Cover Story: The College of Law(suits)

No one would mistake Paul Lapides for a cracker. He's a compact 5-foot-8, with an academically correct beard and a voluble New York intensity that is the antithesis of Southern laid-backness. He is also a Jew.

In other words, he is not someone census takers would trot out as the cultural personification of Kennesaw, Ga. Nor, for that matter, does Lapides find many kindred spirits here at Kennesaw State University, where he teaches business. Many Jewish professors who have taught at KSU have moved on, run off in some cases by "reorganization" plans. One of their vocal defenders, a respected department chair, was fired after protesting.

Lapides, though, remains. But even more than any of the KSU exiles, he probably has the best reason to leave. In two lawsuits, Lapides has claimed that he is the victim of an attempt to frame him on assault charges, that university officials conspired to besmirch his name with false allegations of sexual misconduct, that records were concealed from him, and that the university has tried to oust him because he fought the bogus claims.

On Feb. 25, his fight will reach all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Justices there will hear arguments on a procedural matter involving one of those lawsuits. The issue at hand is interesting if arcane: how Georgia allegedly slick-lawyered Lapides into a Catch-22 where he could never successfully sue the state.

More significantly, the Lapides case — and the six other discrimination lawsuits in the past decade against the university — reveal what some professors contend is a disturbing pattern of anti-Semitism and discrimination at the college.

For a university that is poised to open its first-ever dorms, that enrolls 14,000 students, and that is trying to join the ranks of the top state schools in Georgia, the reputation of anti-Semitism is like a cough it can't shake.

It's a rap that makes KSU President Betty L. Siegel — who is married to a Jew — recoil. "I'm a coal miner's daughter," she says, "and in the mines, everyone was the same." Pointing to a yarmulke-wearing professor walking across campus, she adds, "We have many tenured professors of all religions and races. We're proud of our reputation as Georgia's international university. I would never tolerate discrimination."

Lapides' boss, business Dean Tim Mescon, considers the professor's charges a personal affront. "Lapides wasn't treated unfairly," Mescon says. "I'm Jewish, and any contention that I'm remotely fomenting an environment of anti-Semitism is absolutely odious."

Nonetheless, Craig Frankel, who has represented several plaintiffs, including Lapides, in various lawsuits, says the university's intransigence is to blame. The KSU administrators "won't tolerate their conduct being questioned," Frankel says. "They're offended by inquiries, and instead of investigating, they retaliate. That's why there has been so much litigation."

KSU's spokesman, Associate Vice President Gordon Harrison, says the number of lawsuits is an "unfair" indicator of the university's relationship with its Jewish faculty members. Harrison notes the school has won three of the cases. Still, Kennesaw also was forced to settle two other cases and lost one. Lapides' case, now with its Supreme Court icing, could prove the most sensational of all.

Of the institutional bias at KSU, Lapides says, "They, from Siegel on down, know it exists and they do nothing. If you want to discriminate against a Jewish professor, or one who is black or foreign, it's tolerated. People are even coached in how to make people leave. Look at the record."

The record, unfortunately for KSU and surrounding Cobb County, is Stars-and-Bars antebellum on issues of tolerance. The community's old guard defiantly erected a white fortress of new-South wealth and old-South attitude to the northwest of much-reviled Atlanta.

The castle walls have started to crumble under the pressure of metro growth — which is reflected in KSU's enrollment, now about 20 percent ethnic minorities. But history is history. Cobb shunned links to MARTA 30 years ago — commonly attributed to phobic anxiety that mass transit would make it easy for inner-city blacks to get to the tony white suburban county. Or, who can forget Cobb's snub of the 1996 Olympic Games with a gay-bashing ordinance? And, whenever the media is looking for relics from the unreconstructed South, they often turn to downtown Kennesaw, where avowed racist Dent "Wildman" Myers runs Wildman's, a boutique where he dispenses Civil War relics and fond recollections of the Ku Klux Klan.

At first glance, however, the KSU campus is pure Sunbelt Post-Modern. It has no white-columned, ivy-shrouded buildings signaling an institutional affinity for the "Lost Cause." No Confederate-attired fraternity boys swagger about. No Nazis, skinheads or junior Klansmen can be found goosestepping to class.

