When a custodian at Eastern Michigan University found the body of Laura Dickinson on the floor of her dormitory room last December, the president, John A. Fallon III, promised a thorough investigation. “I would not condone anything but the full and complete disclosure of information,” he told The Ann Arbor News.
The day after the discovery of the student’s body, the university put out a statement saying that there was “no reason to suspect foul play.” For more than two months, even as the local medical examiner began suggesting to reporters that Ms. Dickinson had been murdered, the university did not correct that false reassurance.
Since then, it has become clear that at least four Eastern Michigan administrators knew how Ms. Dickinson’s body was found: on her back, legs spread, naked from the waist down, with a pillow over her face. One official cited fear of compromising the case as the reason he did not tell even her parents that she had probably been murdered.
The president, Mr. Fallon, appeared incurious. He had retreated from the investigation despite his pledge to lead it.
On February 23, the county prosecutor arrested Orange Amir Taylor III, another Eastern Michigan student, for the rape and murder of Ms. Dickinson. (The two students did not seem to know each other, and the suspect has pleaded not guilty.)
Many people on the campus were outraged. In public forums, students condemned what they saw as the administration’s betrayal of their trust and disregard for their safety.
Mr. Fallon said the arrest was the first indication to him that a crime had occurred. He adamantly insisted on that lack of awareness through two major investigations: one, commissioned by the Board of Regents, by Butzel Long, a Detroit-based law firm, and another by the U.S. Department of Education.
The university’s failure to warn its students and employees was not only an ethical breach, the reports concluded, but a violation of federal law.
Some people at Eastern Michigan still believe Mr. Fallon did not know, until the arrest, that Ms. Dickinson was the victim of a violent crime. Others think he stuck to that story to protect his job.
Whether or not the president knew is beside the point, say many faculty and staff members, as well as some regents: He should have known.
“Something as significant as a death on campus requires crisis management,” says Roy E. Wilbanks, vice chairman of the Board of Regents. “The president should have been right in the middle of that investigation, leading a crisis team.”
But there was no crisis team. And faculty members say Mr. Fallon’s hanging back was characteristic of his style. Chosen for the job as the only candidate standing after a yearlong search, he was not known as an aggressive leader. His political capital had dwindled along with enrollment, and was further diminished by a bitter faculty strike.
The regents voted unanimously last week to fire Mr. Fallon. In an era of increased scrutiny of campus security, his failure to take control of the situation ended up costing the president and two other administrators their jobs.
The regents also announced retirement settlements with James F. Vick, vice president for student affairs, and Cindy L. Hall, director of campus police, each of whom had worked at Eastern Michigan for about 30 years. In addition, the board placed a written reprimand for inadequate oversight into the permanent employee file of Kenneth A. McKanders, the general counsel.
Keeping the president had become impossible, says one of the regents, Francine Parker. “There has been so much controversy associated with the university that in order to regain the trust of the community we serve,” she says, “we needed to start anew, from the top.”
The murder case was the final blow to the short tenure of Mr. Fallon, who did not return numerous calls to his home last week. He told reporters after his firing, “I have a story to tell and intend to tell it.” But so far, he has not.
Rocky Start
John Fallon became president of Eastern Michigan through a process of elimination. The previous president, Samuel A. Kirkpatrick, resigned in 2004 amid a scandal over the $6-million construction of a presidential house. While an interim president led the university, the board named two finalists for the job: Beverley J. Pitts, then provost of Ball State University, and Mr. Fallon, then president of the State University of New York at Potsdam. Immediately after her interview in Ypsilanti, Ms. Pitts announced she would become president of the University of Indianapolis. Eastern Michigan hired Mr. Fallon, and he took office in July 2005.
“We have sobering challenges in the road ahead,” the president said in a written introduction. He knew there was lingering mistrust of the university administration. He kept a public diary on Eastern Michigan’s Web site, where he also posted lists of his “perspectives on the academy,” as well as his “personal perspectives and values.”
“I believe that interpersonal trust is simultaneously the most important and the most elusive element of human relations,” one item said.
Within a year, Mr. Fallon began to lose the trust of faculty members. In April 2006 he appointed a provost, Donald M. Loppnow, without consulting them.
“That really got the faculty’s hackles up,” says Howard Bunsis, a professor of accounting and finance and president of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors. One professor discovered that Mr. Fallon had done the same thing in his seven-year tenure at Potsdam. The Faculty Assembly there had passed a resolution expressing “grave disapproval” of Mr. Fallon’s decision to name a chief academic officer without properly consulting professors.
