At least one thing about Dong-Sheng Guo is indisputable: He taught physics at Southern University at Baton Rouge during the past academic year, just as he has done for two decades.
What is in dispute is whether Mr. Guo should have been in front of the classroom those two semesters at all.
University officials say that Mr. Guo was fired in May 2012, during a period of financial exigency that the institution said allowed it to cut tenured faculty members and programs in order to offset the effects of enrollment declines and shrinking state appropriations. (That view is disputed by the American Association of University Professors, which has censured Southern.)
But the chairman of the physics department, Diola Bagayoko, says Southern botched Mr. Guo’s termination process from the outset and that left him no choice but to allow his colleague to keep working.
However, Mr. Bagayoko said on Tuesday night that he had been told that day that the campus’s chancellor, James L. Llorens, had decided to strip him of his role as chair because of how Mr. Guo’s case played out.
University officials had previously said that the institution followed the proper legal procedures when firing Mr. Guo and that the matter of how he was still able to teach was under investigation. Edward Pratt, a spokesman for the university, could not be reached Tuesday night to comment on the status of Mr. Bagayoko’s chairmanship.
Earlier, however, when asked about who might be the recipient of any disciplinary action, Mr. Pratt said that he would not discuss personnel matters. Disciplinary action, if appropriate, would follow once the investigation was complete, Mr. Pratt said.
Mr. Guo could not be reached for comment.
No Documents
Mr. Bagayoko maintains that he did the right thing on behalf of Mr. Guo. “No one sent me any documents about his termination. I was not copied on the notice,” said Mr. Bagayoko, a professor of physics who has worked at Southern since 1984. “When he told me about it, he said he was going to appeal. When he didn’t get a response, I have absolutely no grounds or authority to tell him not to teach.”
That was especially true, said Mr. Bagayoko, when he saw that Mr. Guo had been assigned classes for the fall semester last year.
Meanwhile, in the summer of 2012, the process to fire Mr. Guo, a professor of physics, was already in motion. Southern mailed a termination letter, dated May 30, to his home in Baton Rouge, but Mr. Guo was doing research in China at the time. He then went to Tennessee to participate in a university-backed summer research program for faculty members at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
When Mr. Guo returned to Louisiana, he saw the letter for the first time, he said. That was on August 13, 2012, according to documents he submitted to university officials as part of his appeal. He appealed his termination and did so within a seven-day window provided for employees fired under financial exigency—a period that Mr. Guo interpreted as beginning when he actually received the letter.
Mr. Guo’s main argument against his termination, set to be effective on June 30, 2012, hinged on the timing of the notice he received. According to his account, he wasn’t given 30 days’ notice of his termination, as required, within the period of financial exigency. A mail carrier attempted to deliver the letter of termination to Mr. Guo’s home on June 1, when he was out of the country, but the letter should have already arrived a day earlier to comply with the 30-day window, Mr. Bagayoko said.
“The burden is on the university to get the letter to him,” Mr. Bagayoko said.
Teaching Without Pay
Mr. Bagayoko said he hand-delivered Mr. Guo’s appeal letter, dated August 17, to the Baton Rouge campus’s chancellor. But Mr. Guo told his colleague he got no response before classes began, on August 20. So he showed up to teach his scheduled four courses, plus a fifth for which Mr. Bagayoko could not find an instructor.
Mr. Guo never got paid. At the end of the semester, Mr. Guo contacted the university’s human-resources department about his paychecks and received $20,000 for the four classes; he had volunteered to teach the fifth one, an overload, without pay, Mr. Bagayoko said.
Southern officials said earlier this month that Mr. Guo had been officially removed from the payroll as of February 2013 but not from the system that professors use to see what classes they’ll be teaching. That system automatically “rolls over” the courses that professors have taught in the past, and that’s why Mr. Guo was still slated to teach the same courses he had the previous year.
By the end of the fall-2012 semester, according to documents that outline the case, Mr. Guo had hired a lawyer who filed a petition for an injunction to stop the termination. A state court rejected the request for an injunction but did give Mr. Guo more time to appeal to the chancellor, who denied the appeal in mid-January, shortly after classes for the spring semester had begun.
In the meantime, Mr. Guo reported to class for the spring-2013 semester. His classes were still assigned to him in the university’s computer system.
Mr. Guo appealed his campus leader’s decision to the president of the Southern University system in late January. The president, in early March, recommended to the Southern University Board of Supervisors that Mr. Guo’s appeal be denied.
The spring semester ended, and Mr. Guo, again, wasn’t paid. Tracie J. Woods, the university system’s general counsel, recommended early this month that Mr. Guo be paid as an adjunct professor for the classes he taught in the spring.
Undetected Professor
Ms. Woods said that Mr. Guo’s termination “was legal and executed according to financial-emergency procedures,” according to a letter she wrote to the Board of Supervisor’s academic-affairs committee.
Mr. Guo’s final appeal hearing, before the board, was scheduled for August 16. The board postponed a decision until early September, when it then voted not to consider Mr. Guo’s appeal.
It’s unclear whether Mr. Guo plans to turn to the courts to get his job back. Mr. Guo’s lawyer didn’t return a phone call seeking comment.
It’s also not clear exactly how Mr. Guo’s presence on the campus went undetected for so long. The university system’s lawyer, Ms. Woods, in her letter to the board’s academic-affairs committee, wrote that Southern University at Baton Rouge had made some “administrative mistakes” that allowed Mr. Guo to work for two additional semesters. But she had sharp words for Mr. Guo and the physics department that Mr. Bagayoko leads. They “knew Dr. Guo was terminated,” she said, but the department let him keep working anyway.
Mr. Bagayoko disagreed. “Some other people in the department may have known, but I didn’t know,” he said. “That statement is directly attacking my integrity.”
