Former University of Illinois at Chicago employee’s retaliation case may reveal gaps in state whistleblower protections

As a longtime employee of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Sharon Feldman understood that if she saw something unethical at work, she should say something.

In late 2018, Feldman, who was at the time associate director for global health policy research at the school’s Institute for Health Research and Policy, saw something: documents she believed showed a colleague planned to misappropriate grant funds and university resources.

Feldman worried the proposal would violate university policies that prohibited conflicts of interest and the misuse of university resources, she would later allege in court filings.

“It was like having an IED land in your hands,” Feldman said in an interview with the Tribune. Feldman immediately saw what she thought was “a massive conflict of interest,” she said.

During annual state-mandated ethics training, state university employees are taught to come forward if they observe unethical practices at work, said Feldman, who had worked at the institute starting in 2003.

“They drill into you — if you see this kind of behavior, you should come forward,” she said in the interview. Workers are told, she said, that they’ll be shielded from retaliation by whistleblower protections enshrined in state law.

Feldman reported her concerns to the university. An employee in the university ethics office, she alleged in court filings, told her that she was protected as a whistleblower.

In 2020, however, she was told her contract would not be renewed, according to a lawsuit she filed against the university over her dismissal. Last year, as her retaliation case played out in Cook County Circuit Court, Feldman was diagnosed with carcinosarcoma of the endometrium, a rare and aggressive form of cancer.

Feldman spoke with the Tribune in October while in hospice care at her mother’s home in Maryland, weeks after a judge dismissed her case against UIC.

She died Oct. 21 at the age of 62.

As her condition declined, Feldman told the Tribune in a phone interview she wanted state workers like her to know that despite a long-standing ethics law in Illinois that aims to protect whistleblowers, state university employees who report wrongdoing can be left unknowingly vulnerable to retaliation.

“I want state employees to know that if they see something, they shouldn’t say something,” Feldman said.

Feldman’s attorney and former legislators involved in passing the state ethics law two decades ago believe her case may reveal a gap in the legislation and could lead to a chilling effect on reports of wrongdoing at state universities.

The state legislature passed the State Officials and Employees Ethics Act in 2003 in the aftermath of scandal-plagued Gov. George Ryan’s administration. The ethics package, approved by Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who followed Ryan to prison in his own corruption case, gave broader authority to inspectors general across the state, mandated yearly ethics training for state employees and sharpened the lines between political and government work.

The Ethics Act’s whistleblower provision says state employees shall not be retaliated against for reporting behavior they reasonably believe to violate “a law, rule, or regulation.”

But in her ruling dismissing Feldman’s case this August, Judge Cecilia Horan agreed with the university’s arguments that internal university policies did not constitute “rules” that would have afforded Feldman whistleblower status.

At a court hearing on Aug. 29, Horan granted the university’s motion to dismiss Feldman’s complaint. Horan did not issue a written decision but said in verbal remarks she did not consider university statutes to be “rules” as defined by the Ethics Act.

“The statutes here are kind of more like an employee handbook in my view. They apply to University employees only,” Horan said, according to a court transcript of the hearing.

Susan Garrett, a former state senator who represented parts of the North Shore in the state legislature through 2012, told the Tribune it appeared the court may have used a technicality to protect the university over its employees.

Garrett was a sponsor of the Ethics Act in 2003.

“It feels like they are disregarding, at the very minimum, the spirit of the law,” she said.

Community colleges were given a carve-out in the law, but state universities were not, said former Sen. Jeff Schoenberg, an Evanston Democrat who was also a sponsor of the act in 2003. Schoenberg said he was a family friend of Feldman.

“My strong belief is that if any public university was somehow exempted, in some way, from the state’s ethics act, it would have been expressly written in the law, like it was for the community colleges,” Schoenberg said.

Feldman worked for the university on a series of one-year contracts, according to court filings. She alleged in her lawsuit that after she reported her concerns surrounding grant funding to the university, she began to experience retaliation at work, though the university denied her claims in its own filings.

In September 2019, less than a year after she made her report, Feldman was one of 30 university employees to receive a University Award of Merit, an honor awarded to workers “who exhibit excellence in service, commitment, and dedication,” according to the university’s website.

A few months later, in January 2020, she was told she would be dismissed the following year, according to her lawsuit. She lost her job in 2021.

Feldman’s attorney, Barry Bennett, said she was never given a more complete explanation for the nonrenewal of her contract. UIC did not answer questions from the Tribune about why Feldman’s contract was not renewed.

According to court filings, an internal university investigation found Feldman’s retaliation claim was “unfounded.” Horan never ruled on whether or not Feldman had been retaliated against, according to Bennett.

In a statement, university spokesperson Sherri McGinnis Gonzalez told the Tribune the school would not comment on litigation, although Feldman’s case is closed. “We respect the legal process and agree with the court’s decision to dismiss the claims asserted against the university,” she said.

