Robert Felner’s trail of deceit as seen from Rhode Island

This from the Providence Journal:

Robert L. Carothers still led the University of Rhode Island in 2008, when he placed a phone call to the University of Wisconsin-Parkside about that school’s newly hired chancellor, Robert D. Felner.

Felner had served as director of URI’s School of Education about a decade earlier, a tenure marked by great accomplishment and complaints about his behavior, particularly toward women. Carothers reached out to Felner’s new employer to make sure administrators had the full picture. Carothers began to tell Wisconsin officials about the complications with Felner, only to hear “harassment? That’s the least of our problems.”

“I said ‘what?’ ” Carothers said. He learned authorities had launched a criminal investigation in Kentucky into whether Felner had misappropriated a $694,000 federal grant. That probe eventually uncovered that Felner had embezzled $1.7 million from the URI educational research center he had founded.

Felner had begun to carve himself a national reputation in the education world when he came to URI in 1996. He brought with him millions of dollars in grants and a survey he helped develop that empowered schools, for the first time, to get a read on the culture within their doors by questioning parents, teachers and students.

His story was a compelling one. He told of his days as a teenage truckdriver cut short by a persuasive rabbi who encouraged him to head back to school. His GED certificate and his Ph.D. hung on the wall. He described himself as a gritty Brooklyn kid raised in the shadow of Ebbets Field and unapologetically acknowledged that some people liked him while others did not.

Fourteen years after coming to Rhode Island, his career trajectory has crashed amid scandal. He is awaiting sentencing in western Kentucky Friday for embezzling $2.2 million from URI and the University of Louisville. Prosecutors say he and a former colleague diverted money to accounts for a dummy organization and then used it for personal expenses and investments.

“Professionally, he’s a dead man walking,” said Kenneth E. Fish, now retired from the Rhode Island Department of Education.

Interviews with more than a dozen of Felner’s colleagues, superiors and underlings throughout his three-decade career reveal a brash, yet gifted man full of possibility but hamstrung by an outsized ego and brusque manner. They describe him as a hard-driving boss who charmed those he needed and dismissed others with a terrorizing vengeance. More than one former coworker compared him to fallen former Providence Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr., a skilled politician convicted of running a corruption ring out of City Hall.

“I can’t help but see the parallels between him and Buddy Cianci,” said Fish, who specialized in middle and high school reform. “The academic world is far less forgiving than the general public.”

Still, Fish admired Felner’s contributions. “He brought a tremendous resource to the state … We saw him as a partner in the Rhode Island reform effort.”

Felner declined an interview request through his lawyer, Scott C. Cox.

Felner, 59, was born in Norwich, Conn., a mill town near the Rhode Island border, and spent years in New York City. After quitting high school as a teen, he went on to earn a bachelor’s degree at the University of Connecticut and a master’s and doctorate in psychology at the University of Rochester.

He spent five years as an assistant professor in clinical psychology at Yale University, beginning in 1976. It’s there that glimmers of a pattern that dogged him throughout his career appeared. Within a year, some female students circulated a petition accusing him of sexual harassment, recalls Lisa Willner, who was then a freshman at Yale.

Felner inexplicably asked Willner, an attractive 18-year-old, to assist him in a research project and offered her the chance to take graduate-level courses. At the same time, female classmates were urging her to sign the petition critical of Felner’s behavior. She remembers feeling so uncomfortable that she switched her major to avoid the conflict.

“It really had a profound impact on my life,” said Willner, now executive director of the Kentucky Psychological Association. Willner felt vindicated three decades later upon learning of the allegations her former professor faced. “The charges just kind of affirm some of the doubts and questions I had about him.”

He was investigated and cleared of the harassment allegation, according to Emanuel Donchin, who hired Felner to be the director of clinical psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1987.

Still, his rude, quarrelsome nature rubbed many of the clinical psychology faculty, students and staff wrong, said Donchin, who led the department. Though he showed skill at raising money, the department let him go in 1990, Donchin said. “There was no indication of anything unethical. He was just a lousy character.”

From there Felner headed to the university’s Institute of Government and Public Affairs, where he served as founding director of the Center for Prevention Research and Development. “He did that very successfully,” said Robert F. Rich, Felner’s boss at the institute. “I respected him.”

