My Documented Dysfunction of Chicago State

Long before U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Maldonado ruled Chicago State University had to turn over Nigerian President Bola Tinubu’s academic records and subject themselves to a deposition, CSU was in trouble. I found it hilarious that CSU Atty. Michael Hayes felt this case was bringing unwanted attention and hurting the school’s image. I disagree, this is only adding on to CSU’s horrible reputation and make it known all over the world. CSU has decades of news stories published and lawsuits filed against it for doing illegal and immoral things that shed light onto how the place operates. Here are just a sampling of the confirmed stories that you can find in media outlets and that I can personally attest to because I was there.

In 2006, Dr. Delores Cross, pleaded guilty to one count of embezzlement for misappropriating federal funds while she was the president of Morris Brown College in Atlanta. Cross had previously been the president of Chicago State, leaving in 1997, the year I joined the staff of TEMPO, the school newspaper.

If that wasn’t enough, Parvesh Singh, who was the director of financial aide at CSU under Cross, also pled guilty to fraud in the same year. He had followed his old boss down to Morris Brown to serve in the same role as he did at CSU and now they had both been pinched by the feds. They were both sentenced to five years of probation with one year for Cross, and 18 months for Singh of home confinement.

It must be made clear that neither Cross or Singh were ever indicted or convicted for doing any crimes while they were at CSU. However the rumors around campus were that perhaps they just didn’t get caught or they used CSU as a training ground. I think the rumors were completely unfair to both of them as their was no proof, even though I had my own skepticisms. The judge handed out light sentences to them both because neither personally profited from the funds, they just misappropriated them.

Carmita Coleman is out of prison after serving 13 months for wire fraud. Photo courtesy of Chicago State University.

However, that was not the case for Carmita Coleman. This piece of work, who was a professor and interim dean at CSU, was just released from prison a few months ago. She was convicted of wire fraud after stealing about $650,000 from a student organization on campus that had the primary goal of getting more minority students into the pharmaceutical industry. Coleman was sentenced in May of 2022 to 13 months in prison, which means during her time in prison, she was mercifully spared from most of the Chicago Bears 14-game losing streak, which would have been considered cruel punishment.

Anyway, according to WTTW in Chicago, the Student National Pharmaceutical Association (SNPhA), filed a federal lawsuit against Coleman in 2017, detailing how Coleman allegedly carried out the fraud. Prosecutors believed she withdrew $541,032.58 (damn that’s exact) in cash from the student organization’s account. She also used an additional $110,240.05 (again very precise) on a debit card associated with the account to make unauthorized purchases. Those unauthorized purchases included giving money and gifts to her family and friends, in addition to herself. CSU fired Coleman.

Sculptor David E. Parvin passed away sadly in 2014. He had sent me this photo of “Defiance” as a gift when he found out I was a Black Studies major at Chicago State and I was searching for the missing art piece.

Moving along here to the stolen art portion of the article. We can’t leave Chicago politicians out of an article detailing corruption, so let’s go with former state Rep. Monique Davis, whose quirky personality at least makes theft funny. In January of 2010, CSU administrators came to the Chicago media to tell us that a statue they bought with $25,000 of Illinois taxpayer money, was missing from campus. The statue, which was aptly named “Defiance,” is a life-sized bronzed sculpture of an African slave that shows the tortures and indignities of slavery. But this was no whodunnit case folks. The University knew where the statue was and who took it. “Defiance” had found a new home, right in the office of, you guessed it, Rep. Davis, who defiantly told the press that she had not stolen it. Instead it was brought to her office to “protect” it.

