"taking away his title as "chairman of the physics department" doesn't strike me as fair.

And he's obviously he playing nice with his employer - to try and stave off any retaliation.

You do know the famous quote "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

It seems to me that "chairman of the physics department" is a real job with real work and you want someone there who is able to do it. Do you think he was able to do that job properly with this hanging over his head? If not, he should have moved on.

But it should not happen when your on administrative leave.

Can you imagine a physics department where the chair is on administrative leave?

Easily, with an interim acting chair. Upheaval under all contingencies is minimized with this solution.

Yes why is it any different to any other job - the deputy does the job,

Can you imagine a physics class taught by a grad student?

Half the job of the chair is to manage the human side of the department's priorities, including resolving disputes between faculty. You need moral authority, which a grad doesn't have.

The scale is about the same, and as someone else mentioned near here, the deputy chair would take over.

Taking away his title is far removed from firing him and washing their hands of him, as was implied. Based on what he wrote it's fair to assume that he's been talking with the university during the process, the talks have been productive and positive, and it's possible he will be reinstated.

We won't know for sure until he publishes "his side" as he put it, so it's all conjecture at this stage, including on my part.

Compared to the university going through the hoops to fire a tenured professor, it's reasonably fair. A lot of physics departments do work with outside companies and the government as well; a chair arrested for espionage isn't conducive to those sorts of relationships. I'm surprised that the university was willing to refrain from throwing him under the bus, all things considered.

No one liked being the chairman of the math department