This Black College Is A ‘Criminal Enterprise,’ Ex-Top Official Says In Lawsuit

A historically black university whose president is under scrutiny for plagiarism allegations reported on by The Daily Wire is a “criminal enterprise to divert federal and state funds,” according to a federal lawsuit filed by the school’s former Vice Provost for Academic Affairs.

It is one of four similar lawsuits filed in the last few months against the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, its president Heidi Anderson, its provost Rondall Allen, and its diversity, equity, and inclusion czar Jason Casares, that all follow a similar pattern: A faculty member allegedly discovers wrongdoing at the university, and then is retaliated against by the university’s DEI office.

Claims from the suits paint a picture of a university with almost no academic standards, that admits 90% of applicants and looks the other way at cheating and truancy to avoid worsening its 17% on-time graduation rate and keep the federal student loan money flowing.

The lawsuit filed July 28 by Sandeep Gopalan, a Rhodes scholar who until recently was the school’s vice president for research and vice provost for academic affairs, said after he claims to have exposed a scheme by Anderson and other top administrators to steal thousands of iPads, the university axed Gopalan’s program and Ph.D. students in retaliation.

The students were funded by a $4.6 million grant from the federal Department of Education that Gopalan had secured and the university had no ability to terminate, but it dismissed the scholars anyway, falsely suggesting that the Trump administration had cut off funding to the historically black college, he said.

“As a result of this blatantly unlawful act, highly valuable research on cancer, environmental pollution, and AI, representing thousands of hours of research work by the Plaintiff, Ph.D. students and research staff has been stopped,” the suit said.

As part of his duties monitoring compliance for the university’s accreditor, “Gopalan learned that Rondall Allen and Heidi Anderson were embezzling iPads intended for poor minorities and diverting those resources to their cronies. The thousands of iPads were purchased from a federal grant awarded by the US Department of Commerce,” the suit said.

“After being convinced that the scam was organized criminal activity based on direct observation of the devices’ stealthy storage, destruction of evidence, fraudulent documentation, attempts to trick the auditors, the apparent enablement of concealment by University System of Maryland apparatchiks, Dr. Gopalan sent whistleblower letters to federal agencies, the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, and the Board of Regents of the University System of Maryland in June 2024,” it said.

Soon after, Anderson began asking if the Ph.D. students in Gopalan’s Futures Institute program, the highest-performing students at the school, were black. “Gopalan explained that students were selected based on strict merit, but the projects had a focus on minority populations. Anderson expressed displeasure,” the suit said.

In December 2024, the lawsuit states he filed additional complaints “about Heidi Anderson and Rondall Allen’s embezzlement, diversion of federal funds, fraudulent reporting of student data to deceive the government, fraud in connection with physical plant and facilities,” including to Chancellor Jay Perman, who oversees all public universities in the state.

According to the complaint, “Anderson and Jason Casares began conspiring to steal Dr. Gopalan’s Futures Institute grant of $4.6 million,” and notified Ph.D. students that their scholarships were being revoked. The Department of Education had to step in, writing that the grant had not been terminated and ordering Maryland to restore it.

The willingness to terminate the university’s brightest scholars was all the more remarkable because “UMES has some of the worst student outcomes in the United States under Rondall Allen and Heidi Anderson. The 4-year graduation rate is 17% whereas the 6-year graduation rate is about 35% and graduates’ median incomes are on par with high school graduates. To Dr. Gopalan’s astonishment, Rondall Allen and Dr. Heidi Anderson were indifferent to these outcomes and appeared resentful whenever he mentioned the need to improve,” it added.

Anderson is a pharmacist, and Allen, another pharmacist, was appointed Provost in 2022. “Allen has no record of original intellectual publications and had copied and pasted Dr. Gopalan’s work to steal credit,” the suit said.

The suit asked the court to “direct the University System of Maryland Board of Regents and the Office of Attorney General to claw back Jay Perman’s $1.4 million salary, Heidi Anderson’s $450,000 salary, and Rondall Allen’s $300,000 salary and proportionate amounts from Casares.”

On Monday, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown filed a response in court. It noted that Gopalan was acting as his own lawyer, and sought to have the case dismissed based in part on legal technicalities, the claim that the public college and its officials had “sovereign immunity,” and that he did not provide enough detail showing he was a victim of intentional racial discrimination.