Feldman, who grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland, moved to Chicago in her late 20s and made the city her home. She later went back to school, and after earning her master’s in public health at UIC, she realized her strengths were on the administrative side of health research.

She took pride in her work at the university, she said.

“We were making important contributions to science and people’s health,” she told the Tribune.

In court filings, Feldman alleged that after she made her report, she began to experience retaliation at work.

She was excluded from meetings, she alleged in the suit, and the summer after she made her report, she received an “overwhelmingly negative and harsh” written evaluation, the first written evaluation she had received in her time working at the institute. Feldman also alleged in her complaint that she was not given a raise in 2019, the first time she had not received one except when universitywide salary freezes were in place.

In court filings, the university said Feldman’s written evaluation that year reflected “concerns with (her) job performance.”

In dismissing Feldman’s case, Horan relied on a ruling in a lawsuit involving the 2017 firing of Chicago State University’s general counsel, Patrick Cage, who had reported concerns about a possible violation of the university board’s bylaws.

According to an appeals court decision in the case, Cage raised concerns with board members that former Chicago mayoral candidate Paul Vallas, who was at the time a member of CSU’s board, was interested in serving as the university’s president. Cage believed this would violate the board’s bylaws, which stated that Vallas could not serve on the board while seeking employment at the university.

At a board meeting that spring, the board decided it could consider Vallas for the presidency so long as he vacated his seat on the board, which he did the following week. The day before the board was set to appoint an interim president, Cage sent a letter to each member renewing his concern that Vallas had violated the board bylaws.

The board ultimately selected another candidate for the position; Cage was fired six weeks later. Later that year, he filed suit under the Ethics Act, alleging he’d been retaliated against for reporting Vallas’ potential conflict of interest.

Cage lost his case in federal district court, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit affirmed its ruling on appeal.

“If ‘rule’ covered any and all mandates, protocols and expectations governing the conduct of state employees, the Ethics Act’s whistleblower provision would apply to reports of violations of minor, even trivial, workplace rules — a result that the legislature could not have intended,” the 7th Circuit Court wrote.

The University of Illinois policy on whistleblower protections related to reporting fraud or misconduct, which is available on its website, “encourages employees to disclose serious breaches of conduct covered by the University policies or state or federal law.” The policy says its purpose is to “protect any employee who engages in good faith disclosure of alleged wrongful conduct to a designated University of Illinois system official or public body.”

In its published policy, the university defines “wrongful conduct” as “a serious violation of University policy; a serious violation of the University Code of Conduct; a violation of applicable state and federal laws; embezzlement or other financial irregularities; and/or the use of University property, resources, or authority for personal gain or other non-University related purpose except as provided under University policy.”

But in court, attorneys for the university argued Feldman’s case should be dismissed because she had alleged wrongdoing, that if true, would have violated university policies, not state law or another regulation that had gone through a formal administrative rule-making process.

“They’re trying to have it both ways,” said Garrett, the former state senator. “They may be trying to have the appearance of transparency and support of anybody coming forward with allegations of fraud. But then the proof is in the pudding here. The results don’t indicate that in this particular case that that was their intention.”

UIC declined to discuss its whistleblower policy with the Tribune.

Dick Simpson, a professor emeritus of political science at UIC, said state universities should clarify their whistleblower protection policies. If that doesn’t happen, Simpson said, either the legislature or the state’s Executive Ethics Commission should require them to do so.

“It appears that the whistleblower rules are not clear enough or not effective enough,” he said.

Madeleine Doubek, executive director of the good government group CHANGE Illinois, said “anytime something like this happens, there’s a chilling ripple effect that occurs.”

“We are getting hung up on semantics here,” Doubek said.

“What we’re really doing is telling people if you see wrongdoing you shouldn’t report it,” she said, “when we absolutely need people to be sharing information.”

In the interview with the Tribune from hospice care, Feldman described herself as a proud Chicagoan, one particularly proud of the work she’d done for the state.

After losing her job at UIC, she had found work at Lurie Children’s Hospital.

But the retaliation she alleged she experienced at the university exacerbated her depressive disorder and caused her to experience panic attacks and intense sadness, in addition to losing substantial pay and benefits, she alleged in court filings. The university, which denied retaliating against her, also denied in court filings its actions had caused her to suffer financial harm.

“I just want people to know that the legislators, the state senators and the state reps, they can fix those laws,” she told the Tribune. “But until they’re fixed, there should just be a chilling effect on reporting anything on campus because nobody has any protection.”

She worried state university employees may report wrongful conduct on the assumption they will be protected as whistleblowers.

“Thousands and thousands and thousands of state employees will take this test, this course,” she said, referring to mandated annual ethics training required by the Ethics Act. “And they will be lied to.”

____