Three former professors at Oral Roberts University have sued the evangelical institution in Tulsa, Okla., filing a petition on Tuesday in state court that accuses the university’s president, Richard L. Roberts, of using university resources to back a local mayoral candidate and to bankroll an extravagant lifestyle for his family.
The lawsuit also says that university administrators tried to cover up the president’s involvement in the mayoral campaign when the Internal Revenue Service began investigating the nonprofit institution’s interventions into local politics.
The plaintiffs are suing the university, Mr. Roberts, and two other administrators for breach of contract, wrongful discharge, slander, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The suit asks for damages “in excess of $10,000.”
The university released a statement regarding the lawsuit on Tuesday that reads in its entirety, “It is important for ORU students and their families, faculty and staff, alumni, partners as well as the general public to understand that this lawsuit is largely premised upon a compilation of incomplete statements, unsubstantiated rumors, and innuendoes. ORU will address these allegations through the legal process.”
Whatever the fate of its legal claims, the lawsuit lays out a narrative that is about as sensational as they come in academe.
It all started in December of 2005, says Tim Brooker, a plaintiff in the suit and a former professor of government at Oral Roberts. One day that month, Mr. Brooker says he was summoned to Mr. Roberts’s office on the 57th floor of the CityPlex Towers, formerly the City of Faith Medical and Research Center, built by Mr. Roberts’s father, Oral. Also summoned to the meeting was John W. Swails, then chair of the department of history, humanities, and government, who is also a plaintiff in the suit.
Mr. Brooker, who is described in the lawsuit as having a background in “diplomacy, public policy and administration, campaign management, and talk radio,” was well known on the campus and in Republican political circles for teaching practicum courses that trained students as campaign organizers. Students in his classes would often travel outside of Oklahoma during campaign seasons to get experience canvassing, phone banking, and drawing up political battle plans -- with each student’s way paid by the Republican National Committee.
But that day in 2005, Mr. Roberts, who is the son of the university’s eponymous founder, directed Mr. Brooker to muster his students to support Randi Miller, a candidate in the local Republican mayoral primary campaign, according to the lawsuit. Mr. Brooker and Mr. Swails both objected to the plan, citing the legal problems that could arise if a tax-exempt institution put its weight behind a candidate. However, the lawsuit says, Mr. Roberts insisted.
So Mr. Brooker enlisted his students, with promises of extra credit, to work on the campaign. According to him, they were supervised by Stephanie Cantese, who is Mr. Roberts’s sister-in-law and the community and governmental liaison for Oral Roberts Ministries.
Mr. Brooker’s and Mr. Swails’s worries about legal issues were, it seems, confirmed. According to the lawsuit, the Internal Revenue Service began investigating Oral Roberts in May 2006, after it received a complaint that the university was involved in a local campaign in possible violation of its nonprofit status.
The lawsuit says the university’s administration then prevailed on Mr. Brooker to “fall on the sword” and take responsibility for the campaign push. He says he eventually wrote a narrative, under pressure, that attributed the campaign effort to his work with the campus Republicans. The lawsuit also says that the then provost, Ralph Fagin, signed a sworn statement that omitted any mention of Mr. Roberts’s involvement. The IRS closed the investigation.
According to the lawsuit, the university then made a show of disciplining Mr. Brooker. It says the administration canceled two of his scheduled summer courses, which would have earned him $18,000. And it says that Mr. Brooker suffered unspecified “excessive and unnecessary harassment, loss of academic freedom, was subjected to public humiliation, and endured retaliatory and punitive conduct by defendants.”
However, something else strange had happened during the ill-fated (and unsuccessful) mayoral campaign. According to Mr. Brooker and Mr. Swails, a student working on the campaign was helping Ms. Cantese back up the hard drive on her laptop computer one day when he came across a suspicious document. The document, they say, presents an itemized list of dozens of instances of possible ethical and financial misconduct by Mr. Roberts and his family, along with an index of documented proof for each instance. “It seems to be an index of potential scandal vulnerabilities and a listing of the documents that would be available to support that,” speculates Mr. Brooker, who says the student passed the document on to him and Mr. Swails. “It’s like she conducted her own scandal-vulnerability assessment for the ministry.”
According to the lawsuit, Mr. Brooker and Mr. Swails gave a copy of the document to the provost. “The university needed to be aware that that information was out there,” says Mr. Swails. “We wanted to see the best interests of the university served.”
The two men say they were hardly met with gratitude. According to the suit, Ms. Cantese threatened to have Mr. Brooker’s wife, Paulita Brooker, fired from her post as an instructor at the university if he did not return all copies of the document to her. Ms. Brooker, who is the third plaintiff in the case, was let go in May 2007.
Then in July, after months of “prayerful” consideration, Mr. Swails and Mr. Brooker decided to take the mysterious document one step further: to the Board of Regents.
The itemized document, as partially reproduced in the lawsuit, includes entries stating that:
- The university “maintains a stable of horses for the exclusive use of the Roberts children.”
- “The university jet was used to take one daughter -- with several of her friends -- on a senior trip to Orlando, Fla., and the Bahamas. ... The university was billed $29,411.00 for the trip.”
- “University and ministry employees are regularly summoned to the Roberts’s home to do the daughters’ homework.”
- “Mrs. Roberts personally awarded 13 nonacademic, non-need-based scholarships exclusively to friends of her children.”
Mr. Brooker resigned a few days after the regents received the document, saying that he felt he was about to be fired anyway. Then in August, Mr. Swails says two campus security guards interrupted him while he was teaching a class called “Faith and Civilization.” The guards escorted him to his own office, he says, where the provost told the tenured professor that he was being terminated and his office impounded. The guards then escorted Mr. Swails off the campus, he says.
Mr. Swails says he met with his lawyer the next day to begin working on the lawsuit.
Both Mr. Swails and Mr. Brooker said they have the university’s best interests in mind. “I love the university,” says Mr. Swails. “Our intent is not to damage.”
“If something isn’t done,” says Mr. Brooker, “a great and noble university is going to crash.”
Background articles from The Chronicle:
