Chancellor Wise Strikes Back with Help from Her Son

Well, obvi­ously a lot has hap­pened at UIUC.  I was dri­ving from NY to Urbana on Thurs­day and Fri­day; Thurs­day night I read the online Gazette arti­cle about Wise depart­ing, and then Fri­day I got an email at about 2 from UIUC FOIA refer­ring to “sup­ple­men­tal” 2014 FOIA results … about 10 min­utes after arriv­ing in Urbana I got a call from the Chicago Tri­bune ask­ing for com­ments.  To which I had to laugh­ingly reply “I’d love to com­ment … but I don’t know what the heck’s going on!”

Now I know of course — sorta any­way, and I don’t think any of us will really know until all the other con­cealed emails come out and we find out more.

In the interim I want to note a cou­ple of things.

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First, UIUC’s claim about how they found out that Wise was using a per­sonal email for uni­ver­sity busi­ness and explic­itly to avoid FOIA is a joke.  UIUC-FOIA didn’t find out because they found a ref­er­ence to her per­sonal email account.  Instead, they almost cer­tainly found out because out­side coun­sel prep­ping UIUC for the Salaita law­suit (at a cost, so far, of > $1M?) undoubt­edly said, “we have to pro­vide doc­u­ments under dis­cov­ery; we have Wise’s uni­ver­sity emails, did she (or any­one else) use a pri­vate account?”

Jaw-dropping no doubt ensued, as appar­ently this was a ques­tion that poor old bum­bling UIUC-FOIA had never thought to ask.  Double-dare-Jaw-dropping then ensued when out­side coun­sel informed them that, although the dis­cov­ery logs in the Fed­eral case would be con­fi­den­tial, if Salaita won the par­al­lel state suit over the FOIA, not releas­ing those per­sonal emails in the state case would be active fraud, not to men­tion mal­prac­tice by the lawyers involved.

That’s my guess any­way; it taxes my imag­i­na­tion that UIUC-FOIA had any­thing other than a “don’t ask don’t tell” pol­icy towards actu­ally prob­ing the responses they got from Wise, a con­clu­sion I draw based on volu­mi­nous evi­dence I’ve already dis­cussed on that point.

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Sec­ond, at the end of the “sup­ple­men­tal” stuff on Salaita from Wise’s per­sonal account, there’s the most incred­i­ble email from Wise’s son Andrew on Kennedy, an email that Wise for­warded to uni­ver­sity coun­sel Scott Rice in what I’m sure was a flat out power play to the uni­ver­sity that she wouldn’t go down with­out a fight.  Here’s the major­ity of the email (I’ve left out the last para­graph and the fact that Andrew sent it from his law firm’s account, which is prob­a­bly against firm policy):

Let’s be clear on what this email is: a poison-pill that Wise for­warded on to Scott Rice so he (and the uni­ver­sity) would know that she was doc­u­ment­ing stuff she had ear­lier been forced to elide over.  A poison-pill warn­ing to UIUC that, if she went down, she’d take bod­ies with her.

Put it this way, lawyers don’t write emails like this unless they’re cre­at­ing a record.  And Chan­cel­lors don’t send let­ters like this to uni­ver­sity Coun­sel unless they’re telegraph­ing a not–very-subtle threat: screw with me and you’re screwed.

The only thing that remains to be seen is who’ll end up swal­low­ing the poi­son.  How far after Chris Kennedy will the law­suits (and the clamor for the truth) go?  What heads will roll, and to what extent?¹

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More to fol­low, I still haven’t read the COM doc­u­ments, which tie into my anger all along at hav­ing been sub­jected to the petty crony­ism of the Research Park, which seems to be well-known in the CU com­mu­nity as a place where noth­ing hap­pens with­out pay-to-play.

Anger par­tic­u­larly at what Laura Frerichs did to me, send­ing Jed Tay­lor to mon­i­tor my busi­ness deal­ings and appar­ently also writ­ing at least one email to a per­son I was work­ing with telling him “I will not work with any­one who works with Andrew as he is harass­ing me,“² some­thing I know from hav­ing seen the email as it arrived and which I have in writ­ing, albeit redacted by UIUC-FOIA to con­ceal Frerichs’s words.  Although I’ll say at the moment that I merely allege Frerichs made the state­ment — for it go beyond alle­ga­tion will require the Illi­nois Attor­ney General’s office stop col­lud­ing with UIUC (I have proof of that col­lu­sion) and make them release the doc­u­ment in unredacted form.³

 

Andrew Schein­man

1. Resign­ing with a $400K pay­out doesn’t strike me as a lot of head-rolling. [↩]
2. I assumed “harass­ing” meant fil­ing FOIAs, but I’ve heard rumors that Frerichs may have claimed I sex­u­ally harassed her.  Well since I didn’t know her phone num­ber and talked to her at length exactly once at her work, that state­ment, if she really made it, is flat out not true. [↩]
3. I’ve ear­lier posted my appeals to the AG’s office on some aspects of my treat­ment by Frerichs and UIUC FOIAs ille­gal redac­tions of what Frerichs said. [↩]