CSUDH Develops Course to Train DHR/Title IX Investigators

In December, CSUDH will roll out the first course in the history of the CSU system to train employees to become Discrimination, Harassment, and Retaliation (DHR)/Title IX investigators. The initial cohort will consist of CSUDH faculty, staff, and administrators, but future courses will be open to employees of all 23 CSU campuses.

The genesis of the course occurred at the July 2024 meeting of the CSU Board of Trustees. In response to a report on the shortage of trained DHR/Title IX investigators throughout the system, trustee Diego Arambula suggested that universities should think about training their existing employees, rather than constantly searching for candidates with the relevant experience.

Ed Cleek, senior budget officer for CSUDH's College of Continuing and Professional Education (CCPE) was listening to the trustees' meeting and brought the suggestion to CCPE Dean Kim McNutt. McNutt saw this as a great opportunity to develop a training course and offer it systemwide.

"That's been a hot issue for the last year and a half," says Blair Miles, Executive Director of the CSUDH Office of Equity and Inclusion. "There's really a dearth of investigators, which is why investigations can take so long. These complaints need to be investigated, but we just don't have the personnel to do that quickly on our campuses."

Taking Arambula's suggestion as a starting point, McNutt and CCPE Associate Dean Lynda Wilson got to work developing an appropriate training course. CCPE's leadership team has years of experience setting up professional development courses quickly and successfully. Wilson then contacted Miles, who immediately agreed to flesh out the training course.

"We're very fortunate that we have a deep roster of subject matter experts," says CCPE Dean Kim McNutt. "We took the genesis of an idea and were agile and nimble enough that we quickly turned it into reality."

Wilson worked with Miles to develop the "nuts and bolts" of the course. He created an outline of the procedures and regulations that a civil rights investigator needs to know, which was then used as the basis of the course.

"We took it from there," says Wilson, "I worked with James Vigneau, who teaches a Human Resources certification course at CCPE, and we created a curriculum for a two-day course." Vigneau will serve as the lead instructor, assisted in the classroom by Wilson.

The course was officially approved by the CCPE Curriculum Committee in September, and the pilot offering will consist of two half-day Zoom sessions on Dec. 10-11. It is designed to be conducted digitally, so that future sessions can be attended by interested employees from any of the 23 CSU campuses.

This first outing will only be open to CSUDH employees, though, and the CCPE is currently looking for interested individuals to be part of the initial cohort. Employees interested in attending the course should contact Wilson at [email protected].

"We just started working on this in late summer," adds Miles. "I never would have guessed that we would have a class ready to go by December! But it points out both the extreme need for this course and the extremely skilled CCPE staff who put this together so quickly."