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My University’s Biggest Scandal

  • Lyss Ku
  • Apr 30, 2023
  • 14 min read

Updated: Jul 29, 2023

(TW: Sexual Assault)

This month’s blog post is going to be the most vulnerable and riskiest one that I have ever written. I have never spoke about this issue but I got involved in it through social media outlets. I am afraid if I personally shared my thoughts about it, I would get silenced like so many other people have, and be subject to retaliation. In a couple of past blog posts, I referred to this issue, but never revealed it until now. I will also reveal the name of my college, but I have redacted some of the names of people involved in this for their privacy as well as mine. Hopefully after publishing this, my blog won’t get shut down and I will still be able to write posts since this is considered a controversial topic. However, it is important to speak out about this since this issue is a common especially for college students.


The scandal that my college was involved in had to do with sexual assault. Since this month is also sexual assault awareness month, I thought it would be appropriate to write about it. Before I go into further details, I am going to share some statistics. 1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted during their college career while 1 in 13 men are sexually assaulted. 8 in 10 survivors knew the attacker, and 95% of assaults go unreported. According to a 2019 survey from the Association of American University, over 150,000 students in 27 universities were sexually assaulted. I am sharing these because they are relevant to the specific scandal my university was involved in. Sexual assault reports were common on my college campus. However, these reports were mishandled and brushed under the rug. For instance, there was this one student who was in the same class as me that was raped in the Fall of 2018. They requested for a no-contact order against their rapist, but it was breached multiple times and the school did nothing to keep them safe. This sexual assault incident that I am going to talk about sparked outrage not just in the college community, but across the world. Now, I tried my best to have accurate information using multiple articles from a variety of sources and I have linked them at the end of this post. If I need to, I will update this post with the correct information. Again, this is a personal blog, so don’t attack me with rude comments.

The college that I attended was Linfield College, now known as Linfield University as of Fall 2020. Located in a small town in Oregon, it is a small school with over 2000 students on the main campus, with another one located in Portland for its nursing students. I graduated back in spring of 2020 during the pandemic, and the year after I graduated is when this huge scandal started to rise. However, the incident that caused this scandal occurred back in 2019. There was a former student who was the student representative for the school’s Board of Trustees (BOT). They were at a faculty-trustees dinner, and was invited to a bar after by a board member named David Jubb. He said to them that he would pay for an Uber and accompany them to the bar. While waiting, he also told them where he was staying, and that he would bring them after and “end the night there.” Then, that was when he grabbed their body and pulled it closer to his. The student said it “felt like that’s a bit close.” He still continued this despicable action by reaching under their skirt and grabbed their butt aggressively, and that is when they stepped away saying that wasn’t comfortable. Just after, another member offered the two of them a ride. When they arrived to the bar, the student sat across from him at the table hoping this would avoid contact. Unfortunately, Jubb was aggressively bumping their legs at the table, then pulled their chair closer to his, and groped them. After the incident, they reported it to the Board chair, the school and local police. Then in June, Jubb resigned from the BOT not because of his sexual misconduct, but due to “health concerns” according to the Chair. The former student proceeded to file a lawsuit against the school for failing to protect them from being sexually assaulted. In the end, it was settled and the school paid them $500,000. The sad thing was that this former student was the vice president for student government, a leadership role meant to represent the entire student body, which is why they were a student rep for the BOT. Yet, their experience was ruined after being sexually assaulted by a board member, and I don’t think they ended up graduating from the school.

This isn’t the first time that Jubb was accused of alleged assault. Back in 2017, an alum reported that they were also assaulted by him. They were attending a student leadership dinner with their friend and the former university president asked them to drive Jubb since he was too drunk. After driving him, he engaged in inappropriate behavior which resulted in groping them and two other students. They were not able to speak with the president, but spoke to the vice president of enrollment management, and a former VP of institutional advancement. Then in May of the following year, they were informed that Jubb would never have contact with students or be allowed at events that had alcohol. Clearly the school mishandled this situation based on the evidence from the following year and was accused of one count of first-degree sexual assault.

