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Faculty have expressed deep dissatisfaction with CSCU leadership following the interim chancellor's abrupt departure. Credit: Shahrzad Razekh / CT Mirror

The general counsel for the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system has been placed on administrative leave pending an independent investigation related to former interim chancellor John Maduko.

Karen Buffkin’s departure is the latest leadership shakeup at CSCU since Maduko’s resignation in April following a sexual harassment complaint against him by a female employee. The employee also alleged that Marty Guay, then chair of the Board of Regents, had told the employee he’d once fired a woman who made a sexual harassment complaint. Guay resigned a few weeks after Maduko.

The complaint alleges that Buffkin was told about the conversation between Guay and the employee, but the employee wasn’t aware of any action being taken to address it. Now Buffkin is out, too, at least for the time being.

Buffkin had been serving in an acting leadership role after Maduko’s departure. That responsibility now falls to Interim Vice President for Administration and Chief Financial Officer Lloyd Blanchard. He will serve as administrative lead until the new interim chancellor, Natalie Braswell, begins on June 15.

The complaint against Maduko was dismissed after he resigned, but the Board of Regents voted in May to hire an outside consulting firm to conduct an independent review of how the CSCU system responded to the situation. The press release Friday stated this includes looking into whether “any related patterns of conduct exist.”

The Board plans to announce a decision on which firm will be conducting the investigation in a matter of days and expects an initial report by June 30. The findings will be made public upon completion.

In the wake of Maduko’s resignation, CSCU faculty groups cast multiple votes of ‘no confidence’ in CSCU administration and the Board. Resolutions approved as part of those votes called for evaluations into the viability of the system itself. CSCU came into existence in 2011 to consolidate Connecticut’s state higher education institutions under one leadership structure.

Recent events have only intensified criticism of that consolidation.

Theo is CT Mirror's education reporter. Born in New York and raised in southeast Ohio, Theo earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Brown University and a master's from the University of Chicago. He served for two years in an AmeriCorps program at Rural Action, a community development organization based near his hometown, before returning to school to study journalism at Ohio University. He has previously covered children and poverty for WOUB Public Media in Athens, Ohio.