You see, Rep. Davis had a friend/accomplice, Arnold Jordan, who at the time was the director of the Student Financial Outreach Center at CSU. “Defiance” was supposed to be displayed in the office of the SFOC. According to Mr. Jordan, he discovered (you know like Christopher Columbus) “Defiance” all alone in a dusty warehouse on campus. Perhaps upset that the art piece he had purchased with CSU funds legally was not being displayed properly, Jordan said he got the University’s permission to relocate the statue to Rep. Davis’ office. Nobody ever found out from Jordan, why he just didn’t move it to somewhere else on campus so it could be displayed or how he moved this huge thing miles away. He never said who gave him this authority, but who cares when you got a good caper going on here. CSU administrators disagreed saying they never granted Jordan or anyone else a permission slip to remove a 400 pound hunk of bronze from campus. The result was a four-month-long saga that began over who had rights to poor “Defiance,” who couldn’t speak for herself. Judge Judy wasn’t taking calls on this one, so there was no end in sight.

CSU administrators went as far as sending CSU police officers to Rep. Davis’ office, which at the time was only a few miles west of the campus. An office in which Davis was at the time $500,000 behind in rent. Despite their efforts, even the officers had no success as Davis remained, well defiant, perhaps inspired by “Defiance” herself. Rep. Davis would not release her hostage until her demands were met, in this case she wanted some legal clarification on who had the legal rights to the statue. She got her answer, it wasn’t her. After taxpayers via telephone, email and letters to newspapers informed Rep. Davis that she had committed grand theft, a felony, and were upset she had not been arrested and charged already, Rep. Davis called a press conference to say she had a change of heart. A week later, “Defiance” was back on campus after a really long field trip.

“It was not to decorate the office of Monique Davis. I was protecting it from being discarded and disrespected,” Davis said at the time.

Yeah because a warehouse, a place where you generally store large items that weigh 400 pounds like a bronze statue, is totally disrespectful to it.

Want more misisng money stories? I got you. Former CSU President Dr. Elnora Daniel (yes that one) was forced to resign as the university’s president in January of 2008, after a state audit showed she had expensed $15,000 in taxpayer money towards a Caribbean cruise for her family and listed it as a “leadership conference.” However, before she left office (more on that later), Dr. Daniel wasn’t done spending money recklessly. She approved an $18,000 expense for a tribute book that was actually a self-promotion book for all the things she had accomplished at CSU. Funny she accomplished pissing me off every week but that didn’t make the book for some reason. Go figure.
While Dr. Daniel announced her resignation in January of 2008, she actually kept working until June 30th that year, which just happened to be the final day of her contract. From the day she had announced her resignation until the day she left five months later, she continued to collect her $241,025 annual salary. Most of us just give a two-week notice and call it a day. She never faced any criminal charges over the misappropriation of funds.

LaShondra Peebles sued Chicago State University and was also arrested and charged with fraud, theft and misconduct. Photo courtesy of CSU.

I am sure many of you reading this love your family members. But are you really committed to loving them or do you just say it because it is polite. Well former CSU administrator LeShondra Peebles really loves her mom. So much so, that in November of 2015, Cook County prosecutors say she hatched a plan to hire her 65-year old mother Shirley Kyles in a ghost payrolling scheme, in which the mom allegedly netted $4,500. Problem is mom didn’t get the memo and never showed up to work a day at CSU, according to news reports. School officials reported their findings to the prosecutors office and Peebles was charged with theft, fraud and official misconduct, after thousands of dollars allegedly went into mom’s account. I mean this was a bit more than mom finding some money in the couch.

That is not the end of the Peebles story though. You see she also sued CSU and President Wayne Watson. Peebles claimed that Watson wanted her to file a false sexual harassment claim against Prof. Phillip Beverly because Beverly ran a blog that was often critical of President Watson. That is an example of free speech and a democracy. You can’t have that at Chicago State, I mean what do people think this is America or something.

I have known Dr. Beverly since I was a student at CSU and interviewed him several times when I became a professional journalist. He was the head of the faculty senate so of course he is going to make comments the University may not like, but attempting to censor him is illegal, having one make a false claim against him is really illegal. President Watson resigned two weeks prior to Peebles suit being filed.