Because of this, the faculty of the school voted no-confidence against the chair of the BOT, David Jubb for the handling of the sexual misconduct reports surrounding the BOT in May of 2020. Unfortunately, he remained as the Chair for the following school year, and that only added to the heated scandal that the University was hiding from the public. This resulted in an outcry from students, alumni, and members of the school community. In July of that same year, many of them gathered on campus for a peaceful protest calling for administration to take action to have Baca step down as Chairman. Not only was this going on in-person, people were also writing comments on the school’s social media platform expressing their disappointment and asking for change. For example, there would be a post on IG of the campus on a sunny day. However, the comments section was filled with things like, “It’s also a great day for Baca to step down!” I took part in this by referencing lyrics from Hamilton because one: what was happening at the school reflected the musical and two: it also made its debut on Disney+ that year, making it popular once again. This kept going for several posts until they eventually turned off the comments section. (Below are some of the comments I wrote on the school's IG page).



Baca wasn’t the only major school leader involved in this scandal. There was the current university president who took no accountability in the mishandling of sexual misconduct reports, and a professor who happened to be a faculty representative on the Board at that time named DPP. DPP was a strong advocate for the students especially with the sexual assault issues. He would ask them what the biggest issue the school had, and sexual misconduct was the top choice. As a faculty representative for the Board, part of this job was to write a report three times a year to inform the Board news from the university. Prior to submitting his report to the faculty, the Board chair redacted multiple pages from his report. In his uncensored report, he first reported that the faculty and student representative positions would be eliminated from the Board. That is very concerning because it would strip the voices of both students and faculty and lend more power to the Chair and the university president. Both students and faculty wouldn’t be able to speak up about issues at the school that their own peers face, like sexual misconduct reports. Speaking of which, it was also stated that four members of the Board have been accused of sexual assault, and none of these reports that were filed have ever been investigated. One of them happened in November of 2019 where a faculty member was at a faculty-trustee social event when a board member, who happened to be a friend of the university president, inappropriately touched them, asked about their marriage status, and invited them to spend time off-campus with them. They didn’t file a report due to fear of retaliation. When DPP told the chair about the past allegations, and how there needed to be proper sexual harassment training for board members, guidelines for trustee behavior, and alternate options for social events, Baca said that he had never seen any evidence of misconduct. He also accused DPP of “creating a secret agenda to grab power” and that “the Board never had a problem before he became a trustee.”


The university president told him that he was putting the school at risk with these reported claims and that he was destroying the school from within. Just from these two meetings, DPP was being straight-up gaslighted (gaslighting is a form of abuse in which a person or group causes someone to question their own memories or perception of reality. Source: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/gaslighting). I mean, this professor was doing the right thing for the sake of all the students, and he was a really nice guy. (I know this because he was a guest lecturer for one of my classes). Unfortunately, the Baca and the university president weren’t on the same level, and just blamed him for it (hmm, this situation sounds familiar doesn’t it)? In fact, this wasn’t the first time DPP had bad blood with the university president. Back in fall of 2018, he told the president he was teaching one of Shakespeare’s plays, Merchant of Venice. That is when he made an antisemitic comment on measuring the size of Jewish noses. If you are familiar with antisemitism, that is because it was trending last year all because of Kanye West. To top it all off, the university president was ALSO accused of inappropriate behavior by the same faculty member who reported sexual misconduct from a trustee board member. This time, they did notify HR about it, but they discouraged them to file a complaint saying “that’s just how men are” which is basically the adult version of “boys will be boys.” Nevertheless, DPP never gave up on advocating for the entire college community. In March 2021, he wrote a series of 23 tweets recapping everything that went down between him and the two school leaders and stated that leadership at the school needed to change. It was at this time when I also made my own hashtag #freeDPP in some of my comments since Brittany Spears wasn’t the only one who needed to be freed. (Below are some of DPP's tweets. If you would like to see the full thread, go check out @linfieldsvsa on IG).



