State high court hears dispute over whistleblower protections in Galvin v. Roxbury Community College

A panel of justices heard oral argument in Thomas Galvin v. Roxbury Community College over whether Galvin is entitled to whistleblower protections for reporting alleged failures to comply with the Clery Act.

Attorney Brown, counsel for the plaintiff, Thomas Galvin, told the court that factual admissions and investigative reports in the record establish Roxbury Community College violated the Clery Act for failing to report a series of campus sexual assaults that occurred between 2000 and 2006. Brown said the trial record and the O'Connor Drew and independent-counsel reports show those incidents were reportable under the Clery Act and were not included in the institution's required reporting, a finding Brown said the lower court relied on in granting partial summary judgment to Galvin.

Brown said those record concessions resolve the first element of a statutory whistleblower claim because they show Galvin had an objectively reasonable belief that a violation had occurred. He told the justices that, even if Galvin had some responsibility for campus reporting procedures, the Commonwealth's whistleblower law is designed to encourage employees to report wrongdoing and that the protections can apply where an employee reasonably but mistakenly believes a violation occurred.

Counsel for Roxbury Community College responded that the superior court committed legal error by ruling as a matter of law that Galvin satisfied the 'reasonable belief' element and by excusing the plaintiff from proving he acted in good faith. Defense counsel argued the state-of-mind question is ordinarily one for the factfinder and emphasized that under the Clery regulations the duty to report arises when certain designated campus security authorities (CSAs) receive reports; the defense said the record leaves open whether the assaults were ever reported to a CSA before Galvin's intervention or whether Galvin had designated others to serve as CSAs.

The justices focused on two central legal questions: whether the statutory phrase "employee reasonably believes" requires a subjective inquiry into the employee's state of mind in addition to an objective reasonableness check, and whether the whistleblower protections were intended to cover an employee who reported misconduct that he himself had responsibility to prevent or report. Counsel discussed the interplay between the statutory elements, jury instructions, and the trial judge's rulings that the jury would decide causation and motive but had been told some underlying facts as a matter of law.

Counsel and the court discussed record citations at length. The plaintiff relied on the O'Connor Drew report and an independent-counsel report that, according to Brown, concluded the assaults were reportable and that the college failed to include them in its Clery reporting. The court asked counsel to supply precise regulatory and transcript citations after the hearing, and counsel agreed to file a follow-up letter identifying the regulation that designates certain administrators as campus security authorities and the pages of the record that contain the admissions and investigative findings.

No ruling is recorded in the transcript excerpts provided. The arguments center on whether the summary-judgment ruling on the state-of-mind element improperly deprived the defendant of its ability to present its theory of the case to the jury and whether the whistleblower statute should be interpreted to protect employees who report wrongdoing to which they were in some part connected.

The case raises questions about institutional Clery Act compliance, how campus reporting obligations are allocated among officials, and the scope of whistleblower protections for public employees. The court asked for follow-up filings identifying the regulation cited during argument (34 C.F.R. ' 668.46 was discussed) and the record citations for the investigative reports and trial record that counsel relied on.