Robert Cameron, former systems coordinator for the Monroe Library, was fired from the university on Jan. 29 and is contesting his termination through the university’s grievance procedure. A meeting is scheduled for Tuesday.Cameron, who has worked at Loyola for twenty years, said he received a letter of termination on Jan. 29 from Mary Lee Sweat, dean of libraries, and his supervisor, Laurie Gibson, associate professor at the library. He said that in the letter, Sweat and Gibson said his insubordination was the main reason for his termination.”I don’t think that I was terminated with true justification,” Cameron said. Cameron also said several friends wrote a letter protesting his firing. Six of the thirty library staff members signed the letter, he said.Sweat declined comment, and Gibson could not be reached for comment.Cameron said that before his termination, Gibson gave him a letter dated Jan. 23, which said that Cameron’s attendance since Jan. 1 was unacceptable. Cameron, who was diagnosed with Hepatitis B during late November 2001, said continuing fatigue symptoms made going to work difficult. On Jan. 23, Cameron met with Sweat, Gibson and Lois Goldstein, director of the department for human resources, in a meeting that had initially been called to discuss a letter sent to Gibson by Cameron’s primary care physician regarding a request for accommodation. At that meeting, though, Cameron asked to postpone the discussion until he could have the chance to decide what, if any, accommodations to ask for and to obtain letters from two other doctors. “I explained (during the Jan. 23 meeting) my continuing recovery from Hepatitis was causing more fatigue than I realized it would, and an adverse reaction to a new prescription, which I started taking on Thursday, January 17 and stopped taking Monday, January 21, the M.L. King Jr. holiday, had caused me to miss Friday, January 18 and Tuesday, January 22,” Cameron said in an e-mail to The Maroon.Cameron said he sent e-mails to Sweat regarding what was discussed at the meeting.Cameron said in the e-mail to The Maroon that on the following day, Sweat issued him a suspension because, as Cameron quotes her, she said, “I considered your e-mail responses to our meeting yesterday [Jan. 23] to be very inappropriate, and I am quite concerned about their content.”Cameron’s e-mail to The Maroon continued, “This message had been reiterated several times since November 2001, labeling my words and behavior ‘inappropriate’ no matter what was said or done or whether it was a valid action on my part.”Cameron said he had never before been suspended from his job at Loyola.Richard Snow, collection development librarian, first hired Cameron in November of 1981 and recently described him as a conscientious, responsible and hard-working member of the library staff. “I think Robert is a contribution to the library, to the university,” Snow said. Cameron’s colleague of twenty years and former supervisor, Darla Rushing, library development supervisor, said, “He was extremely dedicated to his work, to the library and to the university, and he cared very deeply about service to students and faculty.”

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