With Kennesaw Mountain as a backdrop and a rural counterpoint, the sleek campus is strictly utilitarian. The academic halls are Spartan, efficient and not very memorable. The scholarly redoubt is somewhat sterile, but not unpleasant among Cobb's rolling hills.

Students are the serious sort. No Berkeley radicalism or even Athens endless-beer-keg partying. KSU students commute to school, overflow huge parking lots with their SUVs and convertibles, and don't hang around after class.

Estimates are that 80 percent or more of the students have jobs, many of those full time. Education isn't an experience; it's a do-or-die line on a resume.

In January, CL informally polled 30 students on the main campus plaza with a three-question survey. Only four students said they participated in KSU activities other than attending classes. Twenty said they had heard of incidents of anti-Semitism and racism; none said they had firsthand knowledge. Five students, two blacks and three foreign (noteworthy, all the blacks and identifiably foreign students interviewed), felt they had experienced some, usually minor, prejudice at the university.

But in 1995, the Anti-Defamation League, a heavyweight Jewish civil rights group, published a list of anti-Semitic incidents around the nation. Among colleges, Kennesaw, with eight black smudges next to its name, had been beat by only one other school as a favorite locale for serial swastika scribblers. Graffiti was scrawled in the KSU library and "Kill the Jews" notes were taped to mailboxes — hooliganism that, as one Jewish professor, who asked anonymity out of fear of the administration, remembers, "made me start looking over my shoulder."

Those ravings of sick minds were easily ignored and dismissed. The Atlanta media hardly noticed.

The KSU office of Paul Lapides is decidedly professorial. The tiny space is crammed and crowded, with boxes and stacks of paper threatening to topple onto the occupant.

There is a difference, however. Most academics don't have a row of financial "tombstones" — descriptions of business fundings and stock offerings — proudly lining one wall.

Lapides defies the truism that those who can't do something teach it. He has done it.

By the time he was 28, he had built a real estate management company. He was a minor partner in one of Manhattan's signature eateries, Sardi's. He has put together a billion-plus bucks' worth of financing for start-up and growth companies. He has managed a property portfolio worth $3 billion.

Lapides has written a row of what he calls "the most boring books in the world" — but they're the bibles of rarefied real estate and business specialties. "Hey, I've made $50,000 off of some of them," he says.

He has honed a reputation as an expert, maybe the expert on "corporate governance," with an emphasis on encouraging public companies to put women on their boards.

In 1991, for reasons even the loquacious Lapides finds hard to explain, he bagged his life in Manhattan and moved to Georgia to teach, first at a private school and then in 1993 at KSU as a professor of management and entrepreneurship. "It may sound drippy, but I felt I had something to offer," Lapides says. He chose Georgia for simple reasons: He'd lived here previously for a while, and he owned a home in Roswell.

On paper, Lapides' KSU career has been stellar. He started and now co-directs the Corporate Governance Center, which, because of its work with corporate boards is a powerful magnet for positive business attention to the university. Lapides adds to his — and KSU's — network by serving on several boards himself.

He is quoted frequently in the press, including a dozen or so recent mentions in the Wall Street Journal. On Jan. 29, for example, the WSJ tapped Lapides to comment on fees paid to board directors — the type of article sure to be read by industrial chieftains.

The university appeared to love him. Although he has nothing more than a M.B.A. from New York University, Lapides was granted tenure in 1998. And, two years ago, KSU gave Lapides and the other co-founder of the governance center, Dana Hermanson, one of the school's three highest honors, the Distinguished Service Award.

President Siegel, in bestowing the award, commented that Lapides and Hermanson are "taking your work as teachers and applying it broadly to the world outside the classroom. You ... should be proud indeed."

Hermanson, in a written statement, cited Lapides' "vision, expertise, determination and ability to foster collaboration among academics and professionals." And, Hermanson commented: "No one on the KSU campus has done as much as Lapides to enhance KSU's reputation in the national business community."

