Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1976 [PAGE 134]

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1974]

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

123

3

College of Physical Education Bachelor of Science College of Law Juris Doctor Total, Degrees Conferred at Urbana-Champaign

Campus

5 637

ANNOUNCEMENTS FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD Future Meetings

President Hughes called attention to the schedule of regular meetings for the next three months: December 18, Urbana-Champaign; January 15, Medical Center; February 19, Chicago Circle.

RECESS AND EXECUTIVE SESSION

President Hughes announced that an executive session had been requested and was being ordered for consideration of pending litigation. Following a short recess, the Board reconvened in executive session and considered the following item of business:

Litigation Initiated by Robert Stafford Byars

(17) T h e University has been served with a complaint filed by Robert Stafford Byars in the Circuit Court of the Sixth Judicial Circuit, Champaign County (Case No. 74 L 930), against the University and other named defendants. The title of the cause identifies, as other defendants, each of the elected members of the Board of Trustees "as trustee and individually," each of the student trustees "as trustee," and Chancellor J. W. Peltason, Dean Robert W. Rogers, Vice Chancellor Morton W. Weir, and Edward A. Kolodziej each "as a representative of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees and individually." The complaint is in nine counts. The first eight counts allege that the individual defendants, singly and in concert, "while engaged in the course and scope of their employment with the University of Illinois, intending to injure the plaintiff's good name, plaintiff's professional reputation as a University scholar, teacher, professor, and researcher," caused to be published in either the Daily Illini, the News Gazette, the Courier, or in memoranda to Dean Rogers from E. A. Kolodziej (Head of the Department of Political Science at the Urbana campus), an article or document containing an allegedly "false, scandalous, malicious libel of and concerning the plaintiff." It is further alleged that the statements were knowingly false and were made with a "reckless indifference and disregard" as to their truth or falsity, as a direct result of which the plaintiff is alleged to have suffered a loss "of his most precious possession in the community, namely that of a good and sound reputation and ability in the plaintiff's field of endeavor, to-wit: that of a University scholar, teacher, professor and researcher." In each of the first eight counts the plaintiff requests a trial by jury and seeks damages in the sum of $630,296 in compensatory damages and $6,300,000 for punitive and exemplary damages. The ninth count incorporates all of the allegations of the previous eight and alleges further that the individual defendants singly, and in concert, interfered with plaintiff's employment rights with the University of Illinois Board of Trustees and that the interference "was done deliberately with actual malice, wantonly and wilfully and because of personal animosity toward the plaintiff." The ninth count seeks ordinary as well as punitive and exemplary damages "in a sum that is fair and just."