The summaries were released nearly six months after Chancellor Joseph I. Castro resigned in the wake of a revelation that Castro failed to aggressively discipline an underling and personal friend, Frank Lamas, when Castro was president of Fresno State in 2020. Castro agreed to pay Lamas $20,000 in Fresno State funds and write him a letter of recommendation for other jobs in exchange for Lamas resigning after an investigation found he sexually harassed an employee.
Students protested and faculty called for Castro’s removal when the deal became public. CSU trustees ordered an independent investigation of sexual harassment across the massive system.
Earlier this year, CSU released similar summaries of management employees who committed sexual misconduct, including viewing pornography on university computers and managers who sexually harassed people on their staffs.
The newly released summaries of non-management cases show students were often victims.
A professor at Chico State resigned before he could be disciplined while facing charges of gender harassment of a student and having what was called a “prohibited consensual relationship” with a student, according to the summaries. The professor, Michael Regan, was then hired to teach in the kinesiology and sociology departments at Cal State East Bay in Hayward where he remains.
A spokesperson for Cal State East Bay said the school was “looking into” Regan’s hiring. At Chico State, a spokesman told EdSource by email it could not be immediately determined if the East Bay school requested any information on Regan’s tenure at Chico.
In an email, Regan told EdSource, “I was open about pursuing a consensual relationship and decided to resign at the conclusion of the semester and not to return for my final visiting semester due to policy on conflict of interest on relationships.”
In another case, a San Francisco State business professor, Oscar Stewart, “engaged in consensual sexual relationships with students when he had significant academic authority over both,” according to summary information that was drawn from a misconduct investigation into his actions.
“The sustained allegations were not based on formal complaint against (Stewart) but the university investigated after learning of the allegations,” the summary states. It does not say how the university learned of the allegations.
The university officials decided to fire Stewart, but then allowed him to resign, the records show. He is now a professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.
In an email on Monday, Stewart said that the university released “false information” about him. “I resigned so as not to deal with a university that never supported me throughout the process of retaliation by a group of conservative students who coordinated to retaliate against my anti-racist pedagogy.” A spokesperson for San Francisco State didn’t respond to an email sent late Monday.