BY ROBERT BIONAZ

After four-plus years, our First Amendment lawsuit against the unethical practices of the lead defendant, former Chicago State University president Wayne Watson, finally ended with the school agreeing to pay $650,000 in attorney’s fees and damages. Additionally, Chicago State likely paid close to $1 million to the private law firm that defended it against our allegations. Chicago State could have settled the suit several years ago by agreeing to change the unconstitutional policies in question and paying $60,000 in attorney’s fees and damages. Watson, however, chose to fight and any discussion of our suit must include a discussion of his ineptitude and corrupt management. Frankly, the Chicago State case is a study on the damage political corruption can do to a public institution.

Watson’s unethical and costly behavior is a familiar story in Chicago. The cost of our action followed the university’s December 2016 settlement of $1.3 million to former Vice President Glenn Meeks, fired because he blew the whistle on Watson’s unethical practices. The Meeks settlement followed the university’s 2014 loss of the James Crowley lawsuit, and the ultimate $4.3 million payout to Crowley for the “thoroughly reprehensible” behavior of Watson and his “top lieutenants” who acted with “malice and deceit” to damage Crowley “economically” and “psychologically,” after Crowley blew the whistle on Watson’s unethical practices (the quotations are from the appeal court’s decision). Watson’s predictably unethical behavior at CSU simply continued the administrative behavior he had exhibited at Chicago City Colleges, which resulted in a $1.175 million payout in 2011 to one of his administrators, who again had blown the whistle on Watson’s corruption and unethical practices.

Wayne Watson is a fraud, both as an academic and as a college administrator. According to his C.V., he received a PhD from Northwestern in 1972. Immediately after receiving his degree, he got a teaching job at Shaw University, an HBCU in North Carolina. He lasted three years. He then worked as “General Manager” for Wheeler Airlines for three years, worked for one year as “Headmaster” at a private boy’s high school in Georgia, and came to City Colleges in 1978. He rose through the ranks at City Colleges, becoming Chancellor in 1998. In 2009, after Richard M. Daley apparently tired of his act at City Colleges, a rigged search by Watson cronies on the CSU Board of Trustees installed him as Chicago State’s president. He ostensibly left that position at the end of 2015, although he continued receiving a paycheck as president through June of 2016.

As an academic, he has done nothing since receiving the PhD. Not a single publication of any kind is listed on his C.V. His performance at City Colleges, described by him as “distinguished” is in fact, abominable. During his tenure as Chancellor, City College enrollment dropped by 22 percent. Nonetheless, after retiring from city colleges, a search “led” by Richard Tolliver and Leon Finney handed him the president’s job at Chicago State. At Chicago State, abetted by arguably the worst Board of Trustees in the country, his incompetence resulted in a succession of scandals and enrollment declines so severe they continue to threaten the school’s existence. Although the new administration is working diligently to undo the damage Watson’s leadership has done to the school, the task remains daunting.

On the CSU Faculty Voice blog, contributors highlighted Watson’s utter lack of competence and the damage his crony hiring and corruption were doing to the school. In contrast to City Colleges, where Watson could hide in the downtown office, Chicago State’s small footprint meant that his ineptitude and vindictiveness was constantly exposed. It was not long before people in administrative support positions realized that he simply was not up to the job.
Between the blog’s founding in 2009 and early 2013, Watson packed his administration with cronies, including his girlfriend (later wife), Cheri Sidney, hired into a $90,000 a year administrative job created just for her. Watson subsequently promoted her to two other newly- created positions, and bumped her salary to its eventual peak of $113,000 per year. Watson also hired a number of former City College employees into key roles at Chicago State: General Counsel Patrick Cage, future Provost Angela Henderson, Police Chief Ronnie Watson, Ethics Officer Bernetta Bush. The performance of this bunch of incompetents speaks for itself: Between 2009 and early 2013, Chicago State’s enrollment had dropped from its peak of 7362 in fall 2010 to 6107 in fall 2012, a decrease of 17 percent in just two years. The Faculty Voice reported on all these issues.

