President Jim Wohlpart’s Feb. 10 email to all CWU faculty disputed several of the justifications for the no confidence vote laid out by the Faculty Senate Executive Committee (FSEC). These contradictory claims involved procedural practices and administrative decision-making at CWU. 

The Observer broke down the contradictory allegations by both Wohlpart and the FSEC by working through the referenced meeting minutes and available public documents in an effort to fact-check each body’s claims surrounding the vote of no confidence.  

Minutes were consulted from all Board of Trustees (BoT) meetings in May, July and October 2025 and Faculty Senate minutes starting May 2025. Additional emails from the BoT, Wohlpart and strategic communications were reviewed, as were relevant CWU policies and past Observer coverage.

Issue One: The New Shared Governance

In their justifications, the FSEC cited multiple allegations pertaining to the creation of the 2025 Shared Governance document that was later used to rationalize the changing of the faculty code.

The FSEC alleged that the document was created with “limited faculty representation and without meaningful consultation” and further claimed that it was created without Faculty Senate approval.

Wohlpart directly responded to these claims in his email to all faculty, stating that “the original committee (in the first two years) was composed of both faculty and administrators in equal numbers … The largest majority of Shared Governance Committee members were faculty.”

He went on to state that “as with vision and mission statements, Faculty Senate does not have the authority to approve a document like the Shared Governance document, though the faculty members on the committee did, in fact, consult with Faculty Senate to get their feedback, which was then incorporated into the final document.”

Facts: The Shared Governance Committee

According to the Shared Governance Committee’s official webpage, at least by the end of the creation of the new document, faculty members made up the majority of the membership of the Shared Governance Committee.

Additionally, the Faculty Senate’s official meeting minutes from their March 5, 2025, report indicate that a 20-minute time slot was allotted for the presentation and discussion of what was at the time a draft of the Shared Governance document that would later be implemented by the BoT.

In the BoT and Faculty Senate meeting minutes reviewed, details surrounding the implementation strategy of the new Shared Governance document were largely undefined, especially in its relation to faculty code. The Shared Governance document also forwent a Senate floor vote, which was not mandatory for the process to be authorized but was a formal option for the creation of the document that the administration chose to forgo.

Conclusion: Limited Consultation Occurred

Wohlpart’s broader claims about majority representation and authority are both supported by the publicly available meeting minutes and policy guides at CWU, meaning that no technical procedures were violated in the creation of the new Shared Governance document.

That said, it does appear that Faculty Senate consultation surrounding the new Shared Governance document was limited in time and nature, as faculty membership on the committee is distinct from direct Faculty Senate consultation, giving credence to the FSEC’s claim that “meaningful” consultation might have been “limited.” 

Issue Two: Rewriting The Faculty Code

In their initial justifications for the faculty petition, faculty members at CWU alleged that Wohlpart had attempted to marginalize faculty governance and representation at the university through a process of revising the faculty code under policy put in place by the new Shared Governance document.

“This effort to marginalize faculty governance is also evident in the development and approval of the recent 2025 Shared Governance document which President Wohlpart advanced through a committee with limited faculty representation and without meaningful consultation with faculty or approval by the Faculty Senate,” the petition states. “Although the document was created outside established shared governance processes, and despite explicit assurances that it would not replace the faculty code, President Wohlpart now asserts that existing policy and Code must conform to the new document.”

Wohlpart responded to these claims directly in his email response, stating, “In the July 2025 Board of Trustees (BoT) meeting, when the trustees reviewed their evaluation of my performance and provided me with goals for the upcoming year, the BoT stated that the Shared Governance document would be used to review and revise all of our structures, systems, policies and practices, and they repeatedly stated that we should do this work collaboratively. This was not an assertion that I made, but a goal and directive that they gave me in their public meeting.”

Further, the FSEC stated in their justifications that Wohlpart had repeatedly asserted that a committee consisting of three faculty members and three administration members was to be created and tasked with the revision and creation of the new faculty code in accordance with the Shared Governance document. The FSEC alleged that Wohlpart stated that the creation of this committee was a directive given to him by the BoT, but the FSEC detailed that they were unable to locate that directive themselves.

Facts: The BoT’s Directive

The Board of Trustees did issue a broad directive to Wohlpart in their July 2025 meeting minutes, which state that “in the coming year, we are tasking the President with making this [Shared Governance] document a living document across the university, considering all administrative, staff, faculty and student practices, policies, and procedures, as well as writing new documents based on what is stated in the shared governance document.”

The BoT later explicitly clarified in an email sent out Jan. 30 that the new Shared Governance document would be used to align faculty code with its new values and policies.

However, the original July 2025 BoT meeting minutes never mention the new Shared Governance document’s ability to change policy in the “faculty code” specifically. The minutes broadly mention that the Shared Governance document will be used in relation to “faculty” across the university. The specific clarification that the Shared Governance document was to be used to revise faculty code directly was provided in a subsequent email by the BoT in late January, six months later.

Additionally, neither the July nor October 2025 BoT meeting minutes ever explicitly mention a directive to Wohlpart advising the creation of a committee composed of three faculty and three administrative members to revise the faculty code. If this specific group’s creation was a directive from the BoT, it was not one expressed in BoT meeting minutes.

