II. VIOLATION OF ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL RIGHTS (1)
After their failure to prevent me from excelling as professor, WIU officials chose to undermine my performance using my national origin as a pretext. In 2011, a few weeks before my application for promotion to Associate Professor, the Chair of the Department of Chemistry and the Dean of the College of Art and Sciences pretexted that my foreign accent was an issue and urged me to join the language center where foreign students without any English proficiency are trained before they start their studies. I could apply only after I denounced them for conspiring to prevent me from being promoted Associate Professor.
On the Illicit document developed a few weeks before my application for tenure
Late August 2012, Rose McConnell attempted to change the rules for tenure and promotion regarding publications, particularly those for an Associate Professor applying for tenure like me. She assigned to Mr. Scott McConnell the mission to modify the so-called Old Chemistry Department Bylaws. The Old Chemistry Department Bylaws was abandoned since 1991 and replaced by the Department Criteria, which was governed by the Collective Bargaining Agreement. I was the only faculty member already Associate Professor and scheduled to apply for tenure in January 2013. Therefore, I would have been the only faculty member to be affected if this obsolete and contractually void document was applied to me. Because promotion, tenure, and PAA were contractually regulated by the Collective Bargaining Agreement, I opposed, together with other junior faculty members, the validation of those “Bylaws”. Two days after Rose McConnell failed to impose this document and conceded to withdraw it, she came up with the idea that articles in journals that required publication fees will not be accepted for tenure or promotion. As she was reminded with evidence that she had paid publication fees her entire career, and that no publication fee was paid for 9 of the 10 articles I had authored at WIU, she changed her story the next day and stated that only publications in journals indexed by the Ulrich database will be accepted. But as she learnt that several of my 10 articles were published in journals indexed by the Ulrich database, she again immediately changed her rules saying that articles accepted for tenure, promotion, or PAA should be indexed in Chemical Abstracts. There again, after I revealed that several of my articles were indexed in this database, she changed her conditions saying that only articles indexed in Scifinder will be accepted for tenure. Finally, when she was reminded that journal indexed in Scifinder are related to the ACS, she sent an e-mail to announce the strange condition that journals in the so-called “Jeffrey Beal’s list of “predatory journals” will not be accepted for tenure, promotion, or PAA. Thus, in about a week, Rose McConnell changed the goalposts five times and trampled the department criteria, the sole document contractually authorized to be used for the evaluation of faculty members.
In September 2012, a few weeks before my application for tenure, Rose McConnell abandoned the department criteria [Doc 16], and fabricated an illicit and non-contractual document that was nothing but a pamphlet of lies and delusions. In her own words, this document was based on the so-called “Jeffrey Beal’s list”. She announced that she will use is to evaluate my articles.
Referring to the so-called “Jeffrey Beal’s list” as a tool to evaluate my articles was just a conspiracy supported by top WIU officials led by the Provost Kenneth Hawkinson. Kenneth Hawkinson was invited at an express chemistry department meeting called by Rose McConnell in October 2012, after she failed to impose new rules for publications. At that meeting, Kenneth Hawkinson openly offered his full support to Rose McConnell and the DPC to use the so-called “Jeffrey Beal’s list” as a tool for the evaluation of my tenure application. I reminded him that I knew nothing about the “Jeffrey Beals’ list”, and since the department criteria have not changed, the criteria for publications cannot be changed a few weeks before my application for tenure. I also brought to his attention that the quality of journals is universally assessed based on the impact factor of the journals and not on a list of journals found on a blog owned by a non-scientist like (the so-called “Jeffrey Beal” – he has a degree in English and Spanish). Ultimately, I proposed that WIU brings and external reviewer to evaluate all publications in the Department of Chemistry so that everybody could receive the same treatment. The Provost rejected those propositions and insisted that he will support any decisions made in the chemistry department. A few days later, the WIU President and Provost invited me at the WIU Alumni House supposedly “because they wanted to address the concerns I raised at the last Department meeting”. This meeting ended up being a well-planned session of intimidation by the WIU President who, in a monologue, asserted that he met on the regular basis Pat Quinn, the Governor of Illinois and therefore, any action against his administration is in vain. After him, the Provost took the floor and asserted that when he developed the criteria for PAA in 2008, his prevision was that the very best professor will receive this award once in a five-year period. Therefore, he could not accept that a person like me earns it 3 times in less than 5 years.
VIOLATION OF ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL RIGHTS (2)
Undermining of my Professional Achievements
In December 2012, the Provost, Kenneth Hawkinson expressly admitted to me that all the sudden and slanderous remarks made about my publications by his administration are baseless, but he supported them because the Chair of the Chemistry Department hates me. For that reason, I have no chance for a career at WIU and he will terminate me even if I insist in staying.
The Provost made such a disturbing statement to divert from the true motivations behind the unprecedented abuse I was subjected to. The real motives behind the “witch hunt” launched by WIU officials against me were:
- the burden caused by the discriminatory and illegal cancellation of the PERM application of my wife and I by the Assistant Provost Judy Dallingher
- the intentional mishandling of our second PERM application by the WIU Provost Office after it ordered the cancellation and withdrawal of the first application.
