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Doctoral student takes case to Supreme Court
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PHILADELPHIA – Even the professors who dismissed him from a doctoral program at Drexel University agreed that Robert Morein was uncommonly smart.
They apparently didn’t realize that he was uncommonly stubborn too – so much so that he would mount a court fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge his dismissal.
“It’s a personality trait I have – I’m a tenacious guy,” said Morein, a pleasantly eccentric man regarded by friends as an inventive genius.
“And we do come to a larger issue here.”
A five-year legal battle between this unusual ex-student and one of Philadelphia’s premier educational institutions has gone largely unnoticed by the media and the public.
But it has been the subject of much attention in academia.
Drexel says it dismissed Morein in 1995 because he failed, after eight years, to complete a thesis required for a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering.
Morein, 50, of Dresher, Pa., contends that he was dismissed only after his thesis adviser “appropriated” an innovative idea Morein had developed in a rarefied area of thought called “estimation theory” and arranged to have it patented.
In February 2000, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Esther R. Sylvester ruled that Morein’s adviser indeed had taken his idea.
Sylvester held that Morein had been unjustly dismissed and she ordered Drexel to reinstate him or refund his tuition.
That brought roars of protest from the lions of academia. There is a long tradition in America of noninterference by the courts in academic decisions.
Backed by every major university in Pennsylvania and organizations representing thousands of others around the country, Drexel appealed to the state Superior Court.
The appellate court, by a 2-1 vote, reversed Sylvester in June 2001 and restored the status quo. Morein was, once again, out at Drexel. And the time-honored axiom that courts ought to keep their noses out of academic affairs was reasserted.
The state Supreme Court declined to review the case and, in an ordinary litigation, that would have been the end of it.
But Morein, in a quixotic gesture that goes steeply against the odds, has asked the highest court in the land to give him a hearing.
His attorney, Faye Riva Cohen, said the Supreme Court appeal is important even if it fails because it raises the issue of whether a university has a right to lay claim to a student’s ideas – or intellectual property – without compensation.
“Any time you are in a Ph.D. program, you are a serf, you are a slave,” Cohen said.
Morein “is concerned not only for himself. He feels that what happened to him is pretty common.”
Drexel’s attorney, Neil J. Hamburg, called Morein’s appeal – and his claim that his idea was stolen – “preposterous.”
“I will eat my shoe if the Supreme Court hears this case,” declared Hamburg.
“We’re not even going to file a response. He is a brilliant guy, but his intelligence should be used for the advancement of society rather than pursuing self-destructive litigation.”
The litigation began in 1997, when Morein sued Drexel claiming that a committee of professors had dumped him after he accused his faculty adviser, Paul Kalata, of appropriating his idea.
His concept was considered to have potential value for businesses in minutely measuring the internal functions of machines, industrial processes and electronic systems.
The field of “estimation theory” is one in which scientists attempt to calculate what they cannot plainly observe, such as the inside workings of a nuclear plant or a computer.
Prior to Morein’s dismissal, Drexel looked into his complaint against Kalata and concluded that the associate professor had done nothing wrong. Kalata, through a university lawyer, declined to comment.
At a nonjury trial before Sylvester in 1999, Morein testified that Kalata in 1990 had posed a technical problem for him to study for his thesis. It related to estimation theory.
Kalata, who did not appear at the trial, said in a 1998 deposition that a Cherry Hill company for which he was a paid consultant, K-Tron International, had asked him to develop an alternate estimation method for it. The company manufactures bulk material feeders and conveyors used in industrial processes.
Morein testified that, after much study, he experienced “a flash of inspiration” and came up with a novel mathematical concept to address the problem Kalata had presented.
Without his knowledge, Morein said, Kalata shared the idea with K-Tron.
K-Tron then applied for a patent, listing Kalata and Morein as co-inventors.
Morein said he agreed “under duress” to the arrangement, but felt “locked into a highly disadvantageous situation.”
As a result, he testified, he became alienated from Kalata.
As events unfolded, Kalata signed over his interest in the patent to K-Tron. The company never capitalized on the technology and eventually allowed the patent to lapse. No one made any money from it.
In 1991, Morein went to the head of Drexel’s electrical engineering department, accused Kalata of appropriating his intellectual property, and asked for a new faculty adviser.
He didn’t get one. Instead, a committee of four professors, including Kalata, was formed to oversee Morein’s thesis work.
Four years later, the committee dismissed him, saying he had failed to complete his thesis.
Morein claimed that the committee intentionally had undermined him.
Judge Sylvester agreed. In her ruling, Sylvester wrote: “It is this court’s opinion that the defendants were motivated by bad faith and ill will.”
The U.S. Supreme Court receives 7,000 appeals a year and agrees to hear only about 100 of them.
L. Stuart Ditzen, Knight Ridder Newspapers