He cultivated partnerships with the state, community and foundations to work toward school reform, particularly in middle schools, Rich said. He attracted grants and helped create a survey, known in Rhode Island as the School Accountability for Learning and Teaching, or SALT survey, which gave schools the tools to assess progress. By questioning students, parents and faculty and establishing data based on those responses, schools for the first time could get a read on what was working in the schools and what wasn’t. They could then design pointed strategies to improve school culture, and hopefully, test scores.

“He’s assertive. Not everyone gets along well with a very assertive personality,” Rich said.

URI wooed him away, without calling to check his references, Rich said.

As Felner headed to the Ocean State, a dispute erupted over who owned the intellectual property rights to the school assessment survey. It was settled that Felner and the university had developed it jointly, Rich said. Some former colleagues toasted his departure with champagne.

Felner came to URI as a professor and founding director of the School of Education in 1996, in part following a romance he would later leave for his fourth wife. URI officials say his main backer was Barbara Brittingham, then dean of URI’s College of Human Sciences and Services. Brittingham did not return several phone calls placed to her office at the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.

Felner arrived full of charm and chutzpah, Carothers said. “I think we saw him as a big-time researcher and grant getter.”

In 1997, while continuing as head of the School of Education, Felner founded the National Center on Public Education and Social Policy at URI, an education research center that contracted with school districts from Santa Monica, Calif., to Buffalo, N.Y., to develop school-improvement strategies, particularly for disadvantaged and high-need communities. The center operated as a self-supporting entity, bringing in millions of dollars in contracts from school districts nationwide as well as grants used to pay staff. Its $12-million contract with the Rhode Island Department of Education was its largest. The university did not share in the center’s income. “He was very smart and well-meaning. When he talked about kids, he did have passion,” said Julia
Steiny, who worked as a communications director under Felner and now writes an education column for The Journal. He took a novel approach toward schools based on the SALT surveys, and led the way for Rhode Island to develop a statewide system for measuring school improvement based on the survey results, she said.

At the same time, he lorded over meetings, spawning fans and detractors. A few inches over 5 feet tall and portly, he was known to pump his office chair up to make himself appear taller. He used his psychology training to study people’s personalities and then toy with them, colleagues said.

“Sometimes people have good information, good ideas even if he’s repulsive,” Fish said. “He had an enormous ego that needed to be fed all the time. Lots of strong leaders have strong egos.”

By 2001, three women had filed complaints about his “abusive” behavior, intimidation and sexual harassment, court records show. Though URI’s affirmative
action officer cleared him in all three cases, one woman, Theresa Watson, filed a civil lawsuit against Felner and URI. The suit accused the school of knowingly allowing Felner to perpetrate his actions. It was settled in 2008 under undisclosed terms.

“Anything you’ve ever read about a workplace bully he did it,” said Watson, now an elementary school teacher in Westerly. He belittled and bullied staff and then warned them “to keep things in the family,” court records show.

She cast him as a puppeteer surrounded by people who took him for a hero.

Carothers said he told Felner to ease up. Felner continued at URI until 2003. “He always pushed the envelope so there was always a worry about how fast he was going,” Carothers said.

Felner’s behavior contributed to his departure, Carothers said. “We encouraged him to move on because of the harassment. He wasn’t able to overcome that,” Carothers said. “We had pretty much had it with him.”

Felner left URI with great fanfare, telling The Journal his exit was prompted by his frustration with state law that caps the number of full-time employees public universities can hire.

He was granted unpaid leave from his $174,000-a-year job when he left in 2003 to become dean of the College of Education and Human Development at the
University of Louisville, according to Robert A. Weygand, URI’s vice president of administration. That leave, which officials said was granted out of consideration for concerns involving his family, was rescinded three years later.

Felner maintained his title as director of URI’s National Center on Public Education and Social Policy until 2006, continuing to serve as an unpaid mentor to its current head, Anne Seitsinger, Weygand said.

“We were not unhappy to see him leave, but he still did good work,” said now retired Provost M. Beverly Swan.

Carothers said he was annoyed that no one from the University of Louisville called to ask about Felner.

His time at Louisville would be marked by discontent. The faculty passed a no-confidence vote against him, 27 to 24, in 2006, but he remained at the university two more years despite 35 grievances about his abusive behavior, said Pedros R. Portes, former chairman of the department of educational and counseling psychology.