DPP’s thread of tweets caught the attention of the Pacific Northwest chapter of the Anti-Defamation League. It prompted them to write a letter to the school’s BOT in April of 2021 stating their disappointment and concern over the antisemitic comments and sexual misconduct reports. They said it was important the school did a thorough investigation on the allegations and encouraged leadership to attend the trainings on bias and antisemitism. The president responded to that letter saying that the school did conduct investigations but found no evidence. He even accused DPP of being engaged in a smear campaign toward him and the administration of the school (more gaslighting)! The Oregon Board of Rabbis also sent a letter calling for both the University president and Board chair to “step down” and “implement guidelines on sexual harassment and a process for investigation” and “strict enforcement guidelines that prohibit retaliation.” Then the president fought back by contacting the local chapter of the NAACP about his concerns of being treated fairly due to his race (he was the first African-American president of our school). They did confirm that the university president was subjected to racial discrimination. They also launched an investigation by inviting 6 faculty members to have a conversation about the “racial climate” in colleges. Those faculty members were the ones that spoke out about the sexual assault allegations and antisemitism, including DPP. They said they were concerned that this was happening after they spoke up, and were subject to retaliation.


The “battle” continued when the faculty members had a vote of no-confidence for both Baca and the University president, asking for them to step down. The vote was 59-11. The faculty position of the Board was also eliminated and replaced with less-powerful group. Then, alumni wrote a letter to the school newspaper expressing their outrage over everything that has been happening up to this point. They also stated that they are not going to make donations to the school any more until there is a change in leadership. A group of alums even created an entire website that had every article about this whole scandal and even included petitions and their own fundraiser for faculty, staff, and student survivors. Plus, they even created a petition calling for both Baca and the University president to step down.


As if things couldn’t get worse, it actually did. First, the school cut off mass emails for the faculty after many of them tried to speak out about the current state of the school. Then, things didn’t go well for DPP as the unimaginable happened. Near the end of April, he received an email from the University provost who requested a meeting regarding his employment. He asked to have it postponed so he could bring his attorney with him, but that meeting ended up being cancelled. The following day, he was in the middle of a videoconference when his school computer suddenly shut-down. He tried to log on, but his access kept getting denied. That is when he emailed himself to his school email only to find out that he got fired from the university! This could not have come at a worse time since it was also finals week before graduation. It especially put students who were taking his class at a disadvantage because they weren’t able to submit their final projects or get their overall grade for the semester. The school even gaslighted everyone by sending an email, saying they “took an extraordinary step of terminating the employment of a member of our faculty for serious breaches of the individual’s duty to the institution.” A spokesperson also said that DPP wasn’t fired for retaliation, but for “false and defamatory statements.” This news made people furious, and it was expressed not just in the school community, but all over the world. It was so bad that it even made the headline of the New York Times (sorry I can’t include the link to the article since it requires a subscription to view). It even landed on the top 10 list of worst colleges for free speech in 2022. More petitions were created by faculty, students, and alumni calling once again for both Baca and the university president to step down, as well as reinstate DPP. Even some were using sidewalk chalk to visually speak out, only to have it washed down by the campus security after. Some professors also hung posters in their offices showing support for DPP, but campus security also took that away by breaking into their classrooms and tearing them down while they were out celebrating the seniors during their drive-thru graduation.


The truth was that according to the faculty handbook, before a faculty member is being terminated, they will have to stand in front of a faculty committee along with some discussions regarding their employment. Clearly the school violated its own handbook, and what is even more absurd is that the handbook seems to be “out of date” and has not been updated since 2020. Heck, the university president claimed that he didn’t know there was guidelines for terminating faculty. All they did was drag DPP off of the campus. At this point, the scandal of my college became an absolute mess, doing a lot more damage to its reputation. It made some professors resign and students transfer out of the school. With the termination of DPP, no one is safe from using their voice to talk about the major issues of this school because you will just get silenced or punished very easily. However, we can also learn that having so much power isn’t always great when you are a leader which is something I learned from my leadership class. Ironically, Billie Eilish’s song, “Your Power” came at such a perfect time because the lyrics reflected this whole scandal perfectly.


