Gender Discrimination Complaint Filed Against UW-Eau Claire Administrator

A gender discrimination complaint has been filed against a vice chancellor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire alleging he created a hostile work environment. The complaint comes from the sixth woman to resign from the campus admissions office in just more than a year.

On Feb. 3, Angie Swenson-Holzinger resigned from her job as UW-Eau Claire’s associate director of advising after working on campus for three years. That same day she forwarded a copy of an exit survey provided by human resources to the campus Title IX and affirmative action director.

The letter detailed what Swenson-Holzinger called a hostile work environment that led to her resignation, and stated Vice Chancellor of Enrollment Services Albert Colom began disparaging her and other female leaders on campus beginning in June. The complaint states one of the first things Colom asked Swenson-Holzinger to do after she began working for him was rank the academic advisors that she supervised from best to worst.

“When I would explain this was an impossible task as they were all very different and excelled and struggled in different ways, he would become frustrated and imply or say explicitly that this was an indication that I was a weak leader,” wrote Swenson-Holzinger.

Swenson-Holzinger’s complaint also alleged whenever she would push back against Colom he would cite steadfast support from UW-Eau Claire’s Chancellor James Schmidt.

“He also regularly referred to ‘Jim’ and how he would support him in any decision he wanted to make in reference to the Chancellor,” she wrote in her exit survey. “In particular, he would make comments about having ‘Jim’s support’ when threatening in veiled ways the job security of me and the team I supervised.”

In an interview with WPR, Swenson-Holzinger said she often heard Colom disparage female leaders in advising and elsewhere on campus, but she had never heard him make similar comment about male colleagues. Swenson-Holzinger said when she decided to resign she wasn’t planning to file a complaint with the university, but after consulting with a faculty union representative and other women who had problems with Colom she decided to come forward.

“My only goal, and I said this in the complaint, is to protect those who are left,” said Swenson-Holzinger. “I don’t want there to be a seventh and an eight and a ninth person that has to resign because they can’t work in this toxic environment.”

When WPR reached out to Colom for comment, the request was referred to Michael Rindo, UW-Eau Claire’s vice chancellor for Facilities and University Relations.

“Whenever a complaint comes forward, whether it’s about faculty, staff, administrators or even student employees, we have in place human resources and other processes that we use to provide fairness, consistency and most importantly, due process for all involved,” Rindo said.

Rindo said Colom had not been placed on leave in relation to the gender discrimination complaint.

“I would say it’s extremely rare someone is put on leave,” he said. “These kinds of complaints are not uncommon. They are taken seriously, and then they are referred to appropriate entities to conduct inquiries and ensure that due process is followed.”

Rindo said an investigation into the matter is underway and will be directed by UW System Shared Services, which offers human resources assistance to campuses around the state.

Mass Resignation

Though Swenson-Holzinger’s resignation is the latest in the advising office, it is far from the first. In January 2019, five women resigned their positions over a two-day period citing similar hostility from Colom.

In an interview with WPR, Heather Pearson, who worked as an associate director of admissions, said she and four others resigned because of the way Colom treated former admissions director Heather Kretz. Pearson said Colom began attacking Kretz almost immediately after he was hired in 2018.

“From the very beginning he questioned Heather’s preparedness to be an admissions director, her competency in her job, just so many different things where there wasn’t a basis to have those concerns,” said Pearson.

Pearson said she and others began collecting stories from people who worked for Colom at other universities and gave them to Kretz, who eventually scheduled a meeting with UW-Eau Claire Chancellor Schmidt. But Pearson said the chancellor signaled support for Colom and Kretz told colleagues she was going to resign.

“So, we cleaned out her office and met as a senior staff, and we started to just understand that this wasn’t a situation that any of us wanted to remain in,” said Pearson.

Pearson recalls that in January 2019, Kretz resigned on a Friday. Pearson, along with three others resigned the following Monday.

In response to the mass resignation Schmidt sent an email to campus faculty, staff and student leaders announcing Kretz and the others were leaving the campus and that he wished them well. Schmidt’s email ended by praising Colom for reforms he was making in campus advisement efforts.

“In the relatively short-time Vice Chancellor Colom has been with us, the university has made significant progress toward creation and implementation of a comprehensive recruitment, enrollment, retention and student success strategy,” Scmidt wrote in the email, which Pearson provided to WPR. “I support this comprehensive approach to enrollment management and believe the university, especially our students, will benefit greatly from it.”

Warnings From Florida

Pearson and Swenson-Holzinger mentioned that even before Colom started his tenure at UW-Eau Claire they had received warnings about his management style. Pearson said that through a mutual acquaintance John Yancey, who had worked under Colom at the University of North Florida in 2014, they had heard reports of bullying behavior from the administrator.

In an interview with WPR, Yancey said everything he’s hearing about the situation at UW-Eau Claire is consistent with what he saw every day in Florida.

“He was someone who sought to have you bear allegiance to fidelity for him,” said Yancey. “You had to be his standard-bearer and it was an atmosphere that he created that you were either with him or against him. And if you were against him you knew that your time there was limited.”

Yancey said he too tendered his resignation because of Colom’s behavior but was convinced by the college president to stay and work in another department.

“In retrospect that was probably the worst decision that I made because now I was able and forced to watch these things happen still, they didn’t go away, but now I was in no position to have any impact on them at all,” Yancey said.