Students echo that accolade. As word spread that this article was being prepared, more than 20 of them contacted CL to offer praise of Lapides. His evaluations by students — some of which are exhibits in his litigation — record one laudatory remark after another. Seldom on evaluation forms do students grade Lapides' classes below "excellent" or "very good."

"He's an awesome professor," says accounting major Richard Nettuno. "Inspirational, a totally different type of professor. He's actually really into corporate ethics, how organizations should treat people."

Christel Mullins, a sales executive who had Lapides for three management courses, says he "has a unique combination of personal knowledge and textbook knowledge. He brings it all together and makes the courses come alive."

Professors as well praise Lapides, although most, saying they feared administration retaliation, would do so only off the record. One professor, however, says she'll brave the administration's ire. "I am a big fan of Paul and I'll tell you why," comments marketing professor Randy Stuart. "I started here in 1998, and students kept telling me, 'I've got this great professor.' I'd ask who, and every single time they'd say, 'Paul Lapides.' When I finally met him, I asked, 'Do you walk on water?'"

So how does a water-walking academic icon become mired in the mud of lawsuits? Lapides and his lawyers profess not to know with certainty. Perhaps it was professional rivalry, Lapides suggests. Maybe that was compounded by the culture clash of a go-go New York entrepreneur on a downhome campus.

Whatever the origin, Lapides isn't shy at describing the next ingredient to his troubles. "I'm Jewish. Around here, that means they can get rid of you."

Up until 1994, the KSU campus' most headline-grabbing brush with controversy had been allowing Newt Gingrich to use political contributions to finance lectures at the college.

But in November of that year, Candace Kaspers, who chaired the communications department, was fired.

"It was a total surprise," recalls Kaspers. Only two months earlier KSU Vice President Ed Rugg had invited her to speak at a Kiwanis Club. "He introduced me as a rising star," she says, adding that she got one of the highest merit raises at the university that year.

Then, Kaspers' rising star plummeted; she was forced to resign a day after protesting a "reorganization" plan that would have eliminated the only two Jewish professors in her department.

"I guess I was already on someone's list," Kaspers says, recounting how she previously had written Siegel about an anti-Semitic incident in her department. A professor, Alan Schwartz, had found a note under his door comparing an orangutan to a Polish Jew.

"I'm not Jewish," Kaspers says, "and I didn't have the sensitivity when I first read that note to understand how Alan would feel. I told him not to take it personally, and he replied, 'How can I not take it personally?'"

After Kaspers came to realize the note was equivalent to a cross-burning, she wrote a memo to Siegel asking for an investigation. "Nothing was done," Kaspers says. "Absolutely nothing."

Except that Kaspers soon found herself booted from the chairmanship, without an office, phone or e-mail.

The mad-as-hell professor sued and won. Big, as it turned out — $275,000 and reinstatement.

When she met with Rugg to negotiate her return to campus, Kaspers says, "He wasn't happy about the publicity. He wanted me to hold a press conference and say the university doesn't discriminate. I couldn't do that. It wasn't true."

That caused an impasse. KSU finally settled with Kaspers for $750,000, and she agreed not to seek reinstatement. Kaspers now runs an Atlanta firm that consults with companies on gender issues.

"Here's how bad things are there," Kaspers says. "When I asked Rugg about the other claims of anti-Semitism, he said, 'Oh, you know those people. They use claims of discrimination as a convenient lever.'"

(The university refers all comments on the discrimination cases to legal counsel and Associate Vice President Harrison, who because of the litigation, decline to address specifics. However, in an interview last week, Siegel — while acknowledging that she didn't know many of the details of the lawsuit — strongly defended her and KSU's reputations for inclusion and diversity.)

What's clear is that there was a purge. Among 25 full-time non-tenured professors at the university's College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, all five who were Jewish were discharged, including Schwartz and another instructor in Kaspers' department.

One of the professors, Bari Levingston, also sued, and the state settled with her for $150,000, bringing the university's payout of taxpayer dollars in the cases to $900,000.

Adding to KSU's black eye in academic circles, Levingston told the prestigious Chronicle of Higher Education that her six-figure settlement proves "there is indeed a problem at Kennesaw."

