Quote Originally Posted by Freightman View Post
Pretty damning comments. Some might accuse you, among other things, of being a conspiracy theorist.
It's not a conspiracy when it is your direct experience.

Four more from that department --

1) Our chairman systematically raided the raise pool each year, giving huge raises to four of his friends. By 1991, our department had four of the top five salaries in the university.

2) This same chairman had his "niece" come over from China and live in his office for about six weeks. She was calling China using the departmental phones -- when the dean cut our department's phone budget we figured it out. Turns out, the concubine was calling her parents.

3) I was on a PhD committee for a student and decided to ask the prototypical super easy question during the oral defense of her dissertation. I asked for the definition of a word on the first page of her thesis. She did not know it. Turns out, her advisor wrote her dissertation. I didn't allow her to pass and that became a huge scandal.

4) Another chairman used the travel funds (meant to help us attend conferences) to take his family on world vacations.

In 1995 I wrote a lengthy and well-researched appeal to the dean, provost and governor asking that the math department lose its PhD granting accreditation. This was co-signed by a number of my colleagues in the department. I then faced retribution directly from the department, no more raises and teaching only Freshman courses. This became a whistle blower case that eventually led to them buying out my tenure.