J. Larry Brown, the former director of the Center on Hunger and Poverty and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, filed a $3-million lawsuit against the University and Provost Marty Krauss earlier this month, alleging that Krauss violated the faculty handbook when she fired him and that the University tried to prevent him from accessing his research funds following his termination.In June 2000 Brown moved the Center and Institute from Tufts University, where he founded both, to the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, bringing his staff and $3 million in funding with him. He filed his complaint Jan. 18 at the Middlesex Superior Court but declined to comment on his allegations.

"The University is doing everything within its legal rights and we're going to fight this vigorously," said Krauss, who was Heller's associate dean for faculty before assuming her role as provost in 2003.

According to the Brown's court complaint, after he was fired the University attempted to keep control of $875,000 of the Center's grant funding and to stop Brown from establishing his Center elsewhere. Although he and the original grantors have retrieved most of that funding now, it was a struggle to get the University to release the funds, the court documents say.

Brown alleges that after he was fired, Brandeis "thwarted explicit directions from corporate and private foundations" to transfer the remaining funds for the Center back to them.

Krauss refutes those claims.

"The Center was transferred to the University," Krauss said Friday afternoon. "He doesn't own the Center; the University does." And, she said, "grants are given to institutions, not people."

According to Brown's complaint, when he signed a contract to come work for Brandeis, he signed over ownership of the Institute, but not the Center, which operates alongside the National Program on Women and Aging under the auspices of the Institute.

In one instance, the University "misrepresented" to a donor Brandeis' expertise in the field of domestic hunger in an unsuccessful attempt to keep the grant funding at Brandeis," according to the complaint. Brown said none of his staff remained at the Center after he left, but the University told the donor that the staff was still there.

Prof. Thomas Shapiro (Heller) became the director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy in May 2006, Kristen Stevens, a program administrator at the Institute, said.

Shapiro did not return two requests for comment.

Krauss said Shapiro is overseeing both the Center and the Institute, but Stevens said there is no director for the Center right now.

When Brown was hired in June 2000 by Jack Shonkoff, the then-dean of Heller, he claims he was promised a faculty position "that would be commensurate with his position at Tufts," where he held a lifetime professorship.

Though Shonkoff didn't specify which faculty title he would receive, Brown said he was guaranteed a teaching position at Heller. Shonkoff refused to comment for this article.

Four years after he moved from Tufts, Brown became the first person to be named a distinguished scientist at Brandeis, and in that capacity he taught undergraduate and graduate courses and conducted research.

Krauss maintains Brown was never a professor-a claim that Brown vigorously disputes, and one that would put his firing outside the authority of the faculty handbook.

"He did not have a faculty appointment," Krauss said.

Although more than 10 different teaching and research positions are mentioned in the faculty handbook, the title of distinguished scientist is never mentioned.

According to the complaint, Krauss fired Brown because she thought his use of a staffer to send an e-mail regarding a potential grant instead of sending it himself was inappropriate and constituted misconduct.

krauss said the University has a policy to not discuss personnel issues, so she could not comment.

Brown's complaint alleges that Krauss made clear that this charge was "non-negotiable" and that she would fire him unless he signed a letter admitting to the charges and giving up his status at Brandeis, agreeing that his contract would not be renewed. The next day, when Brown refused to sign the letter, he was promptly fired, his salary and health benefits were cut, the locks on all doors were changed so he couldn't get into his office and his e-mail account was closed, according to the complaint.

Locking him out of his e-mail was particularly damaging, the complaint says, because it blocked access to "thousands of e-mails relating to on-going research, and his work with student advisees on research projects was abruptly terminated."

The disagreement over his title became an issue once Brown was fired. Brown said he tried to appeal to the faculty committee on rights and responsibilities, saying Krauss had violated firing procedures outlined in the faculty handbook, but was turned away.

In his complaint, Brown says he heard the "real reason" he was fired was because Krauss disagreed with his style of research.

She declined to comment on the firing itself.

The University received word of the charges last week and has three weeks to respond. The suit seeks $1.5 million in direct monetary damages and $1.5 million for emotional distress.

Once Krauss became the Provost in 2003 and Shonkoff stepped down as Heller's dean in June 2005, Brown says matters took a turn for the worse.

His co-authoring of "Building a Real Ownership Society" in 2005 with Shapiro, who now heads the Institute, and Robert Kuttner, the co-founder and current editor in chief of The American Prospect, a liberal political magazine, bothered Krauss, Brown claims. She accused him of writing "a political advocacy piece" that was "non-scholarly" and "quite snide, sneering in places," according to his complaint.

Brown says he felt "trapped": Shonkoff had recruited him for his commitment to social justice, but the Provost doesn't consider advocacy a scholarly pursuit.

"Dr. Brown felt intimidated by Defendant Krauss's attack on his scholarship," the complaint reads. "As a contract faculty member, he knew that his reappointment was at the pleasure of the Provost."

Also upsetting to the Provost, according to the court document, was Brown's legal dispute with Alan Shawn-Feinstein, a Rhode Island philanthropist. The two reached a settlement last July after a three-year dispute over the Center's naming rights and funding.

Feinstein, the founder of the foundation of the same name that donates millions of dollars to Rhode Island schools and other American hunger-fighting institutions, accused Brown in an August 2003 lawsuit filed in a Rhode Island District Court of breaching his contract by keeping Feinstein from tagging his name on the Center's title.

Brown filed a countersuit the following month alleging that Feinstein backed out of his promise to donate $3 million to the Center.