Ted Genoways accepting a 2006 National Magazine award for General Excellence and Fiction

A University of Virginia investigation into the suicide last July of Virginia Quarterly Review managing editor Kevin Morrissey has resulted in “a weirdly inconclusive document that does little to clear up the confusion surrounding the strife at VQR that preceded Morrissey’s death,” according to a report on Slate by Emily Bazelon. Nonetheless, as several reports (such as this story in the New York Observer) have put it, the review “exonerates” VQR editor Ted Genoways of charges that he was a bully who hounded Morrissey to his death.

It’s a finding — or perhaps an interpretation — that many will find shocking. As Bazelon’s Slate report notes,

The report starts by saying there were “no specific allegations of bullying or harassment prior to July 30.” That is the date of Morrissey’s death (though the report doesn’t even say that). As the Los Angeles Times pointed out, this statement suggests that the university rejects the allegations of workplace bullying …. Instead of bullying, the report says that complaints about editor Ted Genoways “were mostly viewed by others as conflicts between a creative, innovative manager and persons who did not share the Editor’s aspirations.”

Yet numerous public reports in the weeks after Morrissey’s death documented numerous instances of bullying complaints filed by staffers against Genoways.

A lengthy Chronicle of Higher Education story by Robin Wilson reports Morrissey himself filed numerous complaints “with the university ombudsman and the human-resources office” — obviously well before July 30. Likewise, says the Chronicle, editor Waldo Jaquith complained to University officials, and so did “three other journal staff members, [who] went earlier this year to the president’s office to complain.” Jaquith detailed his charges in a Today Show report (you can see it in this earlier MobyLives report). And a story in local newsweekly The Hook, from Charlottesville, observes that the report makes “no mention of long-time former VQR staff member Candace Pugh, the woman who won a year’s salary from UVA five years ago after alleging that Genoways bullied her out of her job at VQR.” She tells the paper, “Everyone who has worked under him has been to the President’s office to complain about his management.”

Meanwhile, Genoways says he was as unaware of the charges as the UV investigators apparently were. Despite the fact that the investigation has cleared him, he’s not happy about it, however. In a blistering email to the New York Times’ Julie Bosman, he attacks the report for lacking “clear statement of the facts.”

“I suppose they don’t want to state my innocence too plainly, because it makes their actions – cleaning out my office, canceling the winter issue – look panicked and ill-considered,” he writes.”But I think moving on will require greater honesty.”

We may never know. As Slate observes, “the report lets everyone else at the university off the hook, in one blanket sentence: ‘Appropriate actions were taken by the institution.'”