The Bloomington chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is asking the university to rehire a tenured professor it fired last week without due process.
The AAUP said IU terminated Professor XiaoFeng Wang without ten days’ notice and a hearing as required by university policy.
As a tenured professor, Wang cannot be fired without cause.
Federal law enforcement raided two homes belonging to the cybersecurity expert Friday, the same day IU Provost Rahul Shrivastav notified him in a letter that he’d been fired.
Neither the FBI nor the university have said why.
“The mere fact of an investigation or of unadjudicated allegations cannot justify failure to comply with university policies on the part of the administration,” the AAUP wrote. “It is fundamental that individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty.”
Read more: FBI won’t say why agents searched homes of IU cybersecurity expert
IU removed webpages mentioning Wang on March 14, two weeks before the FBI search. Webpages mentioning his wife Nianli Ma, a staff member at IU Libraries, were deleted as well.
In his letter to Wang, Shrivastav said that he had learned Wang had accepted a faculty job with a university in Singapore and that he would be ineligible for rehire at IU.
Neither Wang nor Ma could be reached for this story. Attorneys representing the couple declined to comment.
According to the since-removed page from IU’s website, Wang led the National Science Foundation Center for Distributed Confidential Computing and chaired the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control.
In his 20 years at IU, Wang administered research projects which received almost $23 million in grant funding.
