More than one year after being charged with intent to perpetrate a child sex crime, the UW System Board of Regents dismissed UW-Madison professor Lewis Keith Cohen Friday.
According to a Board statement, the unanimous vote immediately dismissed Cohen from his tenured position in the comparative literature department, closing the last of three recent felony cases among UW-Madison faculty.
This is just a complete aberration that we would have three separate people doing something felonious,\ Board President David Walsh said. ""It's never happened before.""
Walsh said the three 2005 cases were the only felony cases at UW-Madison within the past 10 years.
Additionally, the university accepted Steven Clark's resignation April 4, UW-Madison Provost Patrick Farrell said in a statement. Clark was an associate professor of human oncology convicted of felony stalking. Roberto Cornado, a physiology professor convicted of sexual assault of a child, was also dismissed in February.
""State rules on faculty discipline need to be re-examined with an eye toward creating faster resolutions when possible,"" Farrell said.
Cohen was arrested March 15, 2005 in a Milwaukee suburb where he had planned to meet a 14-year-old boy he met over the Internet, allegedly to commit a sex crime.
According to court records, Cohen pled no contest to felony charges of the use of a computer to facilitate a child sex crime and exposing a child to harmful material and was sentenced July 27, 2005.
A UW statement said Cohen returned to work at the university in Fall 2005, but Provost Peter Spear recommended Cohen's firing and prohibited him from campus effective Sept.16. Cohen was put on paid administrative leave until the Board dismissed him Friday.
Walsh said he started a committee to implement a ""three times faster"" process for cases of serious criminal misconduct, which would require cases to be settled in 60 days. It would require a preponderance of evidence indicating serious criminal misconduct for an act breaching public trust or inhibiting work.
The committee sent recommendations on the proposal to all UW campuses and expects changes to be made at the June meeting.
""We're going to get through it,"" Walsh said. ""We're going to come up with a better process.""\
