In what could be a first, UK board of trustees will vote on firing tenured faculty member

For what is thought to be the first time, the University of Kentucky Board of Trustees will vote next week on whether to end the appointment of a tenured UK faculty member.

Tenure is a job status that generally protects an employee from dismissal. However, UK Deputy General Counsel Shannan Stamper said Monday the board can end the appointment of a tenured faculty member for incompetency, neglect of or refusal to perform duties, or for immoral conduct.

UK spokesman Jay Blanton said the faculty member at the center of a June 16 hearing was Xianglin Shi. Shi was a professor who UK alleges is responsible for significant research misconduct in a number of scholarly papers.

UK officials said in 2019 they were seeking retraction of the publications in question and, absent their agreement to resign, would begin a process to terminate the employment of Shi and others involved.

In his response to an investigative report in 2019, Shi said there were “several flaws” in the committee’s findings, including how the committee issued its findings “without providing any opportunity ... to express [our] views.” Had that happened, he said, “most of these issues could have been addressed,” the Herald-Leader has reported.

An attorney for Shi could not be reached Monday.

“To our knowledge the board has not held a hearing” to end the appointment of a tenured university faculty member, Stamper said.

Stamper said based on her review, the board has not even conducted a similar hearing in almost 40 years. A prior hearing involved a community college faculty member when the state’s community college system was formally connected to UK.

Stamper said all requirements had been followed and notification given to the faculty member for the upcoming hearing.

Stamper asked board members not to discuss details of the case during a Monday meeting.

In 2019, UK officials said Shi, a professor in the Department of Toxicology and Cancer Biology, had been removed as the William A. Marquard Chair in Cancer Research and Associate Dean for Research Integration in the UK College of Medicine.

Shi also was principal investigator and program director on a P30 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which established the UK Center for Appalachian Research in Environmental Sciences, officials said.

In 2019, the Herald-Leader reported that the university had begun the termination process for Shi and Zhuo Zhang in the Department of Toxicology and Cancer Biology in the College of Medicine. The pair, who were married, would be fired if they didn’t willingly resign, officials said. Zhang has resigned, Blanton said Monday.

Donghern Kim, a roughly eight-year staff research scientist who worked in Zhang’s lab, was previously fired.

This story was originally published June 7, 2021 at 5:06 PM.