Conclusion: Truth to Both Claims

Based on the available meeting minutes from the October and July 2025 BoT meetings and their respective agendas, it is clear that Wohlpart did receive a broad objective from the BoT to create a new Shared Governance document. In operationalizing this broad directive from the BoT, Wohlpart then appears to have used his executive authority to bypass traditional Faculty Senate review guidelines, which mandate that any changes to the faculty code must go through a formal, faculty-led consultation and voting process, and began the process of realigning faculty code with the new Shared Governance document.

Due to the broad nature of the BoT’s initial directive delivered to Wohlpart, it is likely that using the loose authority granted by the directive to implement the new Shared Governance document to create a committee whose goal it was to revise faculty code was done in line with BoT approval. It was also a step outside traditional Faculty Senate processes that was never explicitly outlined in the BoT’s public directives, leaving limited access to members of the Faculty Senate to understand or review the new processes, as they claimed in their petition.

The creation of a 3-to-3 ratio group of faculty to administration that would be used to revise the faculty code was also never directly outlined in the BoT’s public directives during either the October or July 2025 meeting minutes, which puts into question the origin of this objective under the public BoT’s guidelines.

Issue Three: Mission, Vision and Values

In the original faculty-backed petition, the FSEC claimed that “the President indicated that his unilateral changes to the University’s mission and vision statement in early 2025, which lacked robust and representative faculty consultation, were not necessitated by changes in federal politics, but later claimed that was in fact the reason.”

This specific allegation is used as an example of the larger complaint shared by the faculty petition, that “President Wohlpart has abandoned his responsibility to lead the University community. His tenure has been marked by a lack of transparency, inefficient communication and stagnation.”

Wohlpart also directly responded to some of the allegations surrounding his changes to the Mission, Vision and Values (MVV) statement in 2025, stating in his response email that “The only entity that has the authority to approve vision and mission statements is the Board of Trustees; they did so at their May 2025 meeting.”

“The committee that worked through the changes to the vision and mission was composed of all our shared governance groups, including the Faculty Senate Chair, who were responsible for communicating with and gathering feedback from their constituencies,” the email continued.

Wohlpart then went on to describe the different approaches the university took in the creation of the MVV statement in 2022, compared to the revision of the statement in 2025. “In 2021-22, the committee, which included faculty representation, studied those practices, learned how to write meaningful and impactful vision statements, and then spent a great deal of time in open forums educating the rest of the university community and gathering feedback on what should be the focus of our own aspirational vision statement,” Wohlpart stated in his response email.

“All of this learning was part of the process we used to update our vision statement in 2025,” the email continued. “We did not need to review best practices or gather extensive feedback from the community because we were able to build on the work and learning that had already been completed.”

Facts: Distinguishing Revision vs. Creation

In the May 2025 BoT meeting minutes, it is detailed that the BoT did approve the changes to the MVV statement following proposed revisions created through a Shared Governance Committee created specifically to revise the MVV statement.

That committee also did retain the membership of the Faculty Senate chair, according to two university-wide emails sent out by Wohlpart on March 18, 2025, and April 4, 2025, which detail the membership of the group and outline the goal of making changes to the MVV statement.

Also contained in the numerous emails detailing the revision process of the MVV statement in early 2025 are differing rationales for why changes were being made. The most frequent reason given was due to changes to policy at the federal level, specifically following the federal prosecution of other colleges in which funding was withheld following acts of protest or references to “DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion)” language.

Conclusion: Limited Input 

While the faculty petition claimed that Wohlpart’s changes to the university’s MVV statement were “unilateral,” it is clear from the written record of meeting minutes and emails that the changes were facilitated through a committee that worked together to review and provide changes to the document, and were subsequently approved by the BoT. 

It is also clear that the changes responded, at least in part, to regulation and policy shifts at the federal level. As Wohlpart told The Observer for a March 13, 2025 article on changes to federal policy, “What’s in the Dear Colleague letter and the FAQ that came out afterward is taking a certain interpretation of federal law and court cases that is different from what has happened in the past. So we are being very thoughtful in gathering people together to think deeply about all that stuff and have a conversation about what changes we might make.”

Wohlpart’s own response to the faculty petition disputes the FSEC’s claims that changes to the MVV statement represented an example of “his authoritarian nature.” However, the petition uses the MVV changes to exemplify a “lack of transparency” and “inefficient communication,” which Wohlpart’s email does not address.

The faculty petition’s claim that the changes to the MVV statement lacked “robust and representative faculty consultation” would seem to be supported by the public documents detailing the committee’s process and timeline of creating and implementing the MVV statement’s changes. This can primarily be seen in the committee’s top-down representational structure, in which the burden of direct consultation is placed on members of the committee, and not on Wohlpart or other administration, which led to limited discussion at Faculty Senate meetings, as shown in their March 2025 and subsequent meeting minutes. 

Additional Claims Checked

Outside of the three major verifiable claims outlined in the contradictory statements between Wohlpart’s response email, the faculty petition and the FSEC’s original justifications, The Observer looked to verify some of the additional claims only shared in the original FSEC-backed petition.

Using campus office and meeting attendance records, The Observer was able to verify the claims that the FSEC’s primary office was moved, that the attendance of the provost into formerly private FSEC and BoT meetings had occurred, that there was limited time for direct faculty comment at subsequent BoT meetings and that Wohlpart had announced the end of his attendance of Faculty Senate meetings in fall 2025.

All of these verified examples were cited in the original faculty petition as instances of limiting opportunity for direct faculty consultation and communication with administration and/or the BoT. They were also cited as part of a larger “effort to marginalize faculty governance.”