A former high-ranking Ohio State administrator alleges that he was forced to resign in 2008 because his bosses wanted to stop him from raising questions about how the university was awarding building contracts and circumventing state wage and hour laws.
Steven KremerSteven Kremer, former OSU assistant vice president for Student Life and director of Housing, resigned on Jan. 8, 2008. In lawsuits filed in February of this year, Kremer contends that his superiors worked in unison to get rid of him.
He filed two lawsuits, one against the university and another against two of his superiors.
In a written statement to The Lantern, Kremer said he has come to believe “that the use of fear and intimidation in employment matters at Ohio State is something that my lawsuit might help curtail in the future.”
Kremer said he quit several months after his boss disciplined him for telling his staff to deliver 354 racist letters to the residents of seven dorms on April 18, 2007. The university wanted to delay delivery, but Kremer said that would have been illegal. He contends in his suits that his supervisors used that incident to silence him.
Richard Hollingsworth“Do something about Kremer,” then-Provost Barbara Snyder told former Vice President of Student Affairs Richard Hollingsworth in a 2006 telephone call, according to the lawsuits.
Snyder’s phone call came after Kremer had lunch in September 2006 with Martha Garland, vice provost for Enrollment Services and dean for Undergraduate Education at OSU. During their lunch, Kremer questioned how the university was awarding building contracts, according to the lawsuits.
Garland responded to Kremer by making comments he took to be anti-Semitic, one of the lawsuits says. Kremer’s attorney, Jon Browning, said Kremer himself is not Jewish but his wife is.
“It was contextual in referring to members of the Jewish faith as ‘those people’ or things like that,” Browning said. “It wasn’t like they were using specific slurs.”
Martha GarlandGarland also told Kremer during the lunch that she intended to make the university keep “kissing [her] ass,” according to one of the suits.
Browning said Garland is nearing retirement and that “she was just being nasty with the university” and that “she just didn’t like her job all that well.”
Attorneys for the university say judges should dismiss both lawsuits. In motions to both the Federal District Court and the Ohio Court of Claims, they argue that Kremer’s suits are flawed for many legal reasons. Among them, they contend Kremer filed one suit too late and that the courts, in some cases, don’t have jurisdiction to settle his claims.
In seeking the dismissals, university attorneys have not argued that Kremer lied, but in one of the motions they wrote: “Defendants Garland and Hollingsworth strongly disagree with [Kremer’s] characterization of the events described in the Complaint.”
The motion also states that Garland and Hollingsworth “will not undertake to correct [Kremer’s] mischaracterizations or to put forth the many significant facts [Kremer’s] chose not to include in his complaint.”
After her September 2006 lunch with Kremer, Garland passed on Kremer’s questions to Snyder, who then contacted Hollingsworth, who was Kremer’s direct supervisor.
Kremer was concerned about the building contract for Fisher Commons, an apartment complex on the corner of Lane Avenue and Kenny Road. The building offers subsidized housing for master of business administration students.
“The university was funding it, was my understanding,” Browning said. “I’ve asked for the documents to understand that, and no one’s given them to me. And those are public documents.”
According to the lawsuits, Kremer questioned spending that he said “circumvented state wage and hour laws on building projects.”
He also questioned why the university was spending student-housing money to support the Blackwell Inn.
Browning said the hotel is supposed to support itself, but it loses money.
The university, Browning said, is “using money from student housing to support bigwigs and the football team on Friday nights.”
On April 18, 2007, Kremer’s staff notified him about the racist mail as he waited at the Columbus International Airport to go on vacation in Arizona with his family.
When he heard about the letters, Hollingsworth wanted to delay delivery while he prepared an apology, according to the lawsuits.
Kremer told his staff to execute the housing department’s policy to respond to racist mail, according to the lawsuits. That policy required that the mail be delivered without delay.
The next day, while Kremer was in Arizona, Hollingsworth assembled Kremer’s staff and told them he “was placing Mr. Kremer on administrative leave,” the suits say. Hollingsworth told them he was doing this because they had failed to stop the delivery of the racist letters, according to the lawsuits.
In his statement to The Lantern, Kremer said the university created an unlawful expectation that his staff should violate federal postal regulations, and that his staff performed flawlessly. He said his administrative leave was implemented to silence him.
“During the immediate aftermath, two senior colleagues reached out to me to tell me that Ohio State had become a ‘lawless’ environment,’ and I ‘could not trust anyone,’ ” Kremer said in his statement. “I took their counsel seriously and began to take every action to diminish harm.”
From the time he returned from vacation, Kremer’s bosses made his working conditions so intolerable that he decided to resign, according to the lawsuits.
“Hollingsworth used the racist mail incident as a pretext to get rid of Kremer,” Browning said. “In a conversation tape recorded by Kremer, Hollingsworth admitted that his motivation for taking actions was influenced by comments from Garland.
“It’s my belief and Kremer’s belief that she meant to silence him in some fashion. Hollingsworth took that a step further and forced him to resign.”
Kremer is now the assistant vice president of Residential Life at the University of Connecticut. He started working there on Jan. 18, 2008. Snyder is now president of Case Western Reserve University. Hollingsworth retired and Garland still works for OSU.
The Lantern contacted the following people, who were unwilling to comment: Hollingsworth, Snyder, Garland, OSU attorneys Randall Knutti and Kim Shumate; and Fred Pressley, Jennifer Edwards and Kathleen Trafford, who are special counsel from the Porter Wright Morris and Arthur law firm.
OSU spokesman Jim Lynch declined to discuss the details of the case, but said the university disputes the allegations and will defend its actions in court.
Browning said he doesn’t know if or when the case will go to trial.
He said Kremer was offered a cash settlement, but he filed the lawsuits because he wasn’t offered the amount he was hoping for.
“I can’t tell you what he expected in the settlement, but I can tell you they offered him $10,000,” Browning said.
In his statement to The Lantern, Kremer said his only regret is the “tax dollars that will be spent on the law firm Ohio State has hired as defense. More than anything, I sought an official apology to be confidentially shared with my children and parents. That would have been free.”
Drew Sullivan can be reached at [email protected].
