UPenn Professor To Leave After Drug Investigation

PHILADELPHIA--After months of investigation into charges of drug trafficking and sexual discrimination. Statistics Professor Lawrence Mayer will leave the University of Pennsylvania under the guidelines of a confidential settlement with university administrators.

UPenn President Sheldon Hackney and Provost Thomas Ehrlich refused to comment on the terms of the agreement and would neither confirm nor deny that a monetary settlement had been made.

Mayer was suspended from his post as center director last March, based on the findings of a provost's office investigation into charges of drug trafficking and sexual discrimination.

The allegations were then referred to the Wharton academic freedom committee, which found that the charges against Mayer, if proven true, would merit his dismissal from the faculty. If Mayer had been dismissed, he would have been the first faculty member in UPenn's 241-year history to be stripped of tenure.

Severance Pay

Sources close to the Mayer Investigation said that the professor, who will not work at the university this semester, will be granted at least one year's severance pay. The Daily Pennsylvanian, the campus newspaper, reported this month.

A further amendment to the settlement prohibits both parties to comment on the charges surrounding Mayer and guarantees that the university will take no legal action against the professor, the sources added.

Ehrlich said that "for reasons having to do with the settlement, I have to say only that there has been a settlement."

The provost denied that the settlement allowed Mayer to avoid investigation, saying "every charge that has ever been made by anybody with any color or substance has been investigated at length."

Charges against the professor and the Wharton Analysis Center, an energy policy unit headed by Mayer, first arose in October 1980, when former employee Karen Lang filed an unfair firing complaint against the center.

Since then, eight independently commissioned investigation have been conducted and according to sources in the university, five complainants have resolved their claims.