No immediate discipline is planned for any Dickinson State University employees, the chancellor of North Dakota’s university system said on Saturday, a day after the public release of an audit report that determined the university had awarded hundreds of degrees to foreign students who didn’t earn them and as the campus mourned the death, apparently by suicide, of a popular dean.
However, one high-ranking administrator did step down on Friday after the audit’s release, according to news reports. The university’s vice president for academic affairs, Jon Brudvig, was not named in the audit report, but was in charge of overseeing the special international programs in which the students were enrolled. He will remain at the university in a yet-to-be-determined role while looking for another job, the system chancellor, William G. Goetz, told the Associated Press on Saturday.
Mr. Goetz declined to discuss any connection between the audit’s findings and the apparent suicide of Douglas A. LaPlante, who was dean of the university’s College of Education, Business, and Applied Sciences, the Associated Press reported. Mr. LaPlante was not named in the audit report, either, but many affected students had studied in a business program he led.
“I cannot say whether his unfortunate death may have had anything to do with the audit,” Mr. Goetz said. “I won’t draw any conclusions at this time.”
Dickinson city police officers had searched for Mr. LaPlante for several hours on Friday morning after it was determined that he had left his home on foot and was believed to be carrying a high-powered rifle, The Dickinson Press, a local newspaper, reported. His body was found shortly after midday in a city park with an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, the police said. While his whereabouts were unknown, the campus was on emergency alert, and students were told to return to their residences, a notice on the university’s Web site states.
Mr. Goetz and Dickinson State’s president, D.C. Coston, announced the audit’s findings in a briefing for faculty and staff members on Friday morning, before the campus was shut down. The students involved had enrolled in special international programs that bring foreign students to the campus for a semester or longer and award a dual degree or certificate with their home institution, according to accounts of that briefing by The Bismarck Tribune and The Dickinson Press.
Mr. Coston said the situation does not affect 170 foreign students from 31 countries who have enrolled under different circumstances.
Mr. Goetz said that the problems appear to be a legacy of the university’s previous president, Richard J. McCallum, who was fired last year after being found responsible for erroneously inflated enrollment numbers. The report does not mention Mr. McCallum, but statistics it presents show a sharp rise in the number of degrees awarded through the special international programs beginning in the summer of 2008, months after he became president.