- the obstruction perpetrated by WIU to prevent my family from obtaining the permanent resident cards after my own was approved, and the robbery of my wife’s permanent resident card with the supposed implication of WIU officials, as asserted by the Manager of the Macomb Post Office.
Terminating my employment was the option chosen by the WIU administration to avoid dealing with the issues of hatred, national origin discrimination, and possible fraud they created.
With the support of top WIU officials, Rose McConnell and the DPC rejected the PAA I earned based on the computation of my performance points in 2012. The award was approved at the Department level before the illicit document was developed, but the approval decision was reversed by the Dean, Susan Martinelli-Fernandez based on this illicit document, after Rose McConnell forged the application form containing my reported achievement which she had already approved. I still have a copy of the original PAA, a copy of the one she forged, and e-mails in relation to this forgery.
During the evaluation of my application for early promotion to Associate Professor in January 2012, the Chair of the Department of Chemistry and a group of faculty members under her control rejected 5 out of 7 peer-review articles I published in international peer-reviewed scientific journals. Those rejections were based on falsehoods and lies that contrasted with the Department Criteria. For example, articles I co-author with Professor Made Gowda, the former chair of the Department of Chemistry were rejected with the pretext that the subject covered in these articles was not in my field of expertise. In fact, I have previously taught the subject for five years to graduate and undergraduate classes and published over 10 articles on the subject.
The evaluators also claimed that my contribution to some of the articles was not major, or that “it was unusual” that a member of the DPC provides a letter to assess my contribution to the articles. Those pretexts violated the department criteria. In fact, the department criteria require that the corresponding author of an article provides a letter to assess the level of contribution of an author to the article. That was exactly what Professor Gowda did for articles I co-authored with him. The articles rejected have already been accepted in previous evaluations by the same evaluators and I was praised for their quality.
When I applied for tenure in January 2013, Rose McConnell and the DPC used the pretext of the illicit and non-contractual document to reject all 10 peer-review articles I authored or co-authored while I was at WIU. Seven of those articles were accepted in six previous probationary evaluations by the same individuals. In the overall evaluation of my tenure application. the DPC and the Chair of the Department of Chemistry ignored most of my scholarly and professional activities described with supporting documentation and misrepresented some of them to the extent that they gave me less points in 2013 than they had given me in their evaluation of my PY5 in 2012.
Below is an excerpt of Rose McConnell’s evaluation of my probationary evaluation 1(PY1-Doc 17) in the fall of 2007.
“Dr. Kouassi has had 2 referred journal articles published in 2007, has had a third article accepted and had submitted a fourth during 2007.”
In their evaluation of my PY3 in the fall of 2009, the DPC and the Chair of the Department of Chemistry stated:
“During the evaluation period, Dr. Kouassi has published one manuscript in the International Journal of Microbiology describing his work initiated at Penn State University and then completed upon his arrival at WIU. ….
The DPC congratulated me for submitting a manuscript #6 to Current Nanoscience, quote:
“the DPC encourage Dr. Kouassi to publish in per-review journals such as Current Nanoscience and the Journal of Food Chemistry”.
After they rejected 10 peer-reviewed articles I authored, including the 7 they have accepted in 6 previous evaluations, WIU officials insisted in denying me tenure claiming that I did not meet the two-publication requirement for tenure. For tenure and/or promotion to Associate Professor, the requirement for publication in the Chemistry Department Criteria was 2 articles published in national or international peer-review journals.
Western Illinois Officials Mispresented my Performance
In his official letter granting me promotion to Associate Professor (Doc 8) and supposedly based on the above conclusions of the Department Chair and DPC, WIU’s President intentionally mispresented my performance and claimed that I should address concerns raised by the evaluators about my scholarly and professional activities. As shown in the above excerpts, the evaluators, after cancelling several of my publications on the basis of false pretexts, still rated my performance as Excellent and stated that I have consistently received a rating of Excellent in each of my six probationary evaluations by both the Chair of the Department and the DPC.
For the President of WIU, being consistently rated Excellent in scholarships and professional activities in each probationary year from both the chair and the DPC is a concern that I should address. For failing to address the issue of being rated Excellent each year, and because, in addition to being rated Excellent, I added an outstanding performance going for tenure in 2013, I was further discriminated against and abusively terminated, albeit my performance greatly overpassed the standards contractually set for tenure.
The College Personnel Committee Denounced a Targeted and Reflexive Evaluation
Despite a fierce pressure and threatening exerted by WIU officials on the committees involved in analyzing requests for reconsideration, the College Personnel Committee (CPC) rebutted the denial decision, affirmed that the rejection of my articles was targeted and conducted in a “reflexive manner”, and recommended that I be tenured. WIU officials ignored this recommendation.
While Rose McConnell was using the so-called “Jeffrey Beal’s list of predatory journals” as an alibi to reject my articles, it was discovered that in 2011, herself and two professors of the chemistry department, Lisa Wen and Juen Kuen Huang (Jack Huang), both members of the DPC published a manuscript in Intech, a publisher from Croatia that belongs to the same “Jeffrey Beal’s list of predatory journals”.
