Investigator recommends firing KSU department chair

A department chair at Kennesaw State University — who fired his former secretary and called her a bitch, and later showed sexy photographs to his most recent secretary — should lose his chairmanship, according to an investigation initiated by the Board of Regents.

Investigator Linda Nelson recommended that Kamal Fatehi “be appropriately disciplined up to termination from his position as chair of the Department of Management in the Coles College of Business.”

Fatehi fired Elizabeth Boyd in 2001 and then boasted in a memorandum of his top accomplishment for the year: “Fired the bitch.” More recently, Fatehi summoned Cecilia Peyton, his secretary, into his office to show her photographs he had downloaded of Janet Jackson exposing her breast at the Super Bowl halftime show. According to the report, Peyton also claims that Fatehi gave a printed copy of the photo to Peyton’s husband.

In an interview with the investigator, Fatehi claimed that he called Boyd a bitch in a memo because Peyton recommended using the word. Peyton denies she ever made the recommendation. The report concludes that the “investigator finds Ms. Peyton’s testimony credible.”

Fatehi’s secretaries are not the only ones who have complained about his behavior. A visiting professor from Russia, Mikhail Makarov, in an e-mailed letter to KSU President Betty Siegel, said he was mistreated by Fatehi. “I could not account for the true reason of his bad manners, inefficient management, intercultural incompetence, attitude problems, etc.,” Makarov wrote in the May 10 e-mail. “My impression was that it somehow happened to coincide with my mentioning that my wife was Jewish.”

In a recent interview with CL, Makarov said he was surprised that Siegel canceled a meeting with him and failed to respond to his e-mail.

CL reported the incidents on June 3, and on June 9, Siegel sent Makarov a reply e-mail. Siegel wrote that she regretted canceling the meeting with Makarov, but was called to a “pressing meeting with a visiting fellow president.”