with campus leadership and the broader community, by referencing pre-determined factors that were deemed significant.4

II. Adopt policies, procedures, and guidelines to ensure clear, consistent, and accurate communications to the community.

Many community members discussed the University’s official communications, and the impact those communications had on themselves and other community members. Individuals’ views on those communications varied, often tracking that individual’s perspective and views of the prevailing narrative. Repeated observations included (a) appreciation for factual updates, (b) strong views on the University’s May 2 communication, and (c) concern about the length of time between the dispersal of the demonstration on May 3 and the University’s comprehensive statement on May 14.

III. Adopt reasonable time, place, and manner guidelines applicable to campus-based protests and demonstrations.

Wake Forest, like many private universities, lacked a robust set of time, place, and manner policies for campus protests and demonstrations. Given what we have learned this spring at Wake Forest and at other universities across the country, Wake Forest needs clearly defined policies that address, among other things, location and time for protests, erecting of structures on campus (including tents), chalking, and other issues commonly addressed in campus policies.

The lack of any policy addressing student demonstrations led to reactive decision-making and inconsistent outcomes. The primary applicable policy—the Student Code of Conduct—was insufficient to support an effective response to a student demonstration. As a threshold matter, viewing student demonstrations through a “conduct” lens puts the administration in the position of being compliance officers, rather than facilitators of a valuable student experience.

The Committee recognizes that, on August 1, 2024, the administration released a new University Policy on Demonstrations, Chalking, and Posting. The Committee appreciates the greater clarity that this policy provides.

IV. Develop a comprehensive after-action review policy for the University to formalize and institutionalize the body that conducts after-action reviews and the process and procedure for undertaking such reviews.

The University lacks an established process for after-action reviews, which are critical for continuous improvement. Having a formal policy, publicly available, which articulates goals, expectations, and processes for how and when an after-action review is conducted would make after-action reviews more efficient and, in turn, enable and encourage the administration to conduct them more frequently.