Watson’s own selection to become president of CSU was filled with controversy from the beginning. Thirteen members of a 15-member search committee set up to hire a new president resigned in July 2008 after their recommendation not to hire Watson fell on deaf ears, or should I say a deaf ear, the President of the Board of Trustees Rev. Dr. Leon Finney Jr, who was no Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Let me be straight about this dude, he was a jack-legged preacher, community hustler and slickster, who is lucky he died because he should have been in prison. Just like Africans don’t like being labeled as fraudsters, or Italians mobsters, Chicagoans don’t like being labeled as a bunch of street hustlers. Finney was one of them though. Here is a guy, who before he died in 2020, pulled every dirty scheme trick he could and got away with it for the most part. He helped a few people but his methods were always questionable and when he fenagled his way onto the CSU Board through his political connections, you knew nothing good would happen. He brought in his buddy Watson as president against the recommendation of pretty much everyone with common sense and it was downhill from there. During Watson’s tenure, student enrollment plummeted and CSU was caught up in a class enrollment scandal where students with a GPA below 1.8 were still being allowed to enroll in classes, which was strictly against CSU’s own policies.

While Watson would eventually retire in disgrace, Finney kept up with his nonsense until the end. In Sept of 2019, it all came crashing down on him in a great article done by the Chicago Sun-Times. His personal finances were in ruins. His wife divorced him. The Woodlawn Organization, a community group he founded, kicked him out of the organization and a judge was forwarding the organization’s civil bankruptcy case to federal prosecutors to see if criminal charges were warranted.

“You could call it fraud. You could call it dishonesty. You could call it gross mismanagement. You could call it incompetence. It is all of those things,” said U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Carol A. Doyle, when describing the financial mess Finney left The Woodlawn Organization in .

The Woodlawn Organization owed over $4 million in taxes to the U.S. Government. It is alleged that Finney had stopped paying the payroll taxes, something he admitted to in a deposition, amongst a bunch of other shady things. I do get some satisfaction in that his reputation was ruined before he departed this earth. This was the man who was the leader of the Board of Trustees at Chicago State during a time CSU’s downfall gained speed.

In one of the smaller, yet still important controversies, the former police chief at the University was fired after officers gave her repeated votes of no-confidence. Patricia Walsh didn’t last very long as officers complained about her inability to effectively communicate, her failure to fix broken equipment and her yielding to the wishes of Chicago Police commanders in matters involving the Chicago State campus.

When CSU students protested the state’s budget cuts to their school in 2016 by briefly blocking the interstate, Walsh allowed officers from the Chicago Police Department to issue violations to the students, who had marched back to the campus peacefully, escorted by campus police. Illinois State Police patrol the expressways in the Chicago area and they were not going to issue citations, they just wanted the road clear. Walsh undermined the authority of her own officers, which killed department morale.

In terms of broken equipment, the CSU Police Department has never been fully equipped or funded since I’ve known about them. As student journalists, we wrote a huge article in TEMPO about how campus officers were rolling around in unsafe cars. In one police unit, the driver’s side door would not close properly. In another squad, the vehicle couldn’t go over 45 mph because the transmission was shot. However, the most embarrassing vehicle in the fleet was without a doubt, a utility truck that the officers were being forced to use because they didn’t have enough squads. The vehicle reminded you of the pick-up truck used in the 70’s TV show Sanford & Son, except this one was white with the State of Illinois seal on the side doors. It was rusty, you could tell the axles on the car were done by the way the tires buckled out. It was a disgrace and put the campus in danger as officers would not be able to properly respond to an emergency or could have seriously inured or killed themselves, or God-forbid citizens in that death trap. Students would joke about trying to get into a police chase with them because they knew they could get away.

After our article ran in the newspaper, the administration was so ashamed, we never saw the Sanford & Son vehicle again being used on patrol. I also think the police union threatening to sue the school for unsafe working conditions after they read our article had something to do with it too. The school managed to get some replacement vehicles when the Chicago Housing Authority disbanded their police force in 1999. However those vehicles were more than slightly used and so they didn’t last very long either. The officers were grateful the student journalists had written about their situation. We had and lukewarm relationship with the department, especially former Chief Albert Chesser, who was a tool, but that article smoothed a lot of things over, which shows you the power of the media.

