UI physicist accused in state audit of $100K in misuse settles to clear his name

IOWA CITY — The University of Iowa has agreed to retroactively reinstate a distinguished professorship and thousands that came with it for a faculty member who says the state — through an error-riddled audit in 2017 — wrongfully accused him of abusing his position.

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Michael Flatte — a Harvard-educated quantum physics professor who joined the UI faculty in 1995 — never faced any criminal charges from Auditor Mary Mosiman’s investigation that pegged him for $99,805 in improper disbursements and undeposited registration fees from three conferences Flatte organized between 2011 and 2016.

And Flatte, 58, told The Gazette he’s spent the last seven years trying to clear his name and reverse actions the university took following a 57-page audit that accused him of improperly spending $55,643 of UI money and diverting $44,161 in registration fees to his Scientific Conferences company.

“The statement that I owned the company that was organizing conferences is false,” he said. “And it's a separate nonprofit entity, which means of course that I could never pocket any money for it. Because it's a nonprofit … So they just said things that were clearly false.”

Among the audit’s other allegations were Flatte got UI approval to spend more than $8,000 in UI money on robots to “teach classes, supervise assistants, and attend meetings while he was out of the country or attending conferences.”

Although approved in accordance with policy, officials said the equipment did not appear “reasonable and necessary for the operations of the university or physics department.”

Auditors noted in the report that Flatte filed conflict of interest forms but UI officials failed to follow up and failed to recover emails requested by the state. Inadequate documentation kept the auditor from identifying for sure any other misuse or abuse — leading to a recommendation UI improve its handling of conflicts of interest.

“I had never been audited before, but I expected that they would ask questions, and I would provide information and documents, and all the questions that they asked, I answered, and they asked for documents, and I provided them,” Flatte said. “And it was shocking to me, at the end, that they came up with this story that they hadn't asked me about.”

Throughout the investigation, Flatte said, auditors never suggested to him any problem with the conference approvals.

“And, in fact, their conclusions were wrong,” he said. “And when the report was announced, I really felt quite ambushed. And then I was further shocked to see the university put out a press release that essentially parroted what the report said before I even had a chance to address the things in the report.

“So I was obviously quite upset.”

‘They reversed everything’

At the time of the investigation Flatte was the F. Wendell Miller Professor of Physics — a distinguished appointment he’d held since 2010 and was supposed to continue through 2020 that came with $3,000 annually in discretionary research funding.

Earning an undergrad from Harvard and a doctorate in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara before returning to Harvard for his postdoc, Flatte — as a tenured UI professor — led the campus’ Optical Science and Technology Center from 2010 to 2017. He also chaired the Division of Materials Physics from 2016 to 2017, when Mosiman came out with her audit.

“Physicists at the University of Iowa have proposed a new technique to detect and measure materials that give off weak magnetic signals or have no magnetic field at all,” according to a UI news release praising Flatte’s research just months before the audit was released. “The technique has many potential real-world applications, including yielding more sensitive (MRI) machines, developing high-speed-storage memory in the semiconducting industry, and producing more efficient computer processing units.”

Flatte’s research — receiving an average $1 million annually in external funding from the departments of energy and defense, among others — focuses on the optical and electrical control of electron, ionic, and nuclear spins in materials, novel devices, quantum sensors, and quantum computation.

His science has and could continue to have implications for medicine, national security, and code-breaking, according to Flatte.

“One of the reasons that there's a lot of interest on the national security side is that a quantum computer has the ability to efficiently break certain codes,” he said.

Four years after the state audit, the university in 2021 issued a news release celebrating Flatte’s research team for landing $1.8 million from the U.S. Department of Energy in support of their work to develop the next generation of quantum smart devices and computers -- “critical tools to solve pressing national challenges.”

But on the heels of the state audit in December 2017, the university issued a statement promising to take “appropriate action to protect the interests of the university and is reviewing possible disciplinary measures.”

Flatte — continuing to work in what had become an unwelcoming environment — sat in limbo for months, unsure of what discipline he might face and unable to fight it until the measures came down.

When the university did issue a letter of the actions it was taking against him, they included stripping him of his office, his ability to use a UI purchase card, his freedom to organize UI conferences, and his F. Wendell Miller professorship.

It didn’t terminate him, lower his pay, remove his tenure, or ask for any money back.

After investigating his options — including a possible lawsuit against UI — Flatte filed a grievance, given state immunity laws protecting the campus. That process took years — with the university repealing his sanctions one by one, Flatte said.

“It was like, is this going to be enough? Is this going to be enough?” he said. “They reversed everything, so the professorship was the last thing.”

‘Administrative overreach’

On May 6, Flatte — followed by UI President Barbara Wilson and Board of Regents Executive Director Mark Braun — signed a settlement adjusting its records to show Flatte held the Miller professorship through 2020.

The university also agreed to transfer $6,000 into a UI account that Flatte can use for his faculty work — and in doing so got Flatte to agree to drop his grievance and promise not to file any other complaints or lawsuits.

The arrangement doesn’t constitute an admission of guilt, according to the settlement.

“I am pleased to announce that I have reached a settlement with the University of Iowa for the maximum amount possible under the Faculty Grievance Procedure for their actions in response to a false and misleading auditor’s report,” Flatte wrote in a post on his LinkedIn page, explaining that in 2017, “I was subject to a secretive, error-filled process that produced a report filled with errors of fact, errors of policy, and errors of math.”

Noting “excessive delays” in the grievance process, Flatte said the university “finally” has reversed its actions.

“This is the full measure I was entitled to under the Faculty Grievance Procedure,” he said. “Sadly, the protections for faculty from these kinds of events, especially at state universities, are weak. The institution, the auditors, and the administrators are protected by state law from the consequences of their actions except when they are motivated by malice.

“This is, of course, my personal opinion and is more broadly presented in the hope that it will motivate greater protections for faculty from administrative overreach.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com