The dispute began over a $500 teaching award that a University of Illinois engineering professor believes he was wrongly denied.
Since that dust-up more than four years ago, the career of 75-year-old Louis Wozniak, a popular but controversial professor, has only unraveled further. In the wake of being passed over for the student-selected prize, Wozniak has been accused of publicly embarrassing a student, videotaping students without written consent and violating university policy by sending seniors an email with sexual overtones.
Wozniak’s 50-year career at U. of I. could end Thursday when university trustees are expected to decide whether to revoke his tenure — the equivalent of an academic death sentence.
U. of I. officials say it’s likely the first time in university history that a tenure review case has made it to the board of trustees.
“It is not that faculty have not been asked to resign. They would rather negotiate an amicable resolution rather than put themselves and the institution through that process,” said Matthew Finkin, a longtime U. of I. law professor who chaired the faculty committee that reviewed Wozniak’s case.
Administrators initiated dismissal proceedings years ago, and a faculty committee held numerous hearings before clearing Wozniak of most allegations in a January report. The group found that while Wozniak acted inappropriately in one instance, he shouldn’t lose his job. Instead, the committee imposed conditions, including that he shouldn’t share on his website the private conversation he and a student had about the award.
But university officials claim Wozniak has not followed those guidelines, and U. of I. President Robert Easter decided to take the case to the board of trustees — the only way, at this point, to revoke his tenure and fire him, according to university procedures.
Officials declined to talk about the matter or provide any material about it, saying university statutes suggest that public discussion of tenure cases “be avoided until completion of the proceedings.”
“This is a very rare case and the Board considers these matters as among the most serious tasks it faces, as evidenced by the painstakingly thorough process the university has followed,” said U. of I. spokesman Thomas Hardy. “To the best of our knowledge,” no other case has reached the point of a formal board action, he said.
Wozniak, meanwhile, has been suspended from teaching since August 2010, though he continues to get paid. His salary is $85,547, the lowest of any professor in the department of industrial and enterprise systems engineering. Wozniak — affectionately called “Woz” by his former students — said he still goes to his office five or six days a week, spending much of the time working on his case and posting documents about it on his website.
He denies he did anything wrong. He said he has spent more than $100,000 defending himself and just wants to be able to teach. If he’s fired, he will be eligible to receive his pension.
“From the day I started barking about my award that I didn’t get, they started amassing information and made a whole bunch of stupid charges,” Wozniak said. “Somebody has to stand up for principle. And it sure as hell is no one else around the university.”
More Top Picks Sony Mdr 7506
Wozniak took an unconventional path to the U. of I. Born as Luigi Garbujo in Rome, Italy, he spent several years in an orphanage after his father was killed toward the end of World War II, he said.
When he was 13, his cousins, Denise and Joe Wozniak, who lived in Benton, Ill., sponsored his immigration to the United States and legally adopted him, documents show. He changed his name to Louis Wozniak and became a U.S. citizen.
After graduating from high school, Wozniak enrolled at the U. of I., earning a bachelor’s degree with highest honors in mechanical engineering in 1961 and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1967, according to university records.
He joined the faculty, received tenure in 1972 and has taught engineering courses ever since. His honors include being elected a fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers for his contributions related to hydrogenerator controls.
His current problems are not his first with the administration. In the mid 1990s, he challenged a university requirement that he provide his grade books to the engineering department, a claim he took to federal court.
He was on a paid teaching suspension for about seven years, he said, and lost the case before the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. The judges’ opinion — written 12 years ago — referred to him as a “rebel.”
But with his light gray hair parted to the side, he looks more like a grandfather.
Wozniak has an anachronistic way about him. He doesn’t own a cellphone (“I’m 75 and should have some privileges,” he says.) and if he heard a phone ring or vibrate during class, he gave an immediate quiz. He drives a 1995 Toyota Corolla with 211,000 miles on it and lives in a secluded area of Mahomet with his wife in a house that he largely built himself in the 1970s, he said.
The materials for the redwood home came from a kit, and the house is heated with firewood that he cuts himself. There is no electric or gas heat.
His son described him as “a man of principles” who is “fair, fair, fair.”
“It is never about the money, it is about doing what is right,” said the younger Louis Wozniak, 46. He recalled a time when a foreign exchange student came to their house to buy a used car and offered to pay the asking price. His father explained to the buyer that he should negotiate, and he ended up selling it for a few hundred dollars less.
“He is kind of an eccentric — well, a lot eccentric — professor who should be a professor for life,” said his son. “He has just pissed off the big machine that is the university. They should just get off his back and let him teach.”
Nobody disputes that Wozniak has an unconventional way of getting his students’ attention.
He asked students to sign a contract at the beginning of his courses, including indicating whether they would keep “irrelevant conversation to 10 words or less.” His examples of permissible conversation included: “May I borrow a pen?”, “I love you” and “Woz is hot.”
