Fishwrapper - Being a 'bitch' at Kennesaw State

Let's return to one of Georgia's finer plantations, Kennesaw State University, a place that has never seen the need to progress attitude-wise past, say, 1830.

I've written in the past about a Jewish professor, Paul Lapides, who has had a devil of a time trying to force Kennesaw State to tell the truth, stop flagrant abuses of the state's open records law, cease a smear campaign against him, and most of all end a well-established, years-long pattern of anti-Semitism. After KSU officials allegedly tried to coerce a student into framing Lapides on harassment charges, and after the school attempted to ruin his reputation, he sued, and his federal case goes on and on.

As one fired Jewish professor, Bari Levingston, told me: "If you're quiet and Jewish, that's OK. But if you draw attention to a problem, they'll get you."

That rule apparently applies to women and minorities, too. Here's the latest outrage at the school.

Until 2001, KSU's Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, where Lapides works, had a well-liked secretary named Elizabeth Boyd. According to Lapides, "Many of us were very happy with Elizabeth's work. I understand that she is also a loving wife, and excellent mother, mother-in-law and grandmother. She was a valued colleague to many of us."

That opinion wasn't shared by the department chairman, Kamal Fatehi. In departmental e-mails obtained by Creative Loafing, faculty members state that he was openly antagonistic to Boyd, cracked inappropriate jokes — all the things that labor lawyers call a "hostile working environment." It's how organizations get sued — and lose.

Fatehi eventually dismissed the secretary, allegedly for tardiness. "Yes, I'd sometimes get in late, but I'd often be there to 7 or 8 at night, and I almost never took a lunch break," Boyd said in an interview.

Lapides, meanwhile, has emerged as a pain in the butt to the imperial regime of KSU President Betty Siegel. Whenever Lapides smells discrimination, he starts firing off open records requests and snooping around files. KSU officials commonly fib about the existence of records, and the state attorney general's office turns a blind eye.

"At first I couldn't find anything in Boyd's file," Lapides recounts. "That was strange." He kept looking and (lo and behold!) he found a report that was titled Fatehi's "2001 Accomplishments." Under the category of "Teaching, Supervision and Mentoring," Fatehi noted the following about Boyd:

"Fired the bitch."

My, my. Such language.

Shortly after Boyd transferred to KSU from Valdosta State, she says Fatehi's behavior became abusive. "He'd get in my face," she says. "He'd tell off-color jokes, and even my husband doesn't tell me dirty jokes. One time he asked me, 'Do your breasts get in your husband's way?'"

Fatehi's "self-evaluation," which is an official document, sat around for more than a year and, presumably, was reviewed by his supervisors. (Fatehi did not respond to my detailed message concerning the "bitch" memo.)

There's no record that Siegel or her palace retainers advised Fatehi that it's bad form to call the servants "bitches." Even if they're uppity. Was he disciplined? Hahahaha.

Not surprisingly, the lawsuits keep coming.

One case filed in October involves art professor Carole Mauge-Lewis. The black professor claims that, despite talent and a good record, KSU officials humiliated, embarrassed, frightened and outraged her.

Partly as a result of Mauge-Lewis' situation, 14 tenured black professors wrote Siegel, stating: "Our assessment of the status quo ... shows evidences of developments that equate with obstruction, consistently failed progress, harassment and even regression on our campus."

In another recent case, a husband and wife team counterattacked against Kennesaw State. Hillary Hight Daw contends that women were consistently discriminated against in pay and tenure. "Between 1993 and 2000, male teachers received average salaries far exceeding those of female teachers," states Daw's suit, which notes that women cashed paychecks that were between 17 percent and 38 percent less than men in recent years. "Nevertheless, during that same period of time, men received more than twice as many 'equity' raises as women, with the average amount of the equity raises significantly exceeding the raises afforded to women."

"Equity" raises supposedly rectified disparities between professors of equal rank and accomplishment. The suit claims that although men were commonly given boosts when a woman earned more, "there was not one instance" when female professors' salaries were upped to match male scholars.

Men even rated the best offices — almost twice the size of women's, according to the lawsuit.