A few months later, the faculty union at Eastern Michigan became mired in hostile contract negotiations with the university administration. The union was not satisfied with the university’s pay and health-care proposals, and found the administration disrespectful and dishonest, Mr. Bunsis says. Negotiators for the university refused to share financial data, which faculty members had to obtain through Freedom of Information Act requests, he says. The university overcharged the AAUP chapter for photocopies, negotiators set artificial deadlines, and Mr. Fallon kept his distance from the process, Mr. Bunsis says.
“His actions during negotiations were really well short of what a leader should have provided,” the professor says. At 10 p.m. on the day before classes were scheduled to begin last fall, the university’s negotiators walked away from the table. The faculty members went on strike for 12 days before both sides agreed to a fact-finding process, which continued into the spring. Instructors went back to work on expired contracts.
Mr. Fallon began meeting with faculty members one on one and in small groups. Some saw his actions as a diplomatic mission. “Every once in a while he would come around and try to make nice to various departments,” says Sheila Most, a professor of English. Others say he was hoping to discover rifts in the ranks. (The sides finally agreed to new contracts at the end of the spring semester.)
Many faculty members saw Mr. Fallon as a distant leader, seemingly uninformed of campus news. He intervened erratically and sometimes arbitrarily, they say. “He would make a decision and then say, No, I’m changing my mind,” says Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott, a professor of political science. She describes the president’s occasional e-mail messages to the campus — known as “periodic updates” — as “chatty, down-home narratives” that often highlighted the achievements of a few students, athletes, and faculty members.
Eastern Michigan, Ms. Scott says, is a tough place for a poor leader. It has 23,000 students, 1,800 employees, and seven labor unions. Its urban campus has a history of crime. “Fallon, I think, was overmatched by Eastern,” Ms. Scott says. “He was just not up to the job.”
A Crisis of Confidence
After losing the faculty’s confidence, Mr. Fallon lost that of his board. Three regents cited a lack of leadership by top administrators when they resigned in early December. Enrollment had fallen by nearly 6 percent, and the size of the freshman class by 15 percent, since 2002. The new vice president for university advancement — the fifth in six years — estimated that the institution was about 10 years behind its peers in fund raising. Faculty members were still working on expired contracts, as were members of two other unions on the campus.
Karen Q. Valvo, chairwoman of the Board of Regents, resigned, along with her fellow regents Jan A. Brandon and Sharon J. Rothwell. They referred to a “level of distrust and open animosity” in their letter of resignation.
Mr. Fallon acknowledged their assessment. “I wish that it were different,” he told The Ann Arbor News in December. “I see how it can be different. I’m committed to doing everything I can to change that. It does have a wearing effect on people.”
But according to Ms. Scott, the contract negotiations with faculty members had “poisoned the atmosphere so significantly on campus that there was not an ounce of the benefit of the doubt left over.”
Two weeks after the regents resigned, Laura Dickinson’s body was found. Ms. Dickinson, from Hastings, Mich., about 100 miles away, was in her first semester at Eastern Michigan. She was studying human nutrition, and lived in a single room in Hill Hall. The last time her friends saw her was at the women’s rowing team’s Christmas party, on December 12. Three days later, a custodian opened her door to investigate a foul odor other students had reported. The custodian saw Ms. Dickinson’s body and called the campus police.
Ms. Hall, the director of campus police, and Mr. Vick, the vice president for student affairs, both saw the gruesome crime scene. Mr. Fallon and Mr. Vick spoke several times over the next few days, but the president says Mr. Vick never shared the suspicious details. Mr. Vick has explained that he was extremely wary of compromising the criminal investigation with any disclosure. He says the arrest of a suspect justifies his keeping mum. (Ms. Hall has said nothing.)
Robert Dickinson, Laura’s father, mentioned to reporters that his daughter had had cardiac arrhythmia, so many people believed the otherwise healthy 22-year-old had died of heart failure. Resident advisers told some students at Eastern Michigan she had committed suicide.
Mr. Fallon approved the statement that said there was no foul play, and did not push for more information. When pressed for details, he said he was waiting for the medical examiner’s report, which did not come out until early March — after the arrest. It listed Ms. Dickinson’s cause of death as asphyxiation.
For long-term residents of Ypsilanti, the case evoked memories of the so-called “coed murders,” the serial rapes and slayings of seven young women, three of them Eastern Michigan students, in the late 1960s.
Clarifying His Role
A few days after Mr. Taylor’s arrest, Mr. Fallon expressed regret to the chairman of the Board of Regents. “I’m not certain that the university shouldn’t have been more candid with its constituent groups along the way,” he wrote in an e-mail message to Thomas W. Sidlik, the chairman, on February 28.
