The Rumor

What really cost Chris Dussold his dream job?

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By THOMAS BARTLETT

Edwardsville, Ill.

He has told the story before. How he was fired from his dream job. How he cleaned out his office under police escort. How he felt hopeless, crushed, as if his career — and maybe his life — was over.

But even after two years and numerous retellings, the emotion still sneaks up on him. He pauses in midsentence, puts his face in his hands, and begins to weep.

Chris Dussold has been through a lot. In 2004 the assistant professor of finance was fired by Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville for copying another professor's teaching statement. It was two pages of boilerplate about the need to "practice life-long learning" and such. The word plagiarism had never crossed his mind.

Besides, he says, that was not the real reason he was fired.

What brought him down, he believes, was a persistent rumor that he was sleeping with an undergraduate. A rumor that was false, according to both Mr. Dussold and a university investigation. A rumor, he believes, that cost him not only his job, but his good name and his peace of mind.

Now Mr. Dussold is on a crusade to restore his reputation and to expose what he sees as widespread hypocrisy among academics. No matter what you think of Mr. Dussold or his motives, you can't deny his zeal: He is a man on a mission.

And he is starting to make his former colleagues very nervous.

Landing a Dream Job

Chris Dussold loves math, wears a big digital watch, and quotes Star Trek characters. In other words, he is a geek. Even he thinks so.

He majored in finance at Edwardsville and stuck around to get his master's in economics. He earned his Ph.D. just up the road at the University of Missouri at Columbia. After completing his doctorate, he fielded several offers, including one from North Carolina State University.

He turned them all down to return to Edwardsville in 2001, even though it offered less money and less prestige (though his salary at Southern Illinois — just over $100,000 — wasn't bad). "I used to tell them I would take this job for nothing," he says. "It felt like coming home."

His first couple of years at the university were among the happiest of his life. He found that he really liked teaching and research. He tried to steer clear of any controversy. He did not take sides in departmental conflicts. He did not discuss politics or religion with his colleagues. He did his best to remain above the fray.

Then, in the fall of 2003, he heard a rumor. The story going around was that he was sleeping with an undergraduate in his financial-management club. At first he thought the rumor might have something to do with the fact that his fiancée, Sara Bennett, was a former student. But they had not started dating — or even become friends — until after she graduated. Their relationship was no secret anyway: Ms. Bennett accompanied him to university functions and dinners with other professors. Everyone knew they were together.

The woman mentioned in the rumor, Jennifer Peyla, was in the club, but Mr. Dussold says he barely knew her. His only social contact with her, he says, was once giving her a ride to her car. That was it. There were students he considered friends, those who stopped by his office or lingered after class to chat, but she wasn't one of them.

So at first he shrugged it off.

Then he heard the rumor again from someone else. And again, the same name: Jennifer Peyla.

He began to be concerned. Mr. Dussold, who is now 35, asked an older colleague for advice. "This happens to every young male professor," he says the colleague told him. "Rumors come, rumors go. Ignore it."

This was news to him. But maybe it did happen to others, he thought. Maybe he was naïve.

A Meeting With the Accuser

Later in the fall, another colleague approached him privately. "This needs to stop in case she's ever in one of your classes," he says the colleague told him. Those words hit him like a punch. People assumed the story was true. "I realized this was beyond rumors," he says. "This was career-jeopardizing."

He set up a meeting with Ms. Peyla in late October. He also invited Radcliffe G. Edmonds Jr., an associate professor of economics, to attend. In the meeting, according to Mr. Dussold, Ms. Peyla denied that there was any inappropriate relationship and denied starting the rumors. This was reassuring.

(Mr. Edmonds declined to comment for this article. So did Ms. Peyla — who has since married and changed her last name to Schuette — saying that she didn't want to put herself "in the position where something could be used against" her. She is now a graduate student at Southern Illinois.)

Mr. Dussold then asked for a meeting with the university's human-resources director, Angelo G. Monaco. He wanted an official record in case the matter ever came up again. Ms. Bennett, his fiancée, accompanied him to the meeting. Mr. Monaco told them that rumors had a "life cycle" and that they should wait it out, according to both of them.

Maybe everyone was right: There was nothing to worry about. This was a self-correcting problem. It would go away on its own.

But he was starting to feel the strain. Every interaction now carried a question mark: Who believes the rumor? What have they heard? One rumor had it that he was having sex with Ms. Peyla in his office. Another that they were having sex in his truck. Were there more? What exactly were people saying?