Even though he was terminated, DPP continued to fight for his rights by filing a lawsuit against the University in $3.5 million in economic damages for losing his job and $500,000 in noneconomic damages for emotional distress and harm. Then in September of 2021, after months of protesting against him, Baca finally stepped down as chair of the BOT. In the following month, David Jubb went to trial where he entered a no-contest plea to two counts of sexual harassment. (No contest means that he didn’t admit he was guilty, but still acknowledge the state that there was enough evidence for his conviction). Unfortunately, Jubb was sentenced to 18 months of probation, over 80 community service hours, and undergo alcohol-abuse assessment. I honestly wished he was in jail because of the multiple reports on him. As long as he stays away from the college campus, and does not inappropriately touch female-college students, I don’t ever want to hear about him again. Finally, just this year the school agreed to give over $1 million to DPP in his lawsuit. Also, he has a new job now teaching at a college in Portland.


Here are my overall thoughts on this entire scandal. When I decided to go to this school, I trusted that it was a safe place where I could get a quality education. I even represented the college itself as a leader through my work-study job as an admission ambassador. Now that I have graduated and an alumna, I expected so much better. It felt like the school betrayed me when I first started hearing news about all these sexual misconduct reports, and being in a hostile environment where the admin took no accountability. I mean, it looks like a perfect college on the outside, but you can’t help but notice the dark truth if you go deeper. While this scandal was unraveling, I couldn’t help but think about some of the students, professors and staff members, and what side they were taking. Were they concerned about all of this, or did they not care at all? I was especially concerned with those who worked at my previous job at the admission office. They interact with hundreds of prospective high school students who are interested in attending the school. However, it is harder for them to only talk about the positive stuff rather than revealing the truth. Even if they tried to talk about it, I am assuming they will lose their jobs just like DPP. It is as if this school was put under a hex where they are controlled by their actions. If they step out of line, they will get “pruned.” As of now, I have cut ties with the school; I no longer follow their social media pages, keep in touch with anyone, or even donate to the school except to their Hawaii Club. Just like Eliza Schuyler, I “erased myself from the narrative” of the university. I am surprised that this school is still running despite declining enrollment, decreasing amount of donations, and all the money they paid out to their two biggest lawsuits. I don't even know why some people continue to support this school, and attend some of the alumni events as if they hadn't heard about this scandal.


However, I commend the efforts of students, alumni, faculty, and other members of the school community for coming together to right the wrongs of the school. It is amazing that so many would work together and agree that leadership needs to change, and the right people need to take accountability. Even though this whole scandal has settled, we will continue to use our voices and stand up for all victims of sexual assault no matter what. As a message to the my alma mater: I am just absolutely disappointed in what you have to done in regards to these sexual misconduct reports. You have let hundreds of students, faculty, and alumni down. You make hundreds of people think you are a great college with your new "university" name, brand new buildings, and much more. Wait till they find out what really happened. You need to make some big changes to the administration if you want to win the support back, and you need to make sure to prevent this from ever happening to anyone in the future. We definitely don't want to see a David Jubb 2.0 or a David Baca 2.0. Should there be a time where the school has to shut down, you will realize that all those people that protested against you were trying to tell you to make changes, but it will have been too late!


That is the entire timeline of my college’s biggest scandal. Again, I am taking a huge risk writing and publishing this post as it could possibly shut down this blog. However, it is more important to stand up and use my voice regarding a huge issue. I will also include all the links of all the resources I used to make this post as accurate as possible. I will even make updates as needed. Now if this blog is still around, next month I will be writing multiple posts again since it is mental health awareness month. Plus, I will also be taking a social media break for mental health purposes, and to avoid spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3. To anyone from my school who was a victim of sexual assault, I am sorry for what you have been through. What happened wasn’t your fault, and I hope you are in a much better state of mind. We will continue to advocate for you in getting the school to take accountability and make changes.


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