UCI Strips Professor of His Course

IRVINE —  UC Irvine officials have removed a social sciences professor from a course after parents and students complained that he had solicited money for a class exercise involving an actual investment in the commodities market.

UCI spokeswoman Colleen Bentley-Adler said the target of the complaints was Alain Lewis, an associate professor who was teaching a course titled “Games as Models of Social Phenomena.”

Bentley-Adler declined to discuss details of the complaints, saying they were a personnel matter subject to strict privacy laws. UCI officials removed him from the course Friday, she said, “to make sure that the students’ work is not compromised.”

“We don’t want anything hanging over the students,” she said. Lewis could not be reached for comment Sunday.

Students said they had been asked to pay $25 each to invest based on advice from Lewis, who had said such experience would supplement his instruction about group and market behavior. It was unclear, however, whether any of the 55 students enrolled in the course believed that grades would suffer if they refused to participate, and some strongly defended Lewis.

“Yes, it happened,” said student James D. Surlow, “but I really have no comment. Things are a little uneasy right now.”

“I can’t tell you all the details,” said another student, senior Chris Longpre, “but any person who could raise such ludicrous allegations has a deficient mind.”

According to a report to be published in today’s campus newspaper, The New University, students said they invested a total of $1,000 in Swiss francs and gold futures based on advice Lewis gave “as a paid employee of the group.”

However, the report adds that 45 students in the class formed their own organization, called Agape, run by a five-member executive committee that invested money directly to keep Lewis out of the transaction. The report quotes Longpre as defending the entire process, saying it was optional and that only the executive committee knew investors’ identities.

“Lewis appears to be getting condemned for caring about his students,” Surlow, a junior, told the school newspaper.

Lewis, who also teaches a graduate course in game theory and supervises dissertation research, repeatedly asked if anyone objected to the exercise and no one responded, students said.

But, according to the newspaper, one student reportedly complained to campus ombudsman Ron Wilson that not participating in the corporation could jeopardize students’ grades.

It was not immediately known if the student group actually gave Lewis any money.

The newspaper quotes senior Randy Tan as saying that the student group has formed a corporation “to avoid illegality and immorality. Obviously it is not going to look too cool to be cutting these checks to Prof. Lewis.”

Tan was unavailable Sunday.

Bentley-Adler said that Wilson and William R. Schonfeld, dean of the School of Social Science, would investigate the matter. Schonfeld was unavailable Sunday and Wilson declined comment.

William Batchelder, professor of cognitive sciences, will substitute for Lewis while the investigation is under way. The quarter ends in about two weeks.