Mr. Monaco had advised him to require every visitor to his office to sign a log. He also suggested meeting with female students in a conference room, rather than his office. Such actions were supposed to quell the whispers. But Mr. Dussold worried they only made it seem like something was wrong. Other professors did not have a log. Other professors met with students in their offices. Why was he different?

"Everyone started noticing that I was the only one doing this stuff," he says.

The once-outgoing professor started keeping to himself. Maybe he was paranoid, he admits. Then again, people talking behind his back. As the semester drew to a close, Mr. Dussold hoped that the Christmas break would end the rumors. A new year, a new semester. Everything would be OK.

Exonerated?

For a while it seemed like that might be true. Then, in mid-January, Ms. Peyla showed up unannounced at his office door. He describes the conversation that followed as "surreal."

She told him, he says, that other professors were encouraging her to file a complaint. She told him she thought it might be in her best interest to follow their advice, even though she again acknowledged that nothing had happened, according to Mr. Dussold. He remembers her saying that the complaint would not harm him and might somehow help her get into graduate school.

"I told her that filing a false complaint would be unethical," he remembers saying. She was standing in the doorway to his office so he kept his voice low, fearing that the conversation would be overheard. "I said, 'Of course it's going to harm me. It would ruin my career.' I said, 'You need to stand up to them and tell them it's false. And you need to leave me alone,'" he says he told her.

Then came January 28, a day Mr. Dussold says he will never forget. He and his fiancée live on a small farm about a half-hour outside of Edwardsville. They awoke that morning to find that eight of their 22 cows had fallen into a partially frozen pond overnight and drowned.

It was, he thought, a bad sign.

That morning he was told to report to the provost's office.

It turned out to be good news. Mr. Dussold was informed that the university had investigated the rumors and found no evidence to support them. The letter he was later sent said that "Ms. Peyla denied they ever had a sexual relationship." A friend of Ms. Peyla's was interviewed and told officials that the relationship between the two seemed "friendly and professional."

Other professors were also interviewed, none of whom had knowledge of any inappropriate relationship, according to the letter.

In short, he was exonerated. What was strange, though, was that he had never been told of any investigation before that day. Still, he could not help feeling relieved.

His relief would not last long. A couple of hours later, according to Mr. Dussold, he was summoned to the office of Gary A. Giamartino, dean of the business school. Mr. Giamartino had heard about the provost's investigation, and he was not pleased. According to Mr. Dussold, the dean told him he was beginning his own investigation. Then, Mr. Dussold says, the dean began asking detailed questions about his sex life.

"You can't ask me this!" he remembers telling him. "I thought this nightmare was over."

"I don't know why you would think this was over," was the dean's reply, according to Mr. Dussold. (Mr. Giamartino declined to comment for this article.)

The professor says he made it clear that he thought the dean had no right to conduct an investigation. He reiterated his innocence. And then he went home to deal with the dead cows.

A couple of weeks later, Ms. Peyla returned to his office. She was very upset. She accused him of starting the rumors to draw attention to himself, according to Mr. Dussold. "First you're saying you want to file a false complaint, and then you're accusing me of starting the rumors. I mean, holy crap!" he says now.

There was no discussion. "You need to leave my office," he remembers telling her.

She refused, insisting that he apologize. She said her life was miserable and that it was his fault. Mr. Dussold called a fellow professor and asked him to come immediately to his office. When he arrived, Ms. Peyla left. (The colleague, who asked not to be named, confirms Mr. Dussold's account.)

"At this point, I'm thinking she's unstable," he says.

A few days later, he received a call on his cellphone. It was Ms. Peyla. He asked her how she got his number.

"Are you mad at me?" Ms. Peyla said, according to Mr. Dussold.

He hung up the phone.

"Sara and I were both freaked out," he says. (Ms. Bennett, who was with him at the time, confirms his account).

The call was followed by a "long, convoluted" message left by Ms. Peyla on his university voice mail. In it, he says, she apologized for the trouble she caused him.

Mr. Dussold remembers this as a dark time. The rumors were not going away, and he wasn't sure what Ms. Peyla would do or say next. Plus, what would the dean's investigation conclude? When would this end?

A former student of Mr. Dussold's, Amanda Bemis, recalls seeing him during this period and thinking he looked "gaunt" and that "the stress was taking its toll."

While Ms. Bemis only met Ms. Peyla a few times, she felt uneasy around her. "You know how you meet people and you think something isn't quite right? That's how it was," she says. When asked if Mr. Dussold was often flirtatious with students or seemed like a womanizer, Ms. Bemis laughs. "No," she says. "That's not Chris."