‘Private looting opportunity’

A second lawsuit was filed August 1 under the pseudonym Jacob Doe, a faculty member who says he “directly observed the top administrators of the university engaging in criminal activities.”

When Anderson took over in 2018, UMES had an enrollment of 4,800; it is now only 3,000. The passing rate in Anderson’s own field of pharmacy fell from 95% to 57%. Allen became provost a few years later, despite a background in “discount pharmacies, and no record meriting a provost position,” it said.

“Plaintiff found one cause of the university’s terrible outcomes: rogue administrators led by the president Heidi Anderson and provost Rondall Allen turning the vast investments by the federal and state governments in the university into a private looting opportunity. Unlike other normal universities where administrators are appointed pursuant to merit, credentials, and experience, at UMES many were appointed based on a propensity for corruption and collusion in Anderson and Allen’s schemes,” the suit said.

“After directly witnessing and determining that there was organized criminal activity to siphon off federal and state funds led by Defendant 1 Heidi Anderson and Rondall Allen, in Summer and Fall 2024, Plaintiff filed reports with the USM Chancellor and Board, and state and federal officials. The USM initiated a cosmetic investigation – intended to save Anderson rather than determine the truth,” it said.

“Upon learning about the Plaintiff’s complaints, the Defendants took retaliatory actions under the guise of a fake complaint alleging in December 2024 that the Plaintiff had created a ‘hostile working environment’ for one temporary worker whose contract was due to expire in two months” – an Iranian student who, the complaint claimed, was allowed to stay in the country as a reward for going along with the scheme.

Casares, the DEI director, accused Doe of sexually harassing the temp, even though no evidence was provided that the pair had ever been in a room alone together. Casares himself left his previous job after being accused of sexual assault; the suit said “Casares is unemployable in US higher education and his grossly inflated salary and continued promotion by Anderson are bribes” for “intimidating faculty and staff who oppose illegal activities.”

The temp worker’s primary boss was a different professor, who witnessed every encounter between Doe and the temp, but Casares did not interview him, the suit said.

Casares was accused of telling the temp worker that “people say Turkish women are beautiful, but I prefer Persian women,” and “all work and no fun makes [her] a dull girl.” Doe said that these statements were fabricated, but that they would not meet the standard for sexual harassment even if they were true.

He said the temp worker had falsified timesheets, leading him to admonish her, and the false claim was in retaliation. Nonetheless, Doe was suspended, banned from campus and his students were told that he was fired. He filed a complaint against Casares, which was ignored, he said.

A grades for illiterates

A similar lawsuit was filed August 22 by Ciu Fang, an “award-winning computer science lecturer” who said she was retaliated against for raising concerns that University of Maryland Eastern Shore had almost no academic standards and condoned cheating in order to keep student tuition flowing.

With enrollment plummeting, the school seemingly began relying on foreign students from countries like Iran to fill slots. Although the HBCU was a low-performing institution that few Americans wanted to attend, foreigners who wanted to come to America could use it to gain a student visa.

Iranians began taking over the faculty as well, and Asad Azemi became chair of the computer science program. “Since his arrival, Azemi expressed a preference for hiring Iranians and manipulated hiring processes to create vacancies for his friends,” the suit said, citing one job search in which 80% of candidates were Iranian.

Azemi took all the course preparation that Fang had created and appropriated it for himself, while pushing her out of a teaching slot after she was unwilling to give students passing grades even if they skipped class and did not know the material, she said.

Fang said the college admitted students with low high school grades and SAT scores, and most proved unable to master the content in her advanced computer science class, with many not showing up to class at all. But when Azemi taught the course, the failure rate was 0%.

“Many students plagiarized code from the internet and were unable to answer basic syntax questions… Dr. Azemi awarded nearly all students a grade of B or higher,” Fang said. “Azemi encourages cheating and apparently fraudulent practices to maintain a false facade of enrollment to pad his salary and deceive the federal government,” she added, saying he pressured her to change students’ grades.

On March 31, Fang emailed Chancellor Perman and “filed a complaint via the USM Fraud Hotline with information about enrollment, grading, and attendance fraud in specific courses,” but investigators never contacted Fang for more information, she said.

