After Six Deans Resign in Summer 2025, Former Admissions Staff Allege Leadership Failures and “Toxic” Work Environment

It’s no secret that university admissions offices are high-pressure environments, tasked with the profound responsibility of shaping their school’s future community. Faced with ever-increasing applications and demand to deliver quality candidates and low acceptance rates, staff turnover is a familiar problem for offices across the nation. 

The University’s Office of Admission (Admissions) has been no stranger to this trend. 47 admissions deans worked in the office between 2015 and 2025, and 36 of them left in the same time period, according to an independent analysis of Admissions data.

The resignations reached a climax in Summer 2025, when six admissions deans left the office.

Former staff said the reasons behind the recent departures went far beyond the profession’s usual revolving door. In conversation with The Argus, former Admissions employees alleged a long-term pattern of strained leadership practices, inappropriate workplace rhetoric, and unaddressed internal conflicts that exceeded the usual stresses of the workplace and contributed to the 2025 departures.

A significant number of the former employees’ complaints were directed at Assistant Vice President and Director of Admission Chandra Joos deKoven. Multiple former deans reported that deKoven made inappropriately personal, mocking, and racist comments to office employees on multiple occasions. A vast majority said that the office’s day-to-day functions were hampered by pervasive communication problems.

Several former deans lodged complaints about the office’s dysfunction and deKoven’s conduct in meetings and communications with Vice President and Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Amin Gonzalez ’96, who is deKoven’s immediate superior. But the deans said that they were unaware of any consequences or corrective measures taken. 

At least four of the deans who left in 2025 said that they registered their concerns with the University Human Resources (HR) office as they left. Noticing a pattern in the employees’ complaints, HR connected at least three with the University’s Title IX office. But all three deans said that they never heard back from the office.

According to a University source, both the HR and Title IX offices were aware of and “fully vetted” the employees’ allegations, and the process had concluded. The source said that they were not aware of the extent, timeline, or findings of the vetting.

Assistant Vice President for Equity and Inclusion and Title IX Coordinator Debbie Colucci declined to comment, citing the confidential nature of Title IX complaints.

The Argus spoke with six current and 11 former Admissions employees, and leadership including Gonzalez and President Michael Roth ’78, to better understand the nature and causes of the 2025 departures. 

Though deKoven declined an interview with The Argus, she initially agreed to provide written responses to the former employees’ allegations. A University source later informed The Argus that she would not be providing comment, stating that the decision was made on the recommendation of the University’s Communications office.

Not all Admissions employees interviewed described negative experiences. Two operations employees—neither of whom have worked as deans—said they were not aware of the concerns raised by the others.

Eight former Admissions employees spoke at length about their experience in the office on the condition of anonymity, citing concerns that going on the record could jeopardize their current jobs or their prospects for new employment. The Argus also obtained copies of over a dozen emails, office communications, and letters of resignation to corroborate the employees’ allegations. 

Was the Turnover Normal?

While University administrators defended the departures as an unfortunate but normal feature of admissions work, several deans described the quick succession of resignations as anything but.

The Argus analyzed public staffing data from admissions offices across the NESCAC to put the waves of resignations into context. The NESCAC, as a whole, averaged three departures per year between 2015 and 2025, while Wesleyan had an average of 3.3 per year—just barely higher than its peer institutions. 

The data suggest that while the six resignations in 2025 made it a difficult year for the office, the circumstances were not extraordinary in a field marked by attrition. Faced with increasing applications and pressure to deliver low acceptance rates, university admissions offices routinely experience high staff turnover. A 2023 report by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources found that over 71% of college admissions employees had held their job for three years or less. 

“My understanding is that these are often jobs that people stay in for a relatively short amount of time, and move on to other places,” Roth said. “I did know there was higher than typical turnover [at Wesleyan], but I heard about it mostly in the sense that we had to hire new people.”

But former staff argued that while the numbers might be within the realm of normality at face value, the circumstances of staff members’ resignations set the University apart.

“We were leaving without anything lined up, or leaving to take a step backwards, because of the toxic culture,” a dean who left the office in 2025 told The Argus.

Former employees were not alone in expressing this concern. Associate Dean of Admission and Director of Access Initiatives and Partnerships Leykia Nulan said that while she was not privy to the full slate of complaints raised by the employees, she recognized that multiple staff members who departed in 2025 had left without a clear employment opportunity lined up. 

“Some of the folks who left, they left with nothing,” Nulan said. “They didn’t leave to go do some glamorous job that was paying them even more money.”

