Brehm accused of controversial actions

Controversy has arisen at Ohio University about the manner in which a dean evaluation was handled while IU's current Chancellor Sharon Brehm was provost of the University.\nBrehm is accused, by current OU faculty members, of pressuring the evaluation committee to remove parts of the negative evaluation and allegedly coercing the committee chairman to shred the original evaluation.\nEvery year, the faculty of each school receive a survey to fill out about its dean and an evaluation committee is assembled to present that information to the provost.\nLast year, a four-member evaluation committee was assembled to piece together the faculty's surveys on the business school's dean, Glenn Corlett.\nThe evaluation generally only includes a summary of the survey's questions and not individual comments, a policy created by Brehm while she was provost.\nBut last year, the evaluation committee voted to keep individual comments in the evaluation.\nOn March 20, 2001, the committee presented its evaluation to Brehm, including the individual comments.\nThe evaluation sat for over a month with the evaluation committee believing the evaluation was final.\nIn late April, David Chappell, an OU associate professor of management, was curious as to how the evaluation process ran.\n"I wanted to see part of the evaluation," Chappell said. \nChappell asked for a copy of the evaluation but was told by Jessie Roberson, the committee chairman, the provost could not give him a copy.\nChappell then made a public records request May 1 through the director of legal affairs for OU, John Burns, but was denied because the evaluation wasn't complete.\nEight days later, Brehm called an emergency meeting between herself, Burns and the evaluation committee.\n"She persuaded the committee to alter its report, which the committee had every right to do," Roberson said. "It didn't seem possible to take an original report, just a draft, and then create another final report."\nRoberson said Brehm asked the committee to take out all of the individual comments, many of them negative and close to 20 pages, and to take out a paragraph in the remaining evaluation criticizing the business school.\nThe four appendices of the individual comments that were taken out, Roberson said, were supposed to have been destroyed.\n"At no point was I told, 'gather all these up and shred them,'" Roberson said. "What it was that was supposed to happen to the report was absolutely clear. Someone wrote 'draft' on all the original copies, and they wanted me to shred them."\nRoberson, who is a licensed attorney, thought that it may be illegal to destroy the appendices, so he handed them over to Dr. Hugh Bloemer, the chairman of the Faculty Senate.\n"I didn't know what was going on here, but I didn't want to do anything illegal, so I didn't," Roberson said. "And it truly undermines the purpose of having a state public records law."\nBloemer didn't open the appendices. He immediately handed them over to the legal office. But Bloemer believes that nothing illegal happened with the evaluation.\n"If anything, it was a misunderstanding between two people," Bloemer said. "As far as I'm concerned, (Brehm) would never do anything touching the legality of anything."\nAs for what has occurred in the last year during her absence, Brehm is unsure.\n"Because when I left, there were no complaints, there were no concerns. I had cleared my desk," Brehm said.\n"When I came to Ohio University in 1996, I was told that there were a lot of complaints about the dean's evaluations," she said, which is one of the reasons she said she changed the dean evaluation policy in 1996-97.\n"What had caused the concern was that anonymous comments had been produced and were appearing in the newspaper," Brehm said. \nThe provost gave The Post, OU's student newspaper, all of the dean's evaluations each year, but Brehm was concerned about the anonymous comments being published in the newspaper.\nBrehm worked with the Faculty Senate during her first year to change the evaluation policy and to place a new set of guidelines within the faculty handbook, thus eliminating individual comments in the dean evaluations until the business school's evaluation committee voted to keep anonymous comments in their report during 2000 and 2001.\nOU's President Robert Glidden believes Brehm was right in having the committee rework the report.\n"I know that she believed, when I talked with her, that the committee accepted all of that in good spirit," Glidden said. \nWhen Glidden arrived at OU in 1994, "it was a terrible climate for dean evaluations," Glidden said. But, what Brehm managed to fix in her tenure as provost is being looked at again by OU's current provost, Gary Schumacher.\n"I feel like I did my best," Brehm said. "I think I did a really good job, and I think most people who you would talk with would agree with that, and this is an issue that they need to handle. They need to revise their process.\n"I did the best I could at OU. Now I'm focused on Indiana University. What's going on at OU, that's their issue. That's not my issue"