Then, in March 2013, Watson barely held on to his job. Spurred by allegations from Glenn Meeks of crony hiring and other irregularities, at least three members of the Board (including Chicago State’s current president) made a concerted effort to remove Watson from his position. In two farcical Board meetings on March 1 and March 8, a parade of Watson acolytes appeared before the board to urge Watson’s retention. Victor Henderson, Angela’s husband, compared Watson’s travails to those of Jesus or Martin Luther King. Ultimately, Gov. Pat Quinn torpedoed the effort by failing to reappoint the dissident board members, putting Watson cronies in their places. The newly constituted board included Watson supporters Anthony Young, Horace Smith, Spencer Leak, Nikki Zollar, James Joyce, and Michael Curtin. Any hope of change at CSU had evaporated. Soon after the March debacle, the board extended Watson’s contract.

The catalyst for Watson’s desire to crush the Faculty Voice and for our subsequent suit came with my November 1, 2013 publication of the falsified resume of Watson’s girlfriend Cheri Sidney. Following this exposure, I published a number of revelations about various Watson cronies in key administrative positions. These included other falsified resumes as well as the plagiarism accusation against the Provost, Angela Henderson. The November 1 blog post apparently spurred Patrick Cage’s letter of November 11, 2013, demanding that the blog be disabled because “the lack of civility and professionalism expressed on the blog violates the University’s values and policies requiring civility and professionalism of all University faculty members. . . Thus, high standards of civility and professionalism are central tenants of the University’s values and included in the standards of conduct required of faculty members.” The university also threw in some bogus claims about trademark infringement (on November 11, 2013, CSU held no trademarks). In January 2014, the university engaged private attorneys to again threaten the blog, this time because of its picture of Chicago State’s “iconic” hedges in a photograph on the front page. None of these threats passed the laugh test.

The on-campus situation, always difficult for employees outside the Watson crony orbit, became even more strained following my exposure of the myriad problems with Interim Provost Angela Henderson’s dissertation. Although an anonymous “hearing officer” subsequently cleared Henderson of plagiarism, in the forty-plus pages of Henderson’s literature review, there is not a single quotation mark for better than 80 passages of exact language taken from other sources. There is also not a single page reference for the exact language that should be in quotation marks. These conditions both violate the UIC College of Nursing’s Academic Integrity Standards. Ultimately, Watson handed the Provost’s job to someone whose academic credentials were dubious, at best.

Throughout the dissertation scandal, Watson and his administrators worked assiduously to fabricate information that would discredit Phil Beverly and ultimately result in shuttering the blog. After the revelations about Henderson’s dissertation became public, Watson and several other administrators tried to induce LaShondra Peebles to file false sexual harassment charges against Beverly, who they erroneously believed had been a participant in the discovery of Henderson’s dissertation problems. Ultimately, their efforts to frame Beverly ended up in the newspapers, further contributing to the administration’s image as a laughingstock. All the while, Watson’s lickspittle Board of Trustees sat back and did nothing to protect the university.

The stupidity of the Watson cabal is apparent throughout this protracted fight. First, the information I published on the blog came from Chicago State’s own Human Resources Department. The evidence that high-level Watson administrators had falsified their applications and resumes came from official university records. Rather than deal with that scandal, Watson chose to bemoan the “incivility” of the blog for exposing those falsehoods. The evidence that Henderson had plagiarized her dissertation also came from a public source, the internet repository of Ph.D. dissertations available from the University of Illinois Chicago. The tendency of Watson to micromanage and engage in vindictive behavior is legendary, but in his deposition, Watson played the befuddled old fool, who knew virtually nothing about university affairs. Similarly, Patrick Cage, the name behind the November 11 “Cease and Desist” letter, could not recall any rationale for his comments on incivility (other than CSU’s Computer Usage Policy, one of the challenged policies). In fact, LaShondra Peebles, who had been present at the meeting to draft the “Cease and Desist” letter said under oath that “Watson suggested that the
letter reference CSU’s civility standard, as set forth in the Computer Usage Policy.”

Although I believe this action was a loser for Chicago State from day one, the Watson administration had to fight. Desperately trying to hide their corruption and their blatant attempts to stifle speech on the Chicago State campus, some of the high-level Watson administrators were not truthful in their depositions and would have had to lie again under oath in a trial. I firmly believe this is a major reason for the university’s willingness to settle this case. Given their track records in court, the appearance of Wayne Watson and Patrick Cage in front of a Chicago jury would likely have been disastrous for the school. Credit the school’s current administration for cutting their losses and putting the university’s well-being first.