“Perman knew that he would be embarrassed if the fraud were to be publicly revealed because of scandals at other universities under his watch,” the suit said.

(The Daily Wire exposed the president of Maryland’s flagship campus at College Park as a plagiarist more than a year ago, but there have been no repercussions.)

Perman’s assistant merely referred her to Casares, who wrote a report taking Azemi’s side, without interviewing Fang’s witnesses, she said. Then Anderson personally emailed Fang to terminate her without explanation. “The abrupt unlawful firing whilst the appeal process was ongoing is illegal retaliation,” Fang said.

Fang said Anderson developed personal animosity to her years earlier. Fang had also worked as a personal trainer at the school’s gym, and “Heidi Anderson, who is obese,” asked a school coach to help her lose weight. The coach refused to continue helping Anderson due to her poor attitude, and delegated it to Fang. Anderson insisted on losing weight while refusing to do the necessary workouts, and became “resentful,” she said.

On October 31, Maryland filed a reply to the federal court that was similar to its motion in the first case, raising technical legal objections without denying specific allegations.

Director of Human Resources

The university’s former Director of Human Resources, Rosalie Hornbuckle, also filed a whistleblower complaint, though not a lawsuit. Hornbuckle said she was terminated several months into her job after identifying “payment to individuals who were placed in fictitious jobs” and other misconduct.

The complaint alleged a large number of employees remained on paid leave for long periods after being accused of wrongdoing. She said in one case, Casares placed a staff member on paid leave after a complaint of discriminating against white students; six months later, Casares claimed that he had been investigating but had not taken any notes.

As another cited example, a finance employee arrested with a “large amount of marijuana packaged for sale” was provided severance instead of simply being terminated; Hornbuckle couldn’t understand why until learning that he was the nephew of the school’s budget director, she said.

The Daily Wire previously reported on a fourth lawsuit, by former agriculture professor Donna Satterlee, who said that a Kenyan who was “incapable of writing in English at the level required of university professor” took over her department and made her do much of the work, while black faculty took credit and received much higher salaries.

After she called for a study that would publish salary information broken down by race, Casares’s DEI department accused her of bullying her boss, and she was placed on “transitional terminal leave.”

On October 31, Maryland’s attorney general filed a reply in court saying that Satterlee signed papers agreeing not to sue the university in exchange for nine months of severance, and that the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission declined to pursue a complaint she filed with it.

Cyber Warrior Diversity Program

The Daily Wire separately obtained a contract signed in August 2019 by President Anderson with Lance Andre Lucas for a “Cyber Warrior Diversity Program.” The next year, Lucas pleaded guilty to bribing a state lawmaker $42,500 to create a state law pushing such a program, because he anticipated it would benefit his company.

“I’m from Baltimore for real, for real Baltimore … this is the least illegal thing that I’ve ever done,” he told Maryland Delegate Cherl Glenn as he handed her cash in his Porsche.

The contract signed by Anderson said “the State of Maryland is paying a total of $10,000 dollars [sic] per student. The Cyber Warrior Diversity program direct cost [sic] are $7000 or 70%. University of Maryland Eastern Shore Cyber Warrior Diversity Program administrative cost [sic] are $3000 or 30%.”

“Once payment is made to University of Maryland Eastern Shore by the State of Maryland trough [sic] MHEC they [sic] have 30-90 days period of grace to pay Digit All City for program direct cost [sic] incurred,” it continued.

It said Lucas’s firm would run a computer science course, saying “The SWDP [sic] courses offer the hard and soft skills needed to work in this industry.” It is not clear why the school did not simply use its existing computer science program–taught by faculty like Fang–for that.

The bill creating the program allocated $2.5 million to black colleges to create programs “to train students in computer networking and cybersecurity,” and said “the governing entity at each institution is responsible for administering the program at that institution.”

Spokesmen for Anderson and Chancellor Perman both declined to comment on the lawsuits against the Eastern Shore college, citing policies on ongoing litigation.

Anderson hired a lawyer to threaten The Daily Wire with a lawsuit after it presented side-by-side academic papers showing thousands of words of her dissertation were identical to older papers by others. University spokesman Robert Vickers said the lawyer was hired by Anderson personally, not by the school.