MU leaders sent an email to the campus community Monday morning reiterating the conditions and citing the evidence supporting the firing of former chemical engineering professor Galen Suppes.
In the email, Chancellor Alexander Cartwright said Suppes was “not terminated due to his academic scholarship” but because of his conduct toward students, faculty and staff, which violated the rules of the University of Missouri System.
Suppes was sent a notice on Sept. 2, 2016, of the charges that set in motion what the university calls the “dismissal for cause” proceeding, according to a release from the MU News Bureau. He fought it, and the MU Campus Faculty Committee on Tenure held nine hearings totaling over 50 hours in the case. In May of this year, the committee unanimously voted to recommend Suppes’ termination.
Seeking to stop his dismissal, Suppes sued the university in state court; that suit was dismissed in November. He then filed an appeal with the Missouri Court of Appeals, but that court upheld his dismissal in June 2017.
In a separate case, last week a Boone County jury found him liable for $600,000 in damages to the UM System in a lawsuit over intellectual property that Suppes developed while working at MU.
The news release from Cartwright Monday morning also tried to dispel the notion that Suppes’ dismissal was somehow linked to the intellectual property dispute with the university.