“The administration was negligent,” said Portes, who now works at the University of Georgia. “A sociopath was allowed to run loose in higher education.”

Still, administrators credited Felner with raising the University of Louisville’s profile and establishing collaborative relationships with community groups.

He next secured a position as chancellor at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside in 2008. This time, Carothers placed a call to the university system vice president about Felner. He soon learned a federal investigation was afoot.

“I thought he was arrogant and difficult to work with, but I never thought he was a crook,” Carothers said.

The inquiry led to URI, where federal authorities say he and a former Illinois coworker, Thomas Schroeder, embezzled $1.7 million from the National Center on Public Education and Social Policy from 2001 to 2008. Under the scheme, prosecutors say the pair created a phony nonprofit in 2001 with a name deliberately similar to the URI center: the National Center on Public Education and Prevention.

They then diverted money intended for the URI center into bank accounts for the dummy organization. The URI center did the work, while the phony entity did nothing at all, authorities say. The pair, they say, used the money for personal gain. Felner owned properties in Florida, Illinois, Kentucky and Jamestown in Rhode Island.

In addition, federal prosecutors say Felner and Schroeder used the dummy account to embezzle another $576,000 from the University of Louisville and attempted to skim another $240,000. Felner, now of Prospect, Ky., pleaded guilty in January to conspiring to launder money, mail fraud, conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and tax evasion. He faces 63 months in prison. Schroeder’s trial is set for August.

URI officials insist there were no indications of financial wrongdoing because the center remained “in the black.” Reviews of its books by the center’s business manager and the business manager of the College of Human Science and Services didn’t find cause for suspicion because the accounts remained flush, Weygand said.

“As long as a contract is successful … you’re never going to catch on,” URI’s general counsel, Louis Saccoccio, said. Plus, Felner camouflaged his activities by signing contracts in violation of university protocol and creating a shadow organization to which he funneled money, he said.

“The people who worked for him, he was almost like a cult figure,” Saccoccio said. “They had full trust in him.” The center’s work was so well respected that its business practices were overlooked, Weygand said.

Even after his departure, Felner remained in contact with URI. E-mail records obtained by The Journal from the University of Louisville show that he and his former colleagues traded messages about growing financial concerns at the URI center through 2008. Seitsinger wrote she didn’t know if they could pay salaries. Business manager Diana Laferriere asked whether he was giving out loans.

Weygand now attributes that financial hardship to Felner’s financial misdealings. “He was considered a god in many senses,” Weygand said.

Felner, now divorced from his fourth wife, Marilyn, has agreed to pay $1.64 million in restitution to URI and forfeit properties he owns in Florida and Illinois. Weygand said he is “not overly optimistic” the full sum will be repaid.

In the aftermath of the case, URI has initiated unannounced, random audits of its 39 other self-supporting entities, Weygand said. They vary from the Coastal Institute to The John Hazen White Sr. Center for Ethics and Public Service to the crime lab. Previously, the center’s accounts, like that of the other self-sustaining entities, were not audited. The business manager of the colleges that oversee the entities will monitor the accounts. All contracts will be reviewed.

The center — now operating under a new name as the Center for School Improvement and Education Policy — has been reduced from 16 employees in 2008 to 2 today and is rebuilding its reputation after the loss of Felner’s expertise,
Weygand said. It has one contract: a $67,000 deal with the Rhode Island Department of Education that expires in June.

The center cannot get grants from the Carnegie Foundation because it has not completed reports on how it used its money, according to the foundation. It has also been hurt by the economy and schools are facing deep cutbacks, Weygand said.

Rhode Island last year awarded the SALT survey project and management of its Infoworks database to independent nonprofit organizations after a competitive bidding process in which the URI center was a contender.

The state, said Elliot Krieger, spokesman for the Education Department, never encountered any problems with the center’s work, which always came in on time and on budget. “Even today nobody disputes the quality of his work,” Carothers said.

Despite the caliber of his achievements, Felner’s arrest did not come as a shock to some.

“It was more of a disappointment than a surprise,” said Fish, formerly of the state Department of Education. “There was always something about Robert Felner that was like a snake oil salesman. We were using his snake oil and it worked pretty good.”

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