NIU President John LaTourette said he has “documented evidence” that CHANCE counselor Martha Palmer has known the reasons for her dismissal “all along,” although Palmer has maintained the opposite to be true.

LaTourette said Monday that reasons for Palmer’s controversial dismissal were stated to her in September. “I think it was a letter dated Sept. 7 that Ms. Palmer received from (CHANCE Program Director) Leroy Mitchell that gave her the reasons, and this reiterated a number of oral conversations” about the subject, the president said.

He said that, in addition to appealing her case through the regular university process in late September, Palmer went to the state’s Human Rights Commission “within the last few weeks.” In a “sworn statement” to the commission, Palmer cited reasons for her dismissal and alleged that discrimination played a part in the decision of administrators not to renew her contract past December, LaTourette said.

This information came to LaTourette’s office in a form letter from the commission, he said. LaTourette said he did not wish to disclose the contents of the letter.

Palmer, who was informed on June 27 her contract would not be renewed, said Monday that she wrote a letter to Mitchell on June 29 stating she was entitled to due process and asking for the reasons behind her dismissal. However, she said her requests for due process and the list of reasons were not granted to her until September.

Palmer said she already had received the list of reasons by the time she led a group of students in protest outside the Sept. 15 Board of Regents meeting at NIU and demanded that university administrators disclose the reasons behind her dismissal. Student protesters later stormed the meeting itself.

Sherman Stanage, a philosophy professor and Palmer’s academic adviser for her appeals process, said Palmer still demanded to know the reasons of her firing after she had received the letter from Mitchell in September because she was arguing that the letter did not contain “the real reasons” for her dismissal.

Palmer said the letter only contained a “vague description” of reasons and “it didn’t provide me with the things I asked for in the first place or the things I expected to receive.”

She said she had no comment about when she applied to the Human Rights Commission, but did say that the university is in the process of scheduling a hearing to review her case.

Stanage said that because he is Palmer’s adviser he has had the opportunity to study her complete personnel file. He said he was “generally shocked” at the “clear contradiction” between LaTourette’s statements reported in Monday’s Northern Star and the facts presented by administrative documents in Palmer’s file.

“Martha began her appeal in the June 29 letter, which was about two-and-a-half months prior to the period LaTourette was talking about,” Stanage said. “Has LaTourette known the truth in the file but chosen to misstate it?”