“A Toxic Relationship”

Several former employees said that one of the most pervasive issues in the office was the tone set by the Admissions leadership. In interviews with The Argus, former staff described an atmosphere in which routine interactions with senior management felt unpredictable and intimidating.

“Every conversation that you had with anyone in senior leadership was a strategic conversation,” a former dean said. “It was, ‘How is the mood today? Am I going to get screamed at?’ It was very much a toxic relationship.”

Several former deans told The Argus that deKoven drove much of that tone in both group meetings and private conversations.

Four employees alleged that deKoven made inappropriately personal comments on a regular basis, giving advice to staff on issues including childbirth, marriage, and work-life balance. 

“She would sit us all around and tell us, ‘Make sure that you don’t get married. Make sure you don’t have kids,’” another former dean said.

Four employees claimed that deKoven made comments about the visual appearances of both adult employees and student tour guides. The employees alleged that deKoven made jokes about Black employees’ hair being unprofessional, criticized the clothing choices of student tour guides as inappropriate without their awareness, and ridiculed junior employees’ eating habits. 

The employees said that they raised concerns about deKoven’s speech with Gonzalez, University HR, the University Ombudsperson, and, eventually, the University Title IX office, but they were not handled in a manner visible to them. 

The Argus independently verified that at least four former employees corresponded with University HR. At least two raised detailed concerns about deKoven’s comments; however, the documentation cannot be quoted directly, as the specific allegations contain details that could identify the employee to others within the office.

The employees said that deKoven was careful not to put such comments in writing, making them in private and often without the subject present. 

“To my face, she was pleasant, but behind closed doors, I was told that she made very nasty comments about me,” a former dean said. “Basically all of it was verbal.”

Gonzalez and Roth declined to comment on the employees’ allegations, citing confidentiality concerns related to personnel matters, and Gonzalez emphasized that any action taken to address the deans’ complaints would not have been made public.

“I can’t speak on specific individual circumstances, but I’ve invited individuals to bring information to me, and when appropriate, to HR,” Gonzalez said. “I think part of what can happen is that things can be addressed privately, not publicly, and people sometimes have expectations of a public sort of accountability.”

Nulan also argued that deKoven was aware of the deans’ experiences, even if she didn’t acknowledge making the comments, and took steps to address them. 

“I’ve heard [deKoven] say that she’s aware that these things happened,” Nulan said. “She was never one to say, ‘I don’t want to talk to anyone about this,’ or ‘I don’t want to go to HR.’ I think that she was actually proactive.”

Nevertheless, the former deans underscored the lack of a substantive response—even internally—to deKoven’s alleged rhetoric. 

Moreover, five former employees alleged that, once they had submitted their resignations, deKoven made no effort to reach out to them to discuss their complaints. Two deans noted that they were wholly ignored by deKoven once their departure was clear. 

“[deKoven] didn’t talk to me at all when I put in my two weeks’ [notice],” one former employee said. “I didn’t see her for the entirety of those two weeks.”

“A Pressure Cooker”: Communication, Delegation, Work Arrangements

Nearly all of the former employees interviewed by The Argus said that the office lacked a clear organizational structure, regularly leaving junior-level employees with inadequate instructions, improvised distributions of job responsibilities, and an absence of documentation for individualized work arrangements. 

The employees argued that while the work of an admissions office—marked by intensive application reading periods and high levels of external pressure—is chaotic by nature, the persistent disorganization of the University’s office inflamed tensions and contributed to several employees’ departures. 

Six former employees said that job responsibilities in the office were spread across multiple channels, including weekly all-team meetings, Microsoft Teams, email, and ad-hoc verbal instructions. According to the employees, the wide variety of communications made it difficult to keep track of fast-moving, and sometimes overlapping, assignments. Two former employees told The Argus that an office spreadsheet existed to keep track of individual responsibilities, but it was distributed less than twice a year, often contained inaccuracies, and included tasks for employees that had left the office. 

“A question that I always ask of staff is, ‘If there’s one thing that’s not working in the office, what would it be?’” Nulan said. “I heard it over and over again: communication, communication, communication.”

Six former admissions deans noted that written and verbal instructions often contradicted each other, leaving deans with no clear direction on how to approach their task. They recalled that deKoven would provide lengthy, unstructured verbal instructions on how to perform a job duty. Employees said that they would carefully note these directives, only to be berated by deKoven days later for approaching their tasks according to her instructions. 

“You got scolded or a side-eye if you didn’t ask questions, but also scolded if you tried to take things upon yourself or [the office leadership] didn’t like the way you tried to solve something,” a former dean told The Argus.

In early 2025, shifting responsibilities following multiple departures increased tensions between junior employees and office leadership: After two deans left the office, junior staff were tasked with the oversight of crucial programs including WesFest and the office’s tour guide programs. Two former deans who picked up vacated job duties felt that they were not given adequate training to handle their new responsibilities. 

“I remember joining…and then very quickly realizing that I didn’t know where to go to get answers and resources,” one of the deans told The Argus. “We didn’t have trainings for a lot of things.”

Moreover, according to Nulan, the office’s tight budget meant that employees could not be fully compensated for the excess work they took on. Many of them received a limited stipend—just hundreds of dollars—for performing additional duties. Two employees noted that the fast-moving job responsibilities and consequent pay gaps sparked resentment in the office.

“There were feelings [of inequity] among staff who took on those different work duties: [People felt] they were not being paid enough, or not being paid as much as someone else to do the work that they had,” Nulan said. 

Gonzalez expressed that job responsibilities can change in the fast-paced office, but that additional duties are assigned as fairly as possible.

“The distribution of work gets handled in terms of who has bandwidth, experience, and opportunity,” Gonzalez said. “No junior person would be assigned a task without a senior person available to serve as a resource.”

Moreover, multiple employees alleged that the office did not follow official procedure in handling alternate work arrangements given to individual employees. 

Five former deans named several employees who had reportedly agreed upon alternate arrangements with deKoven in order to accommodate new children, health requirements, and other needs. For example, employees were permitted to work from home or have reduced travel responsibilities in exchange for other on-campus duties.

Reportedly, deKoven stressed that a verbal agreement would be enough to cement the accommodations, or that she would make sure to alter the terms of the job contract after the fact to reflect that arrangement. 

According to the employees, multiple special arrangements were terminated or altered in Spring 2025. When employees raised concerns that new assignments and work requirements clashed with their verbal agreements, they said that they were told that they’d misunderstood previous arrangements, or that they were unenforceable.

Some office staff said that the employees might have incorrectly perceived their arrangements as binding agreements rather than informal favors.

“I don’t know if [the employees] understood the difference between what we would call a small letter ‘accommodation’ versus a big letter ‘Accommodation,’” Nulan said. 

According to Gonzalez, any work arrangements that deviate from standard office presence or travel requirements needed to be agreed upon with the HR office. 

“They would not be arranged orally,” Gonzalez said. “They would be arranged with HR.”

Some employees noted that the leadership could not bear the full blame of the office’s high-stress atmosphere. Chronic understaffing and high turnover meant that there were rarely enough employees to handle the high workload. 

But the manner in which this structural difficulty was managed by deKoven and Gonzalez— haphazard communication practices; uneven, disorganized workloads; and unclear work arrangements—only exacerbated the difficulties facing the under-resourced deans, they said. 

“I think it just became a pressure cooker, and it was an ungrateful pressure cooker,” a former office intern recalled. “No one was really giving praise to any deans specifically for doing [more difficult] work.”

Searching for Accountability

Both Gonzalez and Nulan said that they were well aware of the dissatisfaction among the former employees. But Nulan noted that inadequate communication was at least partially due to the complexity of admissions work, not mismanagement. 

“The communication was poor, but not because [deKoven] just didn’t want to communicate well,” Nulan said. “Unless you spend all of your time over-communicating things, some things are going to be missed.”

While Gonzalez declined to detail the office’s internal response to the wave of resignations, he noted two new efforts to familiarize himself with junior staff members’ activities and attitudes.

“I’ve implemented an open-door policy, and also have regular meetings now…with cohorts of staff, to make sure that we’re hearing from them directly on the day-to-day experience that they have,” Gonzalez said.

Nulan argued that the changes had made a difference. 

“I think that there has been a lot of improvement,” Nulan said. “I think that [Gonzalez] took the complaints really, really seriously.”

But a number of former admissions deans told The Argus that as long as deKoven remained the day-to-day leader of the office, they couldn’t imagine the dynamic changing significantly. 

“This was a pattern,” one former dean said. “I told [Gonzalez]. I said, ‘This happened before me. It’s happening currently. And it’ll happen again, because of this one woman.’”

Another former dean said that they expected to see another wave of resignations at the end of the academic year, when it would be easier for current deans to seek employment elsewhere.

“I’ve still got friends in the office,” the dean said. “They say that things aren’t changing.”

Leo Bader can be reached at lbader@wesleyan.edu.

Miles Pinsof-Berlowitz can be reached at mpinsofberlo@wesleyan.edu.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that six deans left within two weeks; the deans left across Summer 2025.