The time line leading to their dismissal was suspicious. Both employees were put on probation after their discovery and were fired shortly before Collegis renewed its multi-million-dollar contract with the school. In addition, Perry had said on a number of occasions that she felt Samuels had committed a grave offense. Four days after her discovery, for instance, she e-mailed Perley, her Collegis supervisor at the school, to tell her that she had looked into the matter of child porn and now knew it to be a serious crime. The e-mail was sent before the school contacted the D.A.

Their story is not, however, a classic example of whistle-blowers being punished. In this case, the institution alerted the authorities as soon as it had gotten advice from counsel, and cooperated fully. Matasar strictly followed the D.A.’s directive not to alert Samuels, which would later earn him the wrath of some professors.

But there are a number of reasons why Collegis might have wanted Perry and Gross gone. A former Collegis director said that these kinds of cases bring negative publicity to the company, putting it at risk of losing IT contracts with other universities. “The last thing you want to do is piss off a client,” the former director said. “If you piss off a client, you’re history.”

Outraged, Perry and Gross have since filed a $15 million civil suit against both New York Law School and Collegis. After receiving his first probation letter, Gross e-mailed Margaret Perley: “I feel as if I am being martyrized for my finding,” he wrote in July. “After complying with your request for a written statement and a personal interview with . . . a member of the District Attorney’s office, I thought this matter was over and felt I would not be penalized for protecting the rights of children.”

Matasar says he had specifically asked Collegis to reform the help desk, where Gross and Perry worked, and that their dismissal was probably the result of his demands. The computer labs were in terrible condition, Matasar says, and he got countless complaints from students about them. Professors were also complaining that their machines were not getting fixed fast enough. Although Nadine Strossen, the head of the ACLU and a faculty member, gave Perry a letter of recommendation when she left the school, a number of professors seemed to think there might have been a good reason to fire the employees. One mentioned that Perry “came and went as she wanted” and added she was “sort of brassy.”

“We did absolutely nothing wrong,” Matasar said heatedly during an interview. “We were the whistleblowers. We. I. And this law school. I, as dean of the law school under advice from our counsel, made the decision to turn this information over to the D.A.’s office. We, the law school, placed Edward Samuels on leave. We, the law school, have had to deal with the consequences of losing a 25-year member of the faculty . . . If we are to be held captive by bad employees by the mere circumstance that they were involved in discovering criminal activity, we couldn’t get our work done!”

Collegis denies the firings had anything to do with Samuels and says the timing was a coincidence. Professor Jonakait agrees: “I don’t think the firing looked particularly good, but I did not come to the conclusion that there was a connection.”

In April 14, Samuels pleaded guilty to 100 counts of possessing child pornography, and most of the professors wanted him out. But again, he didn’t resign immediately; instead, he haggled over how much he believed he should be paid to leave. A faculty inquiry was commissioned. Samuels’s salary was probably over $150,000 a year, and according to Matasar, he was demanding “a lot of money.” It wasn’t until ten days later that the two sides reached an agreement, and Samuels resigned. “I want to have sympathy for him,” one longtime member of the faculty said. “But I find it hard because he didn’t do the right thing as soon as he was capable. If anything, he seemed to be pushing in the other direction.”

Despite his guilty plea, some professors feel that the public scrutiny his case has received, and the destruction of his career, have been punishment enough.

Martin Levin, a former student and current adjunct faculty, said Samuels was more to be pitied than censored. “This may be a class-E felony, but it’s a psychiatric problem,” he said. “If he were an alcoholic or a drug addict, wouldn’t he be sent to counseling?”

Jonakait has received about twenty testimonials, which have been presented to the sentencing judge. The letters, he said, express a great deal of respect for Samuels’s integrity as a professor, and many writers, he added, mentioned that knowing the facts of the Samuels case didn’t affect their regard for his professionalism.

Since his arrest, friends claim, Samuels has been in therapy, and his family has stood resolutely by him. In a brief exchange in the lobby of his apartment building, Samuels declined to be interviewed for this piece.

No one has organized a letter-writing campaign for Perry or Gross. Since they were fired, they have sent out countless résumés, but both are still unemployed.

As Samuels now waits in sentencing limbo, some of his former colleagues still hope he won’t end up in jail. “There can’t be a happy ending, but there ought to be some kind of soft landing,” says Levin. “I don’t like to see somebody who’s creative and been so useful ending up in this kind of situation.”

Related:

• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Elisabeth Franck
• Table of Contents: Jun 23, 2003 issue of New York | Subscribe!