The contract asked students to list the types of comments that offended them.
Wozniak said he endeavored to make what could be dull material more interesting, and the contract was one example of how he lightened the mood. His strategy seems to have worked, as he received numerous teaching awards over the years.
It was the 2009 award, chosen by two student engineering groups, that led to his recent troubles. Wozniak had won it before, and when another professor was named the winner, Wozniak challenged the results. (A faculty report later revealed that 49 students had voted, and Wozniak received nine votes, more than any other professor.)
According to the faculty group that reviewed Wozniak’s conduct, the professor didn’t let it go.
Wozniak interviewed one of the student leaders in his office and then publicized to others that she had cried, according to the faculty report. He made a video about the award, posted it on YouTube and included a link to the video in his email signature. He filed a civil lawsuit against the student leaders and allegedly revealed one of the student’s grades to his attorney.
“He persistently pursued the perceived wrong with single-minded righteousness, oblivious to the feelings of others and in a manner grossly disproportionate to what was at stake,” according to the report from the faculty review group, known as the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
But what precipitated Wozniak’s suspension — and the beginning of the tenure revocation proceedings — was a May 2010 email Wozniak sent to more than 100 graduating seniors. He refers to the students as his “adorable GKs,” or grandkids, a moniker he regularly used to address them.
After congratulating them and urging them to act with the “highest ethical behavior,” he concludes: “If you return to visit and see me, please don’t ask if I remember your name. Just tell it to me up front. I only remember names of the GKs I’ve had sex with.”
He said it was a dumb joke and that he never had sex with his students. The next morning he emailed an apology.
It was too late. The engineering dean suspended him from teaching, and the university initiated the tenure termination process. In presenting its case for Wozniak’s dismissal to the faculty committee, the administration listed 12 allegations of misconduct, many of them stemming from his reaction to being denied the teaching award.
The faculty group cleared him of most of the charges. It said that while the email was “unprofessional, pointless, and, to say the least, puerile,” it was not grounds for firing. Nor were his actions related to the award.
“Being a self-righteous, obsessed, and insensitive person is not cause to dismiss,” the committee wrote in its January 2013 report. It urged Wozniak to “move on from the events” and focus the rest of his career on his students and academic responsibilities.
The committee, however, said Wozniak should delete any references to the private conversations he had with a student about the teaching award, saying it violated student-faculty confidentiality.
Failure to do so “shall be cause to dismiss him,” according to the report.
Officials contend he hasn’t removed from his website the materials referring to the student conversation, though he deleted her name. Easter asked trustees to terminate Wozniak’s tenure because of his “repeated acts of unprofessional conduct” and “refusal to respond to corrective efforts,” according to a document provided to the board in August titled “President’s Statement in Support of Dismissal.”
“If Professor Wozniak remains among the University of Illinois tenured faculty, it is only a matter of time before he acts to harm students and the educational mission of the University of Illinois again,” the document states.
For his part, Wozniak said he removed student names from his website and should not otherwise be “muzzled.” “It’s freedom of speech. Why should I kowtow to some stupid edict just because a university committee says it?” Wozniak said. “I enjoy the same (free speech) rights as every other citizen.”
Tenure is the closest thing to a lifetime job guarantee, an indefinite appointment designed to ensure faculty members can freely teach, research and write without fear of retribution.
More Top Picks Best Football Cleats For Men
There are no national statistics on how often tenure is revoked. Most agree that it doesn’t happen often, and when it does, it typically doesn’t occur publicly.
“It is a very difficult process and time-consuming, and I’m sure very emotionally draining for everybody,” said Gregory Scholtz, with the American Association of University Professors. “In most cases, the faculty member who faces this process is not likely to go through with it if he or she has a choice of retiring or taking a settlement.”
Finkin, the law professor who chaired the U. of I. faculty committee, hopes trustees will explain their reasoning if they revoke Wozniak’s tenure.
“They would have an obligation to explain to the faculty on what basis they have to set our findings aside,” Finkin said.
Wozniak’s former students may also look for an explanation. One of the last students he taught, Matt Appuhn, said Wozniak — who sends his former students an annual email around the winter holidays — “should not be forced out.”
“He made the effort to make his class interesting,” said Appuhn, now a consulting engineer who lives in Coal City. “The way he did it was admittedly a bit politically incorrect at times, but it was nice to see an effort.”
“He clearly cared a ton about his students,” said Christopher Marshall, 29, who graduated in 2006.
Speaking from his office on campus, Wozniak said he is prepared for the board’s decision.
“I am at the point in time that I have nothing to lose,” Wozniak said, and then paused to reconsider his statement. “What I have to lose is the students. They are marvelous. I almost cry when I go past those classes, and I know that I can do a better job than who is there. That is what really tears me up.”