In Addition…
When I joined the Department of Chemistry at WIU in 2007, I was a junior faculty member but I had a decent publication record compared to my fellow colleagues, members of the DPC. Please find Doc 18, the list of publications of TK Vinod, [Professor, PhD in 1986], Scott McConnell, [ Professor, PhD in 1986], and myself Gilles K. Kouassi, [PhD in 2003]. Those publications records were produced by the owners in the fall of 2007, a few months after I joined WIU.
The records show that TK Vinod, was author of 10 articles in 21 years of academic career after his PhD. When he applied for promotion in 2001 most of the work for the only article that allowed him to meet the one-article requirement for tenure and/or promotion to Associate Professor at that time was done by Professor Gowda’s collaborator in India, as stated in Doc 19. Professor Gowda was the corresponding author of this article. This means that from 1997 to 2001, TK Vinod had no publication from his own research at WIU. When he applied for tenure in 2002, he used one article that was mostly done in India and only one article from his own research at WIU published in 2002.
Scott McConnell was Associate Professor at the time, 21 years after his PhD. He had 10 papers. Several of which were just technical reports published not in journals, but in the institution where he previously worked in Arkansas. When he applied for promotion to Professor in January 2011, the work for 3 of the 4 papers he submitted were entirely done while he was still working in Arkansas. The data used in those papers were collected between 1998 and 2004, much before his appointment in July 2006 at WIU. For the fourth article, four of the five co-authors, including the corresponding author were from an institution in North Carolina. This article was about toxicity and mutagenicity of nanoparticles to bacteria. Scott McConnell is a soil scientist. Nothing in his background shows any expertise in human toxicity and nanoparticles. Yet, all those articles were accepted toward his promotion to Professor. Comments made by Professor Gowda in red ink and sent to DPC members during the deliberation of Scott McConnell’s application for Professor are in Doc 20. The publication records of Rose McConnell, [Professor, PhD in 1983] was not impressive either.
Myself, joining WIU in 2004, I was first or corresponding author of all my 10 peer-review articles published in international journals from the USA, Canada, and England. That means that four years after my Ph.D., I had published at least as much in peer-review journals as TK Vinod, and obviously more than Scott McConnell, 21 years after their PhD. When I applied for tenure in 2013, I had published 10 additional peer-review articles at WIU and I was first or corresponding author of 5 of those. The other 5 were published in collaboration with Professor Gowda, the former chair of the Department of Chemistry at WIU.
Professor Gowda shared with me the comments in Doc 20 because he was shocked to witness the double-standard, injustice, and discriminatory treatments I was subjected by the Department Chair and the DPC during the evaluation of my application for promotion to Associate Professor and tenure. He wanted me to have this information for the records.
If the pretexts and falsehoods used to reject my articles were applied to all faculty members in the Department of Chemistry, nobody could have been tenured or promoted to any rank in the department of Chemistry. T K Vinod would have not been promoted Associate Professor in 2001 nor been tenured, and Scott McConnell would have not been promoted Professor in 2011. Doc 21 is information published on the website of WIU in 2006 showing that Scott McConnell was hired at WIU effective July 1, 2006. WIU accepted the work he did before his hire toward his promotion to professor.
When my publication #6 (a review article) was accepted by Current Nanoscience in 2010, Rose McConnell came to my office and asked to be a co-author. But the article being already accepted for publication, I had nothing to justify her authorship.
In 2012, when my article #7 was accepted for publication in the Journal of Encapsulation and Adsorption Sciences, Rose McConnell requested a copy of the galley proof and went to the office of Dr. Mark Boley, the Chair of the Physics Department to ask him to justify his authorship for this article. She then came to my office to ask me why as the chemistry department chair, she was not a co-author but Dr. Mark Boley was. I responded that Dr. Boley earned his authorship for involving one of his graduate student in the atomic force microscopy (AFM) characterization of the nanoparticles, under his supervision, and for revising the manuscript. When I applied for tenure in 2013, Rose McConnell rejected both articles #6 and #7, the very same articles she praised in 2012 and asked in vain to be added as co-author.
Western Illinois, a four-year teaching institution…
WIU is a teaching institution. When I was hired in 2007, I was given a laboratory with zero equipment for research except a few glassware. Therefore, a significant amount of my research materials was experimentally analyzed in laboratories belonging to research institutions such as the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, the Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Maryland. Often, the experiments were done at my own expenses. For example, in 2008, I drove from Illinois to State College at my expenses and stayed a few days to conduct part of my experiments in the lab of a former collaborator at the Pennsylvania State University.
WIU officials involved in sabotaging any professional activity I initiated to the point of contacting the editorial office of journals to freeze the review process of manuscripts I had submitted for publication. Rose McConnell imposed faculty members to submit a monthly report on publication activities for the count of the Office of the Dean. There is nothing wrong with that if the information collected was wisely use. Unfortunately, this information was used to contact members of the editorial board or employees of journals to freeze or sabotage the review process. This happened even with the most reputed publishers. After I decided not to report my publication activities to the department until the paper is in print, the outcomes changed.