Some schools are plagued with a cascade of problems that lead to top-level personnel changes. UNC-Chapel Hill was one, as information about its “no show” classes caused Chancellor Holden Thorp to resign in 2013. The University of Texas at Austin was another, with conflicts over forgivable loans, favoritism in accepting students, and board governance; they led to the departure of UT-Austin president Bill Powers this year. Now the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana is having its turn.

The story begins with Steven Salaita, who was offered a job in the university’s American Indian Studies Department, even though he is a specialist in Arab American and Middle East studies. His extreme anti-Israel tweets became public after he had accepted the job; since the board had not exercised its mostly-rubber-stamp right to approve hires, the chancellor, Phyllis Wise, told Salaita he couldn’t take the position.

Salaita has since challenged that decision in court, and his case is pending.

Salaita wasn’t Wise’s only staffing problem; news reports surfaced that a lecturer, James Kilgore, had been involved in a deadly bank robbery in the 1970s as a member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army, had lived in South Africa as a fugitive, had been extradited and convicted, and had served time in prison. He was dismissed, then allowed back.

Last week, Chancellor Wise announced her resignation. But that’s not the end of the story. Inside Higher Ed explains that under her contract, she should have received severance pay of $400,000, pending board approval. (Her salary was $500,000.)

But the trustees discovered that she and others had conducted numerous conversations about Salaita on private emails; she in fact said that she was using private emails to avoid public scrutiny, and she may have kept the emails back in spite of a public-records request. The deputy governor of Illinois pressured the board to back off the severance pay, which it did. They may fire her instead.

Wise hasn’t had it easy in other respects, either. On one stormy day in 2014, she didn’t cancel classes. Racist (she is of Asian background) and sexist tweets followed her decision. No wonder she resigned, or tried to.

All this follows another major U of I scandal of six years ago, called the “clout” scandal—special admissions treatment given to the children of politically favored parents (an even bigger list, it seems, than UT-A’s). That led to dismissals of both the chancellor and the U of I system’s president.