Daw's husband, Curtis Daw, chaired KSU's theater department. After protesting his wife's treatment, he was fired from his chairmanship and had his pay snipped 25 percent — all without, his separate lawsuit says, explanation.

The salary disparities also are evident in the roughly 20-professor business school department where Lapides works, according to statistics he compiled. The lowest eight raises in the department all went to African-Americans, women and Jews.

Seems to be a pattern.

Memo to Gov. Sonny Perdue: Sonny, I hear that you'd like your new inspector general, Jim Sehorn, to find a few ethical cesspools that need cleaning up.

So, you might want to send Sehorn over to Kennesaw State. Kennesaw has wasted a bundle of state money over the years. It has been repeatedly sued for discrimination.

Attorney General Thurbert Baker just keeps on defending the school — far more than the law or common sense requires. Baker even tried to pull a dirty trick in the Lapides case — and got slapped down by a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court. That embarrassment blew away a pile of taxpayer dollars.

Part of the problem, governor, is that they don't believe in the law at Kennesaw State. In a deposition, Siegel's former aide de camp, Ed Rugg, said he doesn't accept the decision of a judge and jury in a case where a department chairwoman, Candace Kaspers, defended Jewish professors — and was summarily fired. That cost the taxpayers $750,000, probably much more with what the state spent on lawyers.

You've got to remember, Sonny, some of Kennesaw State's history. I know that Newt Gingrich was a good Republican, but he did connive with the school in his hokey political action committee money-laundering scheme that got him a good slap from fellow Congress members. That was some bad press for Georgia, thank you Kennesaw State.

And professors keep trying to teach courses on things like the "culture" of Nazi Germany. (Springtime for Hitler?) It wasn't so much that the course title implied a warm and fuzzy attitude toward the goosesteppers, but that the university yanked the course so that the press and the public wouldn't be reminded of the frequent eruptions of anti-Semitism on the campus.

The equal opportunity racists at the National Alliance happily plaster the campus with hate literature, and the administration never expressed concern until CL applied some heat. There have been, according to court records, swastikas painted on walls and doors at the library, anti-Semitic literature slipped under doors (comparing Jews to orangutans), graffiti (including "Kill the Jews") scrawled on walls. And there has to be something in the long series of lawsuits, discrimination complaints and reports of racist slurs and abusive behavior.

When Siegel's consigliore, Flora Devine, was asked in a deposition about why there were so many lawsuits, she refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing (even when the school had lost litigation). Instead, Devine said, Jewish professors "were gathered together" to plot litigation. Sounds like the old anti-Semitic canard about a cabal of Jews. But KSU honchos probably believe such things.

At Georgia's university system offices, it's put-on-the-blinders time. Both Chancellor Thomas Meredith and his publicist, Arlethia Perry-Johnson, are Siegel's loyal personal friends. Perry-Johnson responded to my request for comment on the new lawsuits by totally ignoring the substance of all of the allegations against KSU and tersely lecturing: "We have complete faith in President Betty Siegel."

The chancellor's ostrich approach to the festering problems at KSU has some history, too. His predecessor, Stephen Portch, refused to meet with prominent members of the Jewish community over their concerns about Kennesaw State.

The only university in the nation with a similar record of anti-Semitic warts, St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, in December paid more than $1 million to settle complaints against it. St. Cloud, at least, had taken the high road. Rather than KSU-style stonewalling, it had invited anti-discrimination groups to study its record and make recommendations.

President Siegel, for her part, either has been out to lunch or feigns forgetfulness. In a deposition last May, she repeatedly answered "I don't recall" to questions about whether she was aware of incidents of discrimination or had discussed them with her staff.

As Kaspers, the department chair who was canned for defending Jewish professors, told me: "How do you teach sensitivity to someone so insensitive?"

Senior Editor John Sugg — whose motto is: "Sacred cows make the best steak tartare" — can be reached at 404-614-1241 or at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com.

Previous articles on Kennesaw State can be found at: www.atlanta.creativeloafing.com/ 2002-02-20/cover.html and www.atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2002-03-06/fishwrapper.html