This is an appeal to you ' Ohio University President McDavis, Provost Krendl and Engineering Dean Irwin. I ask your help in bringing a healthy breath of fresh air to one small part of the unhappy pall of negatives that currently hover over Ohio University's integrity.
Please exercise your administrative authority and put an end to OU's legal and other kinds of stonewalling in IMSE Professor Bob Lipset's David and Goliath struggle with Ohio University. All you have to do is call off OU's lawyers and do what the Ohio Civil Rights Commission ordered you to do on Jan. 12.
Ohio University's lawyers argue that the OCRC demonstrated absolute arrogance in its actions for Lipset. I think these words absolute arrogance are a good description of OU's behavior. It is true that most little Davids in these battles with giant Goliaths give up and fade away. Thus, I stand in awe that Lipset has been able to find the physical, psychological and financial resources to continue his gallant, almost five-year, battle for justice. I applaud the OCRC.
Stonewalling like this reinforces perceptions ' local, statewide, national and international ' that something continues to be sadly awry here at Ohio University. This unfortunate pall obscures OU's many rays of academic sunshine.
Allow me to identify a few of this pall's ingredients: 1) the Lipset case, 2) computer security breaches and related allegedly questionable staff firings, 3) plagiarism in engineering, 4) faculty vote of no-confidence in OU leaders, 5) problems with Vision Ohio, 6) allegations of improprieties with the business college's India MBA program, 7) alcohol and DUI problems for the Bobcats' football coach and assistant wrestling coach that also raise some potential equity and justice concerns, 8) a $9,672 (4.03 percent) 2006-07 salary increase for the DUI football coach, 9) six days of study as penalty for some of the 17 Bobcat football and other athletes who recently ran amuck with alcohol and the law. My goodness, study is punishment? I thought that study was why students came to universities so as to grow their brains.
President McDavis, Provost Krendl, and Dean Irwin, please help jump-start OU's integrity restoration project by calling off the lawyers and complying with the OCRC's order to reinstate Professor Lipset ' with promotion, tenure and full back pay.
' Chuck Overby is a professor emeritus in the Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Department
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Letter to the Editor