Another former student, Tyson Giger, who was in the same financial-management club as Ms. Peyla, says he never saw any hint of a relationship between them.

Mr. Dussold was sure that no matter what he did, the rumors wouldn't stop. The dean seemed convinced of his guilt, he thought. University officials had asked Mr. Dussold to let them know if the rumors continued. So, in February, he called the provost's office and explained that they were not going away; if anything, they were getting worse.

"I'm scared at this point," he says. "I don't know what the next thing will be."

Ready to Jump

Over spring break, Mr. Dussold arrived at a big decision: He was going to quit. He had already submitted his three-year tenure-review package, but when he returned to the campus he would ask to withdraw it. He would stay for his lame-duck year while he looked for a job. He called his friend Jim Wilkerson, an assistant professor of management and marketing. "He let me know he had made the decision to leave the university," says Mr. Wilkerson, who has since left Southern Illinois to become a consultant. "He said, 'I'm not going to request renewal. I'm going on the market.'"

Mr. Dussold told several other colleagues of his decision, all of whom tried to talk him out of it, he says. But he was firm. He could not go on living like this. Anyway, he was sure that the rumors and the investigations were never going to end, no matter what he did.

On the Monday after spring break, he informed the dean, Mr. Giamartino, and his department chairman of his decision to resign. He told them that it was because the rumor, and the dean's investigation, had become too much.

A couple of hours later, he says, he was called into the dean's office. Mr. Dussold assumed that the dean would try to talk him into staying. Instead, the dean fired him — for plagiarism.

"I don't know what they're talking about," he recalls thinking.

He asked what would happen to his classes. The dean told him the classes would be taken care of. Mr. Dussold says he was also offered the opportunity to resign with two months of pay, but only if he signed a letter promising not to sue the university.

"Is there anything I can do to express my point of view on this?" he said he asked.

No. This was final, he says they told him.

There is no doubt about it: Mr. Dussold did copy, nearly verbatim, the teaching statement of a professor at the College of Charleston. He found it on the Internet, decided it was consistent with his own philosophy, and included in his tenure-review packet without a second thought.

"Maybe I am naïve, or not well trained, or just not as educated or smart as I should have been, but I really mean it when I say I never thought at the time I was doing anything wrong," he says.

But should he have known? And is it wrong to copy someone else's teaching statement?

The author of that teaching statement, Bill Manaris, an associate professor of computer science at the College of Charleston, thinks teaching statements should be original work. Still, he says he is not particularly bothered by the copying. "I'm actually kind of flattered," he says.

One of the toughest plagiarism watchdogs, Peter Charles Hoffer, who has investigated plagiarism cases for the American Historical Association and written a book on academic fraud, is not upset by the idea of copying a teaching statement. "I would prefer that a formal teaching philosophy submitted as part of a tenure file cite its origins, but I am sure that the source of that pedagogy got it from yet another, earlier source," he writes in an e-mail message.

He also writes that "copying a brief teaching statement for inclusion in your teaching portfolio, with the understanding that you are expressing a philosophy of teaching, not making a contribution to education scholarship, is not a crime at all — not even a misdemeanor."

It is certainly not in the same league, according to Mr. Hoffer, with plagiarizing an academic article or a passage from a book.

Mr. Dussold says he would have understood if officials had asked him to turn in a new statement or had even put a note in his file. But they did not. They fired him on the spot. According to university policy, there is a procedure that must be followed in cases of alleged wrongdoing by a professor. It says an investigation must be carried out by a committee of three professors, and that the accused should have the opportunity to meet with the committee before it reports to the dean. None of that happened, according to Mr. Dussold.

In a written statement, the university said its actions were consistent with its own policies and procedures. The statement scolds the professor for not conducting himself "in a manner consistent with the university's policies on academic integrity." The statement also says that Mr. Dussold declined to file a grievance; Mr. Dussold says he was told he could not file a grievance because he was no longer an employee. Despite repeated requests by The Chronicle, the administration declined to be more specific or to explain why the stated procedure appears not to have been followed.

He was told that he could clean out his office in the presence of campus police officers.

There would be no lame-duck year, no graceful exit. Instead, Mr. Dussold left the campus in shame.

When his students discovered that the popular professor was not coming back, they held a demonstration. A petition was passed around. Students made T-shirts that asked "Where's Dussold?"

But he was already gone.

Glass Houses

The next week, he says, he received a call from Ms. Peyla. She told him she was sorry about what had happened.

He hung up.

A month later he received a letter signed by Ms. Peyla and several other students thanking him for leading the financial-management club. "Your assistance aided us in what became one of the most rewarding experiences in our professional, academic, and personal lives," it said.

