Credit: Fred Mulhearn, Baton Rouge Advocate

Documents obtained in response to Levees.org’s Public Records Request reveal that LSU paid a Baton Rouge law firm nearly a half million dollars to defend the flagship university in Dr. Ivor van Heerden’s wrongful dismissal lawsuit filed in 2010.

The law firm Kantrow Spaht Weaver and Blitzer received more than $457,000 over a course of two and 1/2 years according to the records.

Additionally, last month, LSU and the Louisiana Office of Risk Management paid a settlement check to the former deputy director of the now shuttered LSU Hurricane Center in the amount of $435,000.

The settlement and the payments to Kantrow Spaht totalling more than $892,000 do not include payments that LSU paid its own staff spent to comply with court orders, subpoenas and depositions.

Dr. van Heerden claimed that he was fired for statements in his post-Katrina levee failure investigation funded by the Louisiana Department of Transportation, namely that the Army Corps of Engineers’ faulty levees caused the flooding during Katrina. He claimed LSU fired him because they were worried that his conclusions would cost the school future federal funding.

“LSU has chosen to hound a faculty member, to engage in secrecy and cover-up tactics, and to try to save face by engaging in a quixotic legal quest that it rightly lost,” wrote Dr. Kevin Cope, President of the Faculty Senate at LSU. “[This] leaves one wondering how many more millions will pass through the courtrooms before reaching the classroom.”

A study by the Association of American University Professors published 2011 which focused on Van Heerden’s firing, and a second unrelated firing, determined that LSU had a ‘prevailing position’ on the cause of the New Orleans flood, namely that the flooding was an unavoidable act of nature. Van Heerden’s conclusions, wrote the authors of the study, ran contrary to that position. In 2011, LSU was the only US university censured by the association and the only two censured colleges in 2012 were other universities in the LSU system.

“I am very critical of this tactic used by LSU to take faculty cases like this to court and stretch them out for years, said Ravi Rau, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at LSU. “Most, who are not like Ivor, would have to give up, and this only allows such behavior to continue.”

Initially, Levees.org’s public records request was only partially fulfilled and included remuneration to Kantrow Spaht only from August 2011 to February 2013. Last week, Levees.org filed a new request for the missing information. David W. Boggs from the Office of General Counsel for the State of Louisiana quickly responded and apologized for the error. “The first payments were entered under a slightly different name”, wrote Boggs in an email.

“Here we are in the midst of a “budget crisis” and threatened cuts to higher education yet we are going to spend a million dollars on ego?” asked Jill Craft, attorney for Ivor van Heerden. “Someone needs to be held accountable.”