Whistleblower

Still, this most extraordinary tiff involving renowned players at one of the nation's leading medical institutions may be headed for the kind of public airing that UCSF officials seem to want to avoid.

In January, Republican state Senator Abel Maldonado, an influential member of the Senate Education Committee and frequent critic of how the UC system conducts its affairs, wrote to Bishop complaining that the circumstances surrounding Kessler's dismissal were "extremely disturbing" and calling the financial documents at the center of the dispute "nothing short of alarming."

Meanwhile, his colleague, Democratic state Senator Leland Yee, was so angered by what he described as the university's attempts to keep the KPMG report from becoming public by initially suggesting that it couldn't be released without the firm's permission that he introduced special legislation to force UC to be more open in the future. "I think it's fairly obvious that [UCSF] tried to hide behind its [outside] accountants because the results weren't flattering to their argument," Yee says.

Last month, after honoring Maldonado's request to turn over hundreds of pages of materials related to the Kessler matter, Bishop sent a delegation to Sacramento to press the case that Kessler's claims are without merit. But the senator was unimpressed, and now says more needs to be disclosed. "Obviously the regents have the right to let someone go, but the more you peel the onion, the more this smells," Maldonado says.

Kessler, who remains a tenured professor at UCSF, isn't saying whether he may sue the university. For now, at least, he appears content in his role. On April 2, UC Berkeley's School of Public Health honored him as a National Health Hero for his leadership in challenging the U.S. tobacco industry. Former Vice President Al Gore presented the award via video.

Kessler lectures, remains active on several nonprofit boards, and has resumed work on the obesity treatise begun in 2002 but set aside by the heavy demands of the dean's job. He has also acquired some in-house counsel. "Obviously what has happened [at UCSF] is incredibly personal," Paulette Kessler says. "I'm not saying we don't take it personally, because we do. But David has his work and his research, and he's moving forward."

Her take is that the university isn't talking about the circumstances of her husband's dismissal for a reason: "They think that by stalling even now in being forthcoming that David will take another job somewhere and be out of their hair."

If so, David Kessler says, that could be a miscalculation: "I'm not going anywhere."