SIUC Professor/IEA Win Battle Over State Ethics Test

SPRINGFIELD, Ill., Apr. 29 /PRNewswire/ --

SPRINGFIELD, Ill., April 29/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A university professor who aced an ethics test has won a legal battle with state officials who wanted him punished for completing the written exam too quickly.

A settlement agreement has been reached between the state and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC) professor, Marvin Zeman.

The Illinois Education Association (IEA) filed a lawsuit on behalf of Zeman and fellow SIUC math professor Walter Wallis in February 2007, against the Illinois executive inspector general and the executive ethics commission after the professors refused to sign a letter stating they had failed a written ethics test by finishing it too quickly.

Illinois ethics legislation passed in 2003 calls for all state employees to undergo ethics training and then be tested on it. Though the state's testing rules don't specify how much time should be spent taking the test, noncompliance letters were sent to state workers who, in the opinion of the bureaucrats, had completed the test too quickly.

"We filed the lawsuit with the support of IEA because we resented the fact that our integrity, along with that of more than 15,000 other state employees, was questioned by bureaucrats in the inspector general's office," said Zeman, who also serves as president of the SIUC Faculty Association.

The settlement agreement states that Zeman and Wallis read and understood the material and successfully passed the test when they originally took it in 2006.

"The bottom line in all this is that employees of the state of Illinois should be treated with respect," Zeman said.

The Illinois Education Association is the state's largest education employees' organization, representing more than 130,000 elementary and secondary teachers, higher education faculty and staff, educational support professionals, retired educators and college students preparing to become teachers.