By Kevin Kiley
There are probably a few academics who have looked up old journal articles by their universities’ presidents to get a sense of their leaders’ intellectual development. But at Kean University, the archive search is far from an academic pursuit.
When he applied for a faculty position in the master of public affairs program at Kean in 1983, Dawood Y. Farahi, now the New Jersey public institution’s president, claimed that an article he wrote was accepted for publication by a major academic journal in his field, but a representative from the journal said it has no record of accepting or publishing his work.
In the 1983 résumé, Farahi claimed that the article “Patterns of Administrative Efficiency” was accepted for publication by Management Science in 1981. In December, Gerard P. Cachon, the journal’s editor and a business professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, responded to a request by Kean faculty members, saying the publication had no record of the article.
“Management Science publishes everything we accept,” Cachon wrote in a letter provided by faculty union leaders to Inside Higher Ed and confirmed by Cachon. “There is a delay from the ‘accept’ decision to the article appearing in print because of the typesetting and production process. I have been told that we have no papers in that stage which were accepted more than 1 year ago.”
Faculty members at Kean say the the 1983 résumé is one of several examples they have found of erroneous claims of publication and other misleading statements on what they claim to be six additional résumés by Farahi, beginning in 1982 and spanning almost 30 years, that they obtained through a combination of open-records requests and searching university records and reports.
The faculty union has brought its concerns over Farahi’s academic record to the university’s Board of Trustees, which is currently investigating the president. “The Executive Committee of the board has employed independent counsel to review and research this matter in a thorough and comprehensive manner, and to report back to the Executive Committee with its findings,” said board chairwoman Ada Morell in a statement. “I am hopeful this work will be completed shortly.”
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