But as it became increasingly clear that the university had mishandled the murder case and violated federal law, Mr. Fallon repeated that he had not known there was a homicide investigation on the campus.
The investigations by Butzel Long and the Education Department began in March and continued through the spring. Their reports came out in June and July, respectively. Both were harshly critical of university officials’ management of the murder case, and concluded that they had violated the Clery Act — the federal law that requires colleges and universities to disclose information about crimes on their campuses and to warn students of threats to their safety — on multiple counts.
Faculty members were unsympathetic to the president’s defense. “I’m willing to believe Fallon when he says that he didn’t know, but I think that in and of itself was problematic,” says Steven D. Krause, an associate professor of English. “When he did find out what was going on, he probably should have acted more quickly in essentially apologizing for screwing up.”
The one time Mr. Fallon did rush to action was to clear up the impression that he had known before Mr. Taylor’s arrest that Ms. Dickinson’s death was being investigated as a homicide. The investigation by the Education Department suggested that the president had received letters from the Michigan State Police before the arrest. On July 4, the day after the university released the report, Mr. Fallon sought — and won — a clarification from the Education Department that the letters were dated after the arrest. In a written statement, Mr. Fallon said the correction would help people “better understand the sequence of events.”
In the past month, the president gave every indication that he was ready to move forward. On June 19, he quoted the old Truman adage: “I, as president of Eastern Michigan University, did not, do not, and will not pass the buck to anyone,” he told the Board of Regents. He acknowledged the university’s mishandling of the murder case, and he apologized for it: “Never again will such a confounding series of mistakes be made on my watch.”
The following day, the Faculty Council voted no confidence in the president, 20 to 4. But in late June, the president, seemingly in a desperate bid to hang on to his job, agreed to re-key the locks of more than 500 faculty offices, a controversial issue since the loss or theft of master keys two years ago. In early July, he issued a 16-point-strategy to improve campus security.
By then, however, he and the regents were in heated discussions about his job. In early July, they stripped Mr. Fallon of some power to hire and fire top administrators, creating a new committee to consult with the president on terminations and performance reviews of vice presidents. Because of concerns over his role in the murder case and his campus leadership in general, the regents proposed to Mr. Fallon some forms of censure short of termination — including a short suspension, with or without pay, Mr. Wilbanks says.
Mr. Fallon rejected all those proposals. James F. Stapleton, another regent, became concerned that the president would use a special public meeting of the board, scheduled for last Monday, to make a scene.
“It was clear to us that he was going to come to the microphone in his capacity as president ... and tell his side of the story,” Mr. Stapleton says, adding that he is still unsure what that story would have been.
“But given all the spectacle that we’ve been under,” he says, “it was not going to be in the university’s best interest.”
The regents voted on Sunday, July 15, to terminate Mr. Fallon’s contract as president. They sent him a letter by private courier that evening, informing him that his office had been secured and that he would be allowed to retrieve his personal belongings at a later date.
Until the regents name an interim or permanent president, a committee of four administrators will lead the university. Mr. Loppnow, the provost and vice president for academic affairs, has become executive vice president and chairman of the temporary “executive council.” That committee also includes Freman Hendrix, chief government-relations officer; Joseph F. Pollack, director of the university’s charter-schools program; and Janice Stroh, vice president for business and finance.
Despite the former administrators’ blunders, Eastern Michigan finds itself in the position of having to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to be rid of them. The terms of Mr. Fallon’s seven-page contract state that he may be “terminated at any time by the board” and must leave the university-owned president’s residence within 60 days — but the board must pay him a severance equal to his base salary, which was $225,000 in 2005, according to the contract. The other administrators also received a year’s salary in their separation agreements, bringing the total buyout to $550,000.
When Mr. Fallon, 60, became president, he shared his philosophy for success, writing online, “I believe that the effectiveness of a university president, increasingly, is related directly to his/her ability to establish and manage effectively a complex array of institutional, professional, and personal relationships.”
After Laura Dickinson’s murder, those relationships, already damaged, fell apart.
Paul Fain contributed to this article.
The article may have led some readers to conclude that the university’s general counsel was one of at least four administrators who knew about the suspicious circumstances in which Laura Dickinson’s body was found. The general counsel, Kenneth A. McKanders, was not one of those four. They were James F. Vick, then vice president for student affairs; Cindy L. Hall, then director of campus police; Teri L. Papp, an administrative associate in student affairs; and Gregory Peoples, the ombudsman.
http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Volume 53, Issue 47, Page A20