The Wall Street Journal took notice of the Kaspers case, and commented: "The public relations woes at Kennesaw State College continue."

Even worse than media censure for KSU, the Jewish community was alarmed. The influential Anti-Defamation League's Southeast regional director, Jay Kaiman, said of Kaspers' victory: "We hope this will be a wake-up call to all institutions that they must have zero-tolerance for religious prejudice and will quickly take aggressive and remedial action when problems occur."

But KSU's critics say the university didn't get the message. Like Kaspers, Levingston also had brought her concerns over bias to the KSU administration but she said at the conclusion of her suit, "They refused to even investigate it."

For Lapides, trouble began in 1997 when a female student went to Lapides' department chair and complained that he had told stories in class about his sex life and dating experiences — stories that were inappropriate for a college classroom.

Lapides contends that rather than follow university procedures and treat the complaint confidentially, administrators spread the word about the allegations around campus.

During the investigation that followed, the department chair, Teresa Covin, produced notes of a meeting with Lapides at which he allegedly admitted the insensitive remarks.

Her "notes" refer to Lapides being under stress because of his father's death, according to court documents. Those "notes," however, were dated two weeks before Lapides' father died, according to the professor's lawsuit and to the father's death certificate.

Covin, according to the lawsuit, "admitted ... she fabricated notes of the meeting."

In an interview, Covin disputed that she fabricated the records and said they were made "in a reasonable amount of time after the meeting."

Lapides was given a letter by a KSU official that stated no evidence supported the student's "claim of a sexually hostile environment." However, the letter went on to say that "at least one other student" had concerns about Lapides' conduct, and Lapides was admonished to be more sensitive.

Considering that a major part of Lapides' professional reputation had to do with counseling companies on gender equity in the boardroom, the letter's ostensible exoneration was in effect damning for the professor. He demanded an unqualified clearing of his name, which he has never been able to get.

Subsequent investigations and interviews with students, conducted by both KSU's and Lapides' investigators, thoroughly supported Lapides' claims of innocence — and, in fact, court documents include claims that his accuser had said "she hated all men and all Jews." Lapides' lawsuit makes the point that a non-Jewish professor who had been accused of harassment had received confidential, considerate treatment by KSU.

With Lapides, according to his lawsuit, "one or more administrators disclosed information about the complaint to other faculty and/or staff, resulting in widespread and long-standing rumors that Lapides had sexually harassed female students."

Lapides recalls that he became very worried, and began requesting records about himself. KSU's Harrison says Lapides was always given everything he was entitled to — and any omissions were accidents. Lapides responds: "Yeah, sure."

At the time, Lapides was in line for an appointment to the board of a public company. He had a private investigator do a background check to ensure the gig would hit no snags.

"There were clearly meetings among KSU administrators that had taken place," says the investigator, David Basham. "The people, the campus police chief, the lead attorney, various deans. You know there had to be notes. It was unbelievable that there were no notes of any kind. But that's what they said."

Then Basham began examining what documents were produced. "These were written with intense detail," he says. "I concluded there must be a file, that they were purging records from official files and putting them somewhere, a file they were hiding from the open records process.

"Then a couple of years later, some of these documents started turning up," Basham says. "We were right all along."

In November 1998, Lapides made the first of his open records requests. For whatever reasons, it took more than a year to get much of the material. Derogatory information about the professor was supposed to have been purged from the university's files, but Lapides eventually discovered four such documents in at least seven different KSU files.

KSU's Harrison doesn't dispute that files and documents kept popping up, but he attributes it to the complex workings of a bureaucracy. There was never an intent to conceal, and it isn't KSU's fault if staff kept making copies of various papers, he maintains.

Lapides has twice tried to have criminal charges brought against KSU officials for breaking the state's Open Records Law — only to be rebuffed by judges in Cobb County.

Referring to the law that made it a criminal act to withhold records, Mike Bowers, a former Georgia attorney general and one of Lapides' attorneys, says: "If there were ever a case for which the 1999 sanctions were designated, this is it. Why have the new sanctions if they are not applied when government officials withhold damaging information about a professor after having been requested to make this information available so it can be known, faced and rebutted?"

