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Former Haskell Indian Nations University President Ronald Graham addresses a bipartisan congressional panel Tuesday, July 23, 2024, in Washington, D.C.

“There’s a toxic culture at Haskell, period.”

This assessment by Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury, D-New Mexico, was repeated in varying words over and over Tuesday in the nation’s capital — by witnesses and lawmakers alike — during a bipartisan hearing that was sparked by a recent federal report detailing a university culture plagued by mismanagement and “severely lacking (in) process and procedures,” as the Journal-World reported.

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Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury, D-New Mexico, is pictured Tuesday, July 23, 2024, at a bipartisan hearing on Haskell Indian Nations University.

The congressional panel — made up of members of the Natural Resources Committee and the Education and Workforce Committee — convened to get to the bottom of long-running dysfunction at Haskell Indian Nations University, putting federal officials in the hot seat to answer questions ranging from why the university has had six presidents in eight years to why student complaints about sexual assault have repeatedly fallen on deaf ears.

“This is a challenging situation to parse out,” Stansbury, holding the thick report, said at the hearing. I think what is evident from the testimony … and the stories we’ve heard shared today is that there’s a toxic culture at Haskell … It’s affecting the leadership, it’s affecting the faculty, and it’s affecting the students.”

And it needs to stop, she and others on the panel said, promising to exercise congressional oversight over the situation until significant improvement is seen. Members chastised the Bureau of Indian Education, which oversees Haskell, for failing to rein in the toxicity and hold people accountable.

“We need to fix it and fix it now,” said Congresswoman Harriet Hageman, R-Wyoming.

Haskell cross country coach Clay Mayes and former president Ronald Graham, who were both fired from their positions, though Mayes has been reinstated, both described an atmosphere at Haskell of no accountability, a culture of silence replete with ruling cliques, backstabbing, nepotism and bullying — echoing findings of the report, which has still not been provided to Congress in an unredacted form, as some members pointed out.

Graham, who is seeking reinstatement after claiming he was unfairly terminated, described the university environment as “just chaos all the time” and said certain people on staff “seemed to thrive” on that.

Mayes described the atmosphere as almost “ganglike,” alleging incidents of large-scale theft of athletic equipment and the refusal to listen to women who had reported sexual discrimination and assault. He believes students came to him — a “cross country coach” — because no one else was listening to them.

Both men described being met with silence or hostility when they tried to “elevate” these issues to the BIE, a division of the Department of the Interior, and characterized the relationship between Haskell and the BIE as broken.

Graham described futile attempts to reinstate background checks for Haskell regents, two of whom he described as felons.

“BIE didn’t help me,” he said.

He and Mayes both said they had worked in schools not controlled by the BIE and that the atmosphere in those institutions was vastly more professional.

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Haskell Indian Nations University cross country coach Clay Mayes addresses a bipartisan congressional panel Tuesday, July 23, 2024, in Washington, D.C.

Congressman Glenn Grothman, R-Wisconsin, surmised that an attitude of “hang out, collect a paycheck and do nothing” was behind the lack of accountability he perceived in Haskell and the BIE.

Mayes seemed to agree, saying the way to get along at Haskell was to not report any issues and to “get along with who’s getting the most out of the system.”

Congressman Burgess Owens, R-Utah, concluded, “We need to fire bad people,” and he mentioned “possibly pulling back funding” as one way to get results.

“If they’re not doing the job, they don’t deserve taxpayer dollars, period,” he said.

While some lawmakers attached blame to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and the Biden administration, others, like Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici, D-Oregon, pointed out that the problems go back many years “under multiple administrations, both Republican and Democrat.”

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Bryan Newland, the assistant secretary of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, addresses a bipartisan congressional panel Tuesday, July 23, 2024, in Washington, D.C.

Bryan Newland, the assistant secretary of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, said in his opening remarks that lack of federal investment in Haskell and high turnover had made running the university challenging.

When specifically questioned about why complaints had been ignored by his department, he said that he believed emails meant for him had the incorrect address and so never reached him. When asked why it took multiple Freedom of Information Act requests and a lawsuit for the report to eventually come to light, Newland did not appear to have an answer, except to say, “Our team did not handle that as well as we should have” — prompting Congressman Mark Takano, D-California, to say, “I’m frankly appalled by the lack of transparency and accountability that BIE schools are subjected to.”

Newland said the department has made some improvements, such as trying to create stability in leadership at Haskell, which has gone through six leaders in eight years, by reclassifying the presidency position into a higher pay scale. Newland was unable to answer specific questions about salary, but Graham later told the panel that his salary was $129,000, which he did not appear to object to.

Newland also said that a campus advocate coordinator had been put in place to help with Title IX-type concerns such as sexual discrimination and that efforts were underway to teach students about what kind of support they could expect when they have concerns.

Rep. Stansbury lauded these improvements but said they weren’t enough.

“These actions are the floor, not the ceiling,” she said.

Others testifying Tuesday included Matthew Elliott, assistant inspector general for investigations, in the Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of the Interior.

He told the panel that from 2018 to the present, that office had received 68 complaints related to issues at Haskell and that 32 of those had been referred to the BIE.

Emily Martin, the chief program officer with the National Women’s Law Center, spoke on the topic of sexual assault, and Rep. Hageman briefly read from a statement of Tierra Thomas, a Haskell student who was critical of the way her sexual assault claim was ignored by the university, as the Journal-World has reported.

Martin told the lawmakers that Indigenous women are subjected to sexual assaults at higher rates than any other group, and though she did not have specific knowledge of the Haskell campus, she laid out best practices for universities to protect their students, including focusing on prevention, bystander intervention, training in how to handle reports of assault, including not “retraumatizing” through indifference, protecting against retaliation and other measures.

Multiple lawmakers asserted that the safety and well-being of Haskell students was their No. 1 concern, and they vowed continued commitment to bettering the situation at Haskell, the institution “meant to be the pinnacle of BIE-operated schools,” as a committee report describes it.

“If we’re not willing to (do it), who is?” Congressman Paul Gosar, R-Arizona, asked.