The former president of Southern Vermont College is suing several college officials in the latest lawsuit in the messy closing of the Bennington school.
In the 27-page suit filed in federal court Dec. 30, David Evans alleges four college trustees and the chief restructuring officer retaliated against him over disagreements about how to shut the school by wrongly denying him severance and inadequately indemnifying him for legal expenses.
The lawsuit names a subgroup of college trustees as defendants — Ira Wagner, Susan Hunter, Deborah Wiley, and Carmen Lawrence — as well as Charles Goldstein, of 3Cubed LLC, a Maryland consulting firm, who was appointed the chief restructuring officer last spring.
Southern Vermont College shut down last year.
The four trustees assumed an outsized role on the board as the college began contemplating closure in the wake of a severe liquidity crisis in early 2019, according to the suit, and “sometimes took Board action without a Board meeting to further and protect their personal interests.”
The suit alleges the trustees named in the suit acted chiefly “to protect their own personal interests as creditors of the College,” as well as to “shield themselves from accountability for a lack of necessary financial oversight during the tenure of Dr. Evans’ predecessor.”
And it accuses the defendants of retaliating against Evans because he acted to prioritize “the payment of earned wages and benefits and full and accurate disclosure to all of its employees over the personal interests of the Defendants.”
The lawsuit was first reported by the Bennington Banner.
This isn’t the first lawsuit connected to the school’s wind-down. Two former Southern Vermont College benefactors have separately gone to court in an attempt to recover their donations. In one of those lawsuits, Bruce Laumeister and his wife Elizabeth Small are suing to block the school from selling the Laumeister Arts Center, which they donated to the college in 2017.
Evans’ suit contends that Laumeister and Small have offered to dismiss their lawsuit — which names Evans, along with Southern Vermont College, as defendants — if the school deeds the arts center back to them. Evans’ complaint also claims that the four trustees named in his suit are refusing to release a mortgage they gave themselves on the property in order to secure their own loans to the college.
Evans, who led the college from 2015 until its closure in the spring, was recently appointed interim president at American University in Bulgaria. He is being represented by Stephen Ellis of Paul Frank + Collins P.C., a Burlington firm, who declined to comment.
David Newell, the college’s current trustee chair, deferred comment to the school’s attorney, Justin Barnard, of Dinse, Knapp & McAndrew in Burlington. Barnard declined to comment.
Southern Vermont College announced in March 2019 that the school would close at the end of the academic year because of financial difficulties stemming from declining enrollments. Over the last year, four Vermont colleges — including Green Mountain College, the College of St. Joseph, Marlboro College — have either shuttered outright or merged as schools compete for a shrinking pool of applicants.
Trustees have agreed to sell the main campus in Bennington to the New Hampshire-based Oliverian School, a boarding school, for $4.9 million.
