Should JCCC censure trustee who took cheap shots at the college in a secret email?

What if a colleague went behind your back to take unfair, even untrue cheap shots at your organization — and then brazenly wouldn’t admit it in the face of overwhelming evidence?

This is the bizarre odyssey Johnson County Community College has been on since one of its seven trustees secretly sent an incriminatory email to state leaders last fall, alleging various improprieties at the institution.

The other trustees’ sense of betrayal will come to a head with a possible censure of the culpable trustee on Thursday in the mysterious case of the anonymous email.

Since a member of the college’s board of trustees sent out the lengthy private email last fall — airing what trustees and college staff say is a factually suspect laundry list of unsupported allegations of ethical and actual misconduct, neglect and waste in the college’s highest echelons — the mortified and outraged board has been forced to act.

The incident has taken up precious oxygen at multiple monthly board meetings since November and has even prompted an official, and necessary, fact-finding investigation by an outside attorney to get to the bottom of it.

The fact-finder’s report, which was distributed to the seven trustees on Friday, is expected to lead to a vote at Thursday’s board meeting over censuring the trustee who the report definitively says was the source of the email: Angeliina Lawson.

The investigative report is dispassionately but thoroughly damning of Lawson’s conduct, citing fact after fact that Lawson either got completely wrong, misconstrued or misstated in her email. That includes, oddly, the fact that it took mere days for her to arrange for a tour of a college art storage facility, rather than the year she claimed in the email. The fact-finder also noted that much of Lawson’s account of what was said during the tour was “flatly wrong,” according to five other people present at the time.

Lawson said she had an audio recording of the tour but never produced it, the report says.

In another bizarre disconnect, Lawson complains in the email about trustees’ lack of access to what the JCCC Foundation Board of Directors is doing. But as the fact-finder notes, all seven members of the college’s board of trustees, including Lawson, are automatically members of the foundation’s board.

As the culprit in drafting the email, Lawson’s censure is more than warranted. The scattershot allegations in the email, as noted in a Jan. 8 letter to his colleagues by board chair Greg L. Musil, have been a disaster for the college’s reputation and for camaraderie and civility on the board. Musil also pointed to serious violations of board and college conduct codes, as well as multiple inaccuracies in the email.

Prior to the fact-finder’s report, JCCC administrators had also answered, in red type, many of the email’s allegations within the body of the email. The rebuttals include what administrators contend are numerous false and inflammatory claims about how works of art are procured and stored by the college. In some parts of the administration-rebutted email there is more red rejoinder than original text. In at least six instances, Lawson’s allegations are followed by an administration answer of, “This entire statement is inaccurate.”

Lawson’s email also throws shade at several other community colleges in the state with vague allegations of malfeasance, further horrifying the JCCC trustees. “We would hope our fellow Kansas institutions realize these comments are not the views of JCCC,” the administration’s rebuttal says.

In fairness to Lawson, the fact-finder found she did sign her name to the original email, which she sent to several state legislators. It appears to have become “anonymous” when it came back to the college from someone else with her name redacted, perhaps to protect her. Asked if she believes she owes anyone an apology, Lawson said the email was a “private letter between myself and a pair of legislators.”

“The college certainly harmed others by choosing to distribute (the email) as widely as possible without the board’s approval,” she said.

Still, she unfairly and publicly accused her fellow board members of conducting a “witch hunt,” when she could have simply owned up to sending the email. Her peculiar and repeated evasions to admitting authorship of the email included a telling exchange at the December trustees meeting: As every other trustee plainly denied being the source of the email, then-chairman Jerry Cook had to ask Lawson repeatedly whether she wrote it, and never got a straight answer.

Despite Cook’s direct question at the December meeting — “I’ll ask a third time. Did you write the memo?” — Lawson told The Star, “The question being asked was not as clear as it seems.” Really? What part of “Did you write the memo?” is all that foggy?

“Mr. Chair, this is not court,” Lawson complained during the December meeting.

Of course it isn’t. It’s a board of trustees at an institution of higher learning, which one would hope entails openness, courtesy, collaboration and honesty — all of which have been absent in this unnecessary episode.

“It has been a distraction,” Musil told The Star. “It’s caused lots of time and resources to be spent on this — and it has not done one thing to help us help our students.”

“This is not a moment to be proud of,” Cook, speaking at the December meeting, said of censure. “I’m not aware of any time when we’ve had to do this with a trustee, but the time is now.”

Perhaps it should be a time of contrition as well.

When asked how this protracted clash would affect the board going forward, Lawson responded, “I imagine the board will move forward as it has.”

Johnson Countians should certainly hope not.