In August 2000, one of Lapides' searches turned up a firecracker. A memo to Board of Regents lawyers defending the university was authored by KSU legal counsel Flora Devine. In it she referred to "a second sexual harassment investigation" against Lapides that could result in a "criminal complaint."

Lapides was totally unaware of any other allegations. "That document wasn't in the file the first time we looked, which makes me wonder how it got there," Lapides says. "But when we saw it, it was more evidence of the same thing. They'll do anything to hurt me, but won't talk to me."

KSU's problems aren't limited to the Jewish faculty members. In March 2000, 14 tenured black faculty members sent a detailed list of complaints to President 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."

Following the letter, KSU asked an employment expert from Emory University to investigate some of the charges. That report was completed 13 months ago, but university officials are sitting on the public document despite an Open Records Law request by professor Carol Edwards, chairman of the Visual Arts Department.

"When you state your needs at Kennesaw, they see you as a troublemaker," says Edwards, who has been cited as a distinguished professor both by KSU and the Board of Regents.

"And, yes, with Jewish faculty members it has been worse," she says. "I can't say whether they've been fired because they're Jewish, but they have been treated differently. Everything here is seen through a Christian focus — holidays, for example. There's ignorance by people who shouldn't be ignorant."

Four doors down from Lapides is the office of professor Ken Robinson. The two men started out as friends, comparing notes on cars, mechanics and barbers. "Silly bonding sort of stuff," Lapides recalls.

The bonds, however, blew apart. Police reports, court documents and an affidavit from a then-Kennesaw student who was also Robinson's live-in girlfriend tell an incredible story — incredible mostly because of KSU's indifference.

The "second sexual harassment" charge uncovered by Lapides' search during the summer of 2000 involved Robinson's girlfriend, Mindy Buckalew. In 1998, she had made a police report alleging that Lapides had assaulted her, even pulled a gun, put it in her mouth and told her to keep her "fucking mouth shut."

When Lapides read the report, he recalls: "I thought, 'This is great. It's better evidence than I had ever had.' I knew I didn't do it, and that this would blow open what was happening with me at Kennesaw."

The Cobb police officer who investigated concluded in February 1999: "I cannot find a foundation for the allegation indicating that a crime ever was committed in the first place and am clearing this case as unfounded."

Lapides contends that documents show KSU was following the case — it was referred to in Devine's memo to the Board of Regents lawyers. Thus, Lapides figures, the administration would have known the Kennesaw police had decided Buckalew's report had no merit, that it was false. Yet, the university never informed Lapides he was under investigation, much less that he had been cleared. Nor were the Regents' lawyers advised of the police findings.

After discovering the police report, Lapides' lawyers tracked down Buckalew, who by then had left KSU. In September 2000, Buckalew made a sworn statement to Lapides' attorneys recanting her allegations in the police report.

She that said while she was "under tremendous pressure," her boyfriend, professor Robinson, convinced her that "Lapides was after me" and "that I needed to file the report." Robinson, she stated, claimed "Lapides had friends in the Mafia."

The statement concluded that Buckalew does not believe or have any proof that her assailant was Lapides.

Robinson, in an interview with CL, denied every statement concerning him made by Buckalew, although he acknowledged a personal relationship. He said that while he had accompanied her to the police station when the original report was made, "I wanted nothing to do with it."

Robinson blamed Buckalew's about-face on pressure brought by Lapides' attorneys. Robinson also said his doctorate and his award of research funding had engendered "jealousy" by Lapides, and that was the origin of the meltdown between the two.

Buckalew's affidavit contains details of another electrifying campus episode. In November 1998 she was summoned to a meeting with business Dean Mescon, department Chair Covin, the head of the KSU police and two other administrators.

"All of the members tried to convince me that I needed to file a sexual harassment complaint against professor Lapides," Buckalew stated. "The group kept me in the legal office for about three hours. ... I felt like I was being backed into a corner with no way out. The group told me there were four to five other female students that had made complaints against professor Lapides and needed me to 'lead the pack and the other female students would follow behind me.'"

