In his response to my resignation, Piper mentioned an investigation that the BCS Board of Trustees conducted into concerns that I and three other individuals raised about the institution.
He writes that the Board “engaged an independent law firm with expertise in such institutional allegations to do a thorough and impartial investigation.” 
In this thread, I’m going to explain why I do not share Piper’s seeming enthusiasm about the investigation and its results. Rather than being a means of seriously addressing the serious dysfunction at BCS, I believe the investigation was another *expression* of that dysfunction.
I hold this belief for four reasons: (1) the lawyer hired to conduct the investigation was not an ideal choice to help participants feel safe to share their stories; (2) the investigation was an *internal* rather than an *independent* investigation;
(3) the scope of the investigation, as I understand it, was limited largely to whether or not BCS had violated anti-discrimination law with respect to gender;
and (4) the Board’s suggested action steps following the investigation failed to address the toxic nature of the institution’s leadership.
If you want to read more about the background leading up to the investigation, I took a screen shot of a Notes document I typed up. I decided to leave this information out of the main tweet thread so it doesn’t get ridiculously long. It’s long enough as it is.
To summarize, the process that led to the BCS Board commissioning an investigation was not clean and straightforward. In fact, my impression of the whole process was that it took a fair amount of arm-twisting to get the Board to take action at all.
Now, to my first point. The lawyer hired to conduct the investigation was not an ideal choice to help participants feel safe to share their stories.
The Board, based on the recommendation of its own lawyers, hired Derek Gaubatz of Gammon & Grange, P.C., to conduct the investigation. We were not consulted in this decision.
Those of you who have followed the sex abuse scandal in the SBC may be familiar with Gaubatz’s name.
He was the General Counsel for the SBC’s International Mission Board who, in 2007, investigated Anne Marie Miller’s claims that her former youth pastor, Mark Aderholt, had sexually abused her when she was 16 years old (1996–1997). houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t…
On her personal blog, Miller wrote in 2018 that the team conducting the investigation “was not trauma-informed.”
She also added that “the pain that was caused [by the investigation] directly and significantly affected my physical and emotional health over the past ten years.” annemariemiller.com/2018/07/13/ann…
Her experience in this investigation was so traumatizing that she didn’t want to press charges against Aderholt. She didn’t think she could survive another process like what she went through with Gaubatz and the IMB.
According to Miller, the investigating team “inappropriately crossed boundaries with their questions that had nothing to do with why we were all there, which was humiliating.”
An ex-boyfriend of Miller’s, who participated in the investigation, said that Gaubatz’s team asked him about their relationship and whether Miller talked about Aderholt.
According to this ex-boyfriend, “They also asked me how she dressed . . . . I thought they were almost insinuating she asked for it, or she could have been more complicit in the interaction than what she claimed.” web.archive.org/web/2018071319…
There is much more to this story. I share these few details simply to say that if a Board understood the dynamics of institutional abuse, and if they wanted people to feel safe to share their stories, they would likely not choose someone like Gaubatz to conduct an investigation.
Point #2: The investigation was an *internal* rather than an *independent* investigation. This distinction may seem like splitting hairs, but it makes all the difference in the world.
In a truly independent investigation, an institution relinquishes control of the investigative process to a qualified third party. People who are interviewed are assured confidentiality, and the final report from the investigation is made available to all who were involved.
Transparency governs the entire process.
Internal investigations, on the other hand, aim to protect the institution. They give the appearance of being independent, because the organization’s leadership contracts with an “independent” third party, but the organization drives the process and receives the final report.
As Boz Tchividjian has written, “An internal investigation allows the institution being investigated to stay in the driver’s seat, while an independent investigation requires that they get into the backseat with everyone else.” netgrace.org/resources/are-…
BCS chose to conduct an internal investigation. The participants were denied confidentiality, although Gaubatz assured me that “we have no plans to indiscriminately share everything you provided.” I have not seen the final report from the investigation.
And, to this day, I don’t know what the Board members have seen of the information I submitted to Gaubatz.
I want to stress how vulnerable an internal investigation can make participants feel. Whatever assurances the investigator makes, participants don’t ultimately know how the information they share will be used.
Point #3: The scope of the investigation, as I understand it, was limited largely to whether or not BCS had violated anti-discrimination law with respect to gender.
When Paul Lim first told us about the investigation, he said, “The Board has learned that you have concerns about the work environment and culture at BCS.
We take your concerns very seriously and believe the best way to address these or other concerns you may have is through an impartial investigation conducted by an outside investigator.”
Based on this wording, one might assume that the Board was interested in conducting a wide-ranging survey of the school’s leadership and institutional culture. I certainly assumed that. So, I spent a long time trying to document the concerns I had about BCS.
I limited my observations mainly to things I had personally experienced rather than heard about from other people.
I noted the prolonged conflict I had had with President Tomlinson over racial justice issues and how President Tomlinson had responded to that conflict in unhealthy ways.
I also mentioned my concern over the way a former colleague had been treated when he was dismissed from BCS.
It turns out that the investigation was primarily focused on whether anti-discrimination law had been violated. (The investigation concluded that it hadn’t.) I was not expecting such a narrow focus. The investigation didn’t even look into my colleague’s dismissal.
I did not get the sense that the Board was truly concerned with assessing the school’s leadership culture. They were concerned with issues of legality.
Point #4: The Board’s suggested action steps following the investigation failed to address the toxic nature of the institution’s leadership.
As I mention in the screenshot above, in response to the investigation, the Board determined that it should clarify its positions and policies on issues such as complementarianism, academic freedom, and internal accountability.
They also recommended that I participate in a mediation process with President Tomlinson.
I believed that these were insufficient action steps to address the dysfunction that I and others had seen at the school.
I sent an email to Paul Lim and others, explaining my disappointment with the investigation, recommending a very different set of action steps for the Board to take, and declining to participate in mediation with President Tomlinson.
Lim responded by asking me to clarify my suggested action steps and to explain what I would do if the Board declined some or all of the action steps I recommended.
I said that I would like someone who was familiar with the dynamics of organizational abuse to come in and assess BCS. I suggested Wade Mullen, Diane Langberg, Boz Tchividjian, and Darby Strickland as options.
I also noted that if the Board allowed the dysfunction at BCS to continue on without taking steps to address it, I would likely resign.
Lim gave no indication that the Board was willing to do what I had asked. I didn’t expect that they would be. And on October 8, I resigned.
To recap, the BCS investigation was an *internal* investigation with a narrow focus on matters of legality. It was an exercise in institutional protection.
As such, it would seem that the investigation reinforces, rather than undermines, my claim that BCS is committed to preserving its own image at the expense of the vulnerable.
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