The Edge of Reason

Ramani Pilla arrived at the police station that bitter December night prepared. She was, after all, a statistics professor. Numbers and data were her life.

So she brought a lawyer. And pictures of the evidence. Every detail of her story in place.

Last summer, she arrived home from a conference at Stanford to discover that someone had entered her office at Case Western Reserve, moved things around on her desk, and turned off the AC.

Then, in August, someone had slipped an envelope filled with "derogatory remarks" under her door. A week later, someone opened her departmental mail.

She started getting phone calls straight out of a horror flick. All she could hear was heavy breathing, then the dial tone.

By December, things had gotten worse. The latest anonymous note was a blatant threat -- albeit with curiously formal grammar.

"Last warning, 'F' bitch. You don't belong in the department. Be gone or else face dire circumstances!"

This hate mail, Pilla would later tell the FBI, was written by co-workers angry about a discrimination complaint she'd filed. She needed protection. Couldn't anyone help her?

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A small woman with pride in her voice and suspicion flashing in her dark eyes, Pilla had been pummeling at the door of success since she'd arrived in America from India in the early '90s. As a Ph.D. candidate at Penn State, she was a promising student in the field of statistics. She would later use computer models to interpret data from images, helping to locate everything from land mines to cancerous tumors.

"She worked about as hard as you can imagine any graduate student doing," says her former adviser, Professor Bruce Lindsay.

But some found her ego tough to swallow. She had a strong sense of her own importance. Still, since being self-absorbed is more norm than crime in academia, it didn't cause much trouble for the bright young scholar.

After graduating, Pilla did a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health and briefly worked as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Then, in 2002, she moved on to what she thought would be greener, more prestigious pastures: Case Western Reserve. She couldn't have been more wrong.

For a university acclaimed as a scientific powerhouse, Case's statistics department is an Achilles' heel. Housed in a drab building with bunker hallways and cramped classrooms, it's a place that prompts claustrophobia more than pride.

Ever since splitting off from the math department in 1994, it has struggled to stand alone, cycling through a string of temporary leaders -- some of whom weren't even native to the field. Most recently, an interim chairman borrowed from the math department was replaced with another temporary import -- from anthropology.

No matter who the university found to put in the director's chair, the department had a lingering reputation as a disaster area. Its faculty may have been respected scholars, but social skills were another matter. Former chemistry professor Cather Simpson describes them as "dysfunctional, impossible-to-deal-with, egotistical jerks."

They had so much trouble getting along that in 2004, a dean hired an outside committee to figure out what to do with the department. But there was too much chaos to fashion a solution. The committee's final report was never made public, but the basic message was "They don't know quite what to suggest," says former statistics professor Catherine Loader. "Nothing major happened as a result of that report."

The chaos had ripple effects. With their cheap labor, graduate students are the lifeblood of any research institution. But from year to year, one could never be sure how many students would be admitted to the department. Some years it was four, some years two. And at times there were none at all. This made it hard for professors like Pilla to do advanced research that depended on the grunt work of students.

The department also had trouble promoting its own rising stars. Loader came to Case in 2002 as an associate professor, but she did not have tenure -- the coveted guarantee of lifetime job security. During her four years there, Loader, Pilla, and another assistant professor, Nidhan Choudhuri, all applied for tenure or promotions, and all were rejected. Loader even had the unusual experience of being promoted to the rank of full professor -- thanks to the recommendations of faculty outside her department -- but still received no tenure. It was like being elected president, then told you only had one year to serve.

"They were just arbitrarily blocking people," she says.

James Alexander, chairman of the math department, who also headed statistics from 2002 until last summer, sees things a bit differently. He says each professor's situation was unique, and decisions were weighed by committees all the way up the chain of command.