Buckalew escaped by promising to think about things. "It is my opinion that the faculty group was more interested in getting a complaint about professor Lapides than they were about finding the truth."

Covin says Buckalew "did not accurately describe the meeting." And, Dean Mescon depicts Buckalew as "extremely distraught," and says that he would "never pressure a student."

There are other allegations of intimidation on campus. When Diane Michael, an investigator for one of Lapides' lawyers, visited campus — with KSU police permission — she says she was accosted and cornered against bushes by Dean Mescon and Robinson. "Belligerent and hostile" is how Michael recalls the faculty members. "There's a real problem on that campus," she says.

Robinson denies the event happened. Mescon recalled the incident, but calls Michael's rendition "unbelievably offensive," and that all he did was to ask her to make appointments with faculty before visiting campus.

No other harassment complaints have ever surfaced against Lapides, raising a big question about the motives and veracity of the administrators at the meeting where Buckalew says she felt pressured to finger the professor. Of course, KSU will certainly contend that Buckalew's contradictory statements prove she isn't trustworthy.

Whatever, there is no indication that KSU ever initiated any investigation of the actions of Robinson, Mescon, Covin or others.

In March 2000, Lapides sued KSU and several of its officials in Cobb County Superior Court.

At the same time, he filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming he was discriminated against because he is Jewish. The EEOC must grant a "right to sue" before a discrimination suit can be filed in federal court. That determination, based on a finding that there is sufficient evidence to pursue a claim, came last year, and in September, Lapides filed that lawsuit in federal district court.

It's his state lawsuit, however, that ended up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Georgia Attorney General's Office immediately sought to move the state case to federal court. And, then, when it was in federal court, the state claimed Lapides couldn't sue because the 11th Amendment gives states immunity in federal court against claims by individuals.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Thrash ruled the state waived its immunity by seeking federal jurisdiction, but an appellate court reversed that decision. The Supreme Court then decided to hear the case. (The state has no 11th Amendment immunity in the separate EEOC litigation.)

Lawyers for the Attorney General's Office, speaking on background, said the jump from state to federal courtrooms wasn't a trick, but was done merely to sort claims into the proper jurisdiction.

And, if the proper jurisdiction makes Lapides ineligible to sue, tough luck.

David Bederman, an Emory law professor who will argue for Lapides before the Supreme Court, says the state "is just doing what good lawyers do, using procedure to try and win the case. It's a divide and conquer tactic, split the claims and knock them down, usually avoiding arguing the substance. They hope to drive up the legal bills and keep people from suing the state."

Indeed, KSU has virtually unlimited cash — taxpayer dollars — to thwart staff members who feel aggrieved. Yet the legal bills for the professors quickly tally more than six figures. Lapides, due to his successful entrepreneurial past, is one of the few who could sustain protracted legal warfare.

But while the state may be engaging in shrewd lawyering, Bederman says, "it's just plain improper from the standpoint of whether citizens can seek claims against the government."

Lapides, meanwhile, is looking at his stack of lawyers' fees totaling more than $400,000. His phone messages occasionally contain threatening phone calls; he has a gun and says he is fearful for his safety.

When not parsing the tiny details of his case, he talks most often about his son — divorced, he's been a single parent for 15 years — and his religion. Lapides is not merely Jewish. As with most of his life, even his religion is exceptional. Lapides is a "messianic" Jew, one who believes in Christ. It's a route not likely to win accolades in mainstream Judaism; and, of course, as Lapides says he has found out in Georgia, anti-Semitic Christians don't distinguish between Jews who believe in Jesus and Jews who don't. "They are equal opportunity haters," he wryly quips.

Stricken with spinal disk problems several years ago, Lapides nonetheless crackles with nervous energy. The disease, however, has forced him to teach a reduced workload. Ironically, Robinson — who also acquired a gun for personal safety — is teaching some of Lapides' classes.

"They didn't think I would fight," Lapides says. "I guess they misjudged me."

john.sugg@creativeloafing.com??