By then, Mr. Dussold says, his life was a mess. "I'm trying to make a life with a wonderful girl," he says. "We have our own little hobby farm, and then one day — no income, no benefits, and in my mind no hope for a comparable job. How often are professors fired midsemester?"

He was, he admits, extremely depressed.

Later, he became angry. He believed strongly — and continues to believe — that the teaching statement was not the real reason he was fired. It was an excuse, he contends. A pretext. How else to explain his dismissal over what seems like, at worst, a fairly minor infraction? And only hours after announcing his intention to resign?

Around that time, Mr. Dussold started poking into the work of his former colleagues to see whether any of them were guilty of similar copying. His motive was not revenge, he says, but rather to prove that what he had done was far from unique.

And he seems to have proved exactly that.

Mr. Dussold has found teaching statements by professors from around the country that are identical or very similar. Like his, they do not cite their sources. One of those teaching statements belongs to Sara Long, a professor of animal science, food, and nutrition at Southern Illinois's Carbondale campus.

Her teaching statement, which is posted on her university Web page, is nearly identical to that of Rex R. Campbell, a professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri at Columbia. "I went to a conference where he was one of the speakers," Ms. Long explains. She acknowledges copying the statement.

She adds, "Am I going to be in trouble?"

Should she be?

Or should Walter V. Wendler, chancellor of Southern Illinois at Carbondale? Last March in his state-of-the-university address, he told a story about how mapmakers used to draw dragons at the edge of their maps to indicate unknown territory. "Each of us has a mental map of the world that contains information we use to guide ourselves in our day-to-day encounters," he told a crowd of 25,000 students and employees.

That sentence and most of the rest of that anecdote appear word for word in the 1986 book A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, by Roger von Oech. The dragon story was the central, recurring theme in the speech, which was later published on the university's Web site.

"I wrote a big chunk of it," Mr. Wendler says. "I didn't write that particular example. I thought maybe the media office, who helped me with some examples, had written it. I just thought it was a good example."

The anecdote was provided by Susan L. Davis, director of the university's media-relations department. She says she neglected to provide the chancellor with the proper source in the materials she gave him. "I thought it was created by our people, but I'm still responsible for it," says Mr. Wendler, who plans to apologize to the author of the book.

Ms. Davis also volunteered to take the blame. "Nobody likes to make mistakes, but we all do sometimes," she says. "There was no intent here."

Nor, presumably, did the dean who fired Mr. Dussold mean any harm when he copied much of the previous dean's welcome message on the business school's Web site. It is mostly boilerplate ("I hope that you will sense our dedication to excellence"), but it says it is from Gary A. Giamartino. One 25-word passage — praising the many accomplishments of the university's professors — also appears verbatim on the Web site of the University of Southern California's business school. When that was brought to the attention of Southern Illinois by the student newspaper last fall, the sentence was removed.

"The organizational image we wanted to project did not change when I became dean, so we felt no need to change the text of the welcome message," the dean wrote in a letter to the student newspaper, saying that what was done did not "constitute plagiarism."

Maybe not, but Mr. Dussold argues that a welcome message (one that uses the pronoun "I" and has the dean's name on it) is remarkably similar to a teaching statement.

These are only a few of the examples Mr. Dussold has uncovered. And he's still looking. "Where does intellectual property start and stop?" he asks. "I don't know. There's a big, gray line there. But if they want to talk about plagiarism, fine. Here's plagiarism."

A New Start

Mr. Dussold has sued university officials, fellow professors, and Ms. Peyla, all of whom he believes were responsible for his dismissal. In the lawsuit, he accuses them of making false statements about him and failing to follow university policy. (Six of the people named in the lawsuit declined to comment when contacted by The Chronicle.) He remains convinced that it was the rumor — and the fear that he would sue — that led to his firing. And he believes he can prove that in court.

"This isn't about getting back at SIUE," Mr. Dussold says. "I just want my name cleared. That's all I want."

He was recently hired by nearby McKendree College. He says the college has been kind and welcoming, even after everything that happened at Southern Illinois. "I can't say enough good things about McKendree," he says. He does note that his salary is less than half what it was at Southern Illinois and that his tenure clock has been reset. He is, in effect, starting over.

And he is much more cautious now about even the slightest appearance of impropriety. The chairs in his office are closer to the door than to his desk. He tries to work at home whenever he can. And he says he would never allow a student in his car because that might be enough to start a rumor. "Do I take it to the extreme? Yes," he says. "I take no chances."