The Documentary Case For Wayne Watson's Firing: An Offer for Readers of This Blog

For the past four years, and especially over the past several months, the contributors to this blog have laid out the case for Wayne Watson’s mismanagement of Chicago State University. His tenure includes multiple performance failures coupled with a demonstrable and sustained fealty to crony hiring and promotions. The results for the school have been disastrous. Watson’s execrable performance as Chicago State’s president warrants his immediate dismissal along with a purge of his crony-riven upper administrative ranks.

Watson’s supporters have responded to the multiple revelations of his incompetence and the academic dishonesty and fraud perpetrated by both Watson and several top university administrators--at a minimum, the university’s current interim provost, an associate vice president and an associate director--by attacking the messengers exposing Watson’s ineptitude and unethical behavior. In particular, Watson and his mouthpieces have denounced his opposition as a small group of “disgruntled” faculty; by implication dishonest, whose stock-in-trade includes distorted facts and “mean-spirited” and “uncivil” personal attacks on persons inside the administration. However, to date, neither Watson nor his acolytes have refuted any of the documentary evidence Watson opponents have provided to undergird their assertions.

This past Sunday, in an attempt to make the case for Watson’s dismissal clearer, I e-mailed my faculty colleagues a compendium of information that included a number of the most damning pieces of evidence I have collected over the past few months. As a member of the community of scholars that constitute Chicago State, I feel that my faculty colleagues deserve to be able to examine the most essential evidentiary material supporting my contention that Watson is a failure who deserves to be terminated. I also feel that readers of this web site deserve the same opportunity. As a result, I am enclosing the e-mail I sent to my faculty colleagues on Sunday, April 6, 2014. If anyone who reads this blog wishes to see any or all of the documentary evidence I have collected, please e-mail me at rbionaz@att.net, and I will send you copies of the material.

Here is a copy of the pertinent portions of the e-mail I sent to my faculty colleagues on April 6:

Dear Colleagues:

As many of you have heard in meetings with Wayne Watson and in news media blurbs produced by the Watson administration, persons opposed to Watson are nothing more than “individuals who have shown they will go to great lengths to undermine any member of this administration in any way they can" (Chicago Tribune, January 14, 2014). Watson repeats this claim frequently and it is useful in airily dismissing even charges of academic dishonesty and fraud. Watson uses this argument as a cudgel with which to bash faculty who dare to take seriously the claims made by and the actions of dissenting faculty or the Faculty Senate. In Watson’s view, these misguided dupes simply do not have “all the facts.” The implication is that dissenters are, in reality, lying, misrepresenting reality, or distorting the truth in the service of some kind of vile agenda.

Frankly, I am tired of hearing this bullshit from an administration that has done little more than bring the university to the verge of extinction by virtue of its multiple failures. In that spirit, I present to you a compilation of the evidence that supports my belief that Watson and his administrators should be fired and sent packing. Much of this material will be familiar to readers of the Faculty Voice as it has been presented piecemeal on that site over the past several months. Some of the material is evidence I have not released before but I think the time has come for these documents to be presented in a complete and hopefully coherent format in order for anyone interested to form her/his own conclusions regarding the efficacy of the Watson administration. Here are the points I will cover:

1. Watson’s failure in enrollment management.
2. Watson’s failure in compliance and accounting procedures.
3. Watson’s failure as a fundraiser.
4. Watson’s failure in public relations.
5. Watson’s supervisory propensity toward vindictiveness and retaliation.
6. Watson’s failure to protect the academic integrity of Chicago State University.
7. Watson’s attacks on free expression and duly constituted university advisory bodies.

I am appending a number of attachments to this e-mail. You are free to read as many or as few as you wish. These attachments provide documentary evidence for the assertions I make in the narrative overview, which I endeavor to present with little editorial comment. The six attachments include the following:

Document 1 narrates Watson’s multiple failures and provides an overview of the case for his dismissal. For those who wish to consult the original materials, there are references in the text to my sources of information.

Document 2 discusses Angela Henderson’s plagiarized dissertation. It includes a copy of the dissertation with problematic passages, citations and bibliographical entries marked in yellow, a copy of the plagiarism report I submitted to the University of Illinois at Chicago, and separate pages that show the composition of her committee and the date of IRB approval for her research project.

Document 3 addresses crony hiring at Chicago State and the existence of falsified applications/resumes submitted by three CSU administrators, Cheri Sidney, Angela Henderson and Tyra Austin. Included are: a copy of the CSU Human Resources guidelines for effective supervision. Of particular interest are pages 6 and 7, which detail the consequences for falsifying official university records; copies of the applications and/or resumes of Sidney, Henderson and Austin; degree verification for Sidney; official notification that Austin has no degree.

Document 4 details the crony promotions and special positions created by Watson for Cheri Sidney and Tyra Austin. Documents include: Administrative Hiring Forms, Budget Change Forms, Request for Funding Form and Personnel Change Notices.

Document 5 recounts this school year’s attacks on the Faculty Senate. Included are the Henderson memorandum of October 31, 2013; Watson’s memoranda of January 28 and February 25, 2014; Patrick Cage’s Freedom of Information Act request of February 28, 2014, and the official results of the Senate balloting to amend its constitution as requested by Watson.

Document 6 explores the Watson administration’s attack on the Faculty Voice blog. Documents include the “Cease and Desist” order from Patrick Cage on November 11, 2013, the response from Wesley Johnson on November 27, 2013, and the trademark infringement letter from Gonzalez, Saggio and Harlan.

I believe that these documents demonstrate a serious and sustained pattern of incompetence and misbehavior on the part of Wayne Watson and members of his administration. Various portions of this information have been communicated to members of the Illinois state legislature, to the Chicago State Board of Trustees, to the Illinois Executive Inspector General and to the Governor of Illinois. You can see what their collective response has been. It is my belief that if something is not done soon, this school may cease to exist. I trust you to come to your own conclusions on that matter.

I am willing to have a substantive discussion with anyone regarding the material enclosed in this communication. I will not, however, respond to anonymous attacks or stale talking points. If there is evidence that counters the material I am providing, I would be delighted to see it.