The First Amendment however is not respected at CSU. As perhaps one of the biggest scandals led to the eventual elimination of the school newspaper TEMPO. In January of 2012, a federal judge ordered CSU to reinstate the fired newspaper faculty advisor. CSU fired Gerian Steven Moore from his position as TEMPO faculty adviser in October 2008 after the newspaper published a series of articles critical of the university. Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, who is now the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court of Northern Illinois, said CSU violated Moore’s First Amendment rights as well as those of student editor George Providence. CSU administrators were demanding prior review of TEMPO’s content and ordering that publication of an issue be delayed, all violations of the law.

I can personally attest to this practice by a CSU administrator. It was one of the biggest regrets of my career. As a new student journalist in 1997, I had the scoop that a former female member of the women’s basketball team had a sexual relationship with the head coach, who was also female, while the player was still under her athletic scholarship. The relationship was very open as all members of the team and possibly coaching staff knew what was going on, according to the player. Sources had told me that even the men’s basketball coaches and players knew about it. When I asked them, they all denied knowing anything, although I’m sure some of them knew for a fact what was happening. One coach told me off the record he witnessed the player coming out of the coach’s hotel room in the early morning hours during a road trip. At that time, the teams were in the Mid-Continent Conference and they traveled together for road games. There was one person who I also believed knew, Dr. Elnora Daniel.

I was summoned to her office one day on the third floor of the Cook Administration building. As I sat down across from her desk, she probed me about the story and what I had found. I told her I had conducted a full interview with the player in question who had since left the school and returned to Ohio where she was from. I planned to question the coach next and then get a comment from the athletic department, public affairs or Dr. Daniel herself. That wasn’t going to happen though as she made it quite clear that she didn’t want this story to run. While she never flat out told me don’t do it, she was very subtle, yet strong with voicing and displaying her displeasure. She was a former military officer and when she needed to get gritty with it, Elnora ain’t no punk. Instead she said to me, “what do you think will come of this if you write this story? What do you think this will do to the University’s reputation? She followed that up by saying, “you do realize this type of stuff happens all the time on college campuses between professors and students?”

I had no doubt what occurred, after I had conducted a telephone interview with the young woman from the TEMPO offices. The phone records are easy to find. Dr. Daniel’s behavior confirmed it in my gut that she and others in the administration knew and were nervous about me printing this young lady’s testimony. I was still new to journalism and had not developed a reputation. I didn’t have the skills or knowledge on how to go about writing a story this big that I’m sure ESPN would have picked up. Even as a 20-something, I knew this was different. This was sexual harrassment. Regardless of the player being a legal adult as well as the coach, the coach has a power dynamic over the player in that she controlled her scholarship, meal money etc.

I was so appalled, but also intimidated by Dr. Daniel’s response, that I simply got up and left her office under her glare. I went to my editor-in-chief at the time and told her about the conversation. We talked to our faculty advisor, who was moreso on the side of Dr. Daniel, albeit for different reasons. She believed the story, but she didn’t think we had enough to print. The faculty advisor didn’t want this to be the player’s word against the coach’s word. That left just myself and the editor-in-chief, two 20-somethings trying to figure it out.

I buckled under the pressure and relented. I felt like shit. My schoolmate had poured out her heart to me over the phone and I had the goods, but not the guts to pull the trigger on the story. When she called back to ask me when we were running the story, I told her we decided not to go with it because we didn’t have enough. That was a lie. We didn’t print the story because I didn’t fight for it. She was upset, cursed me out, told me I had betrayed her, hung up the phone and I never heard from her again. I can’t even speak her name I’m still so ashamed of it, but life seems to be treating her well these days. I follow her on social media and she is making a difference in the lives of people.

Some time later the Chicago Tribune did run the story, naming the coach and player. In January of 1999, the player eventually filed a federal lawsuit against the coach, CSU and the Board of Trustees. The suit was dismissed, the courts had now failed her too. She deserved better. It is the one story that has both haunted me and motivated me about Chicago State. Because it is the story that I never told.

It won’t happen again.