Court Throws Out Lawsuit by a Fired Professor and Former Chancellor Against Indiana U.

A lengthy legal battle between Indiana University and a fired physics professor who was once chancellor of its South Bend campus may finally be approaching an end.

In a 17-page decision last week, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled for the university in the dispute, which initially led to the removal of the professor, H. Daniel Cohen, as chancellor and subsequently to his dismissal from the faculty.

Mr. Cohen was ousted as chancellor amid allegations that he had sexually harassed a female employee. He was allowed to remain on the faculty, but only on the condition–set forth in a written agreement–that “any future act of sexual harassment or retaliation” would result in his dismissal.

Last week’s ruling, by a unanimous three-judge panel of the court, concerned the university’s effort to have Mr. Cohen’s lawsuit over his firing thrown out. A lower court had refused to dismiss the lawsuit, citing what it called ambiguous language in the agreement, but the appeals court disagreed.

The appellate judges found that the language in question was “clear and unambiguous” in allowing the university to dismiss Mr. Cohen for violating the university’s ethics code, as described in the faculty handbook.

Mr. Cohen told the South Bend Tribune on Friday that he had no comment on the ruling. He would not say whether he planned to appeal the decision to the Indiana Supreme Court. The Responsibilities of a Professor

Mr. Cohen served as chancellor from 1987 to 1995, stepping down after a former employee accused him of groping and kissing her against her will. (In a civil lawsuit she filed against Mr. Cohen, a jury found in 1998 that he had sexually harassed her and awarded her $800,000 in punitive damages, an amount later reduced to $50,000.)

Four years after he returned to the faculty, however, a female student filed a sexual-harassment complaint against him. And in 2000, 11 other female students signed a petition accusing him of a range of “inappropriate behavior,” including hostile and abusive language as well as various forms of discrimination in the classroom. The first student’s complaint was later found to fall short of sexual harassment, but in early 2001 she said Mr. Cohen had tried to intimidate her.

The South Bend campus’s chancellor at the time, Kenneth L. Perrin, warned Mr. Cohen about his behavior, then barred him from the campus, and finally fired him. It was the first firing ever of a tenured professor at South Bend.

Mr. Cohen sued the university in 2003, demanding to be reinstated to the faculty and asserting that the dismissal itself violated the agreement because of ambiguities stemming from that document’s description of his “responsibilities” as a tenured professor.

The university had urged the trial-court judge to throw out the lawsuit, but last year he declined to do so, citing Mr. Cohen’s argument that the agreement was ambiguous.

The appeals court ruled last week that the university “did not breach the agreement” in firing Mr. Cohen and could have dismissed him for violating the ethics code alone.