photo by: Nick Krug

Updated at 12:20 p.m. Wednesday

Venida Chenault won’t be returning to her position as president of Haskell Indian Nations University, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Indian Affairs announced this week.

Chenault, who has been on a special assignment for the past four months, served for five years as the leader of Haskell, the federally operated tribal university in Lawrence.

She will be working in the Office of Research, Policy and Post-secondary Education with the Bureau of Indian Education, according to Nedra Darling, the BIA spokeswoman. The BIA and the BIE are both within the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Chenault will remain in Lawrence and have an office on the Haskell campus, Darling said.

Daniel Wildcat, a longtime Haskell faculty member, took over temporary leadership of the university on Nov. 20, 2018, after it was announced that Chenault would be on a special 60-day assignment for the BIE. Her leave was extended in January through mid-March.

Wildcat will continue serving as the acting president, Darling said.

“The process has been initiated to find a permanent Haskell president, with the president’s job announcement posting on Friday, March 8,” Darling said.

Chenault was reassigned shortly after a federal investigation of Haskell became public.

Her stepping down as president, however, had nothing to do with the findings of the investigation, Darling said.

“Dr. Chenault requested and accepted the reassignment within BIE,” Darling told the Journal-World Wednesday.

Back in November, the Journal World reported that an investigation by Department of the Interior Office of Inspector General had determined that complaints of nepotism filed in 2016 about Chenault’s son Joshua Arce being appointed to temporarily fill a high-level position at Haskell were unfounded.

The Journal-World also reported a federal investigation had found that the university had under-reported the number of crimes reported on its campus, including sexual assaults.

The school’s federally mandated annual campus security report, known as the Clery Report, should have listed 19 crimes reported in 2014 instead of three, and 32 crimes reported in 2015 instead of five.

A Haskell employee admitted to purposely falsifying numbers for the Clery Report, but said she did so at the direction of the university’s president, whom she said she feared. Chenault denied intentionally running afoul of requirements and called the failure “discouraging.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Wildcat sent out a campuswide letter, not mentioning Chenault, but stating “the BIE had completed its internal review of Haskell and was addressing all substantiated allegations through corrective action. The internal review also identified several areas for improvement.”

“The Haskell administration is committed to diligently working to ensure that the best practices in higher education reporting and regulatory compliance processes are adopted and implemented,” Wildcat wrote in the statement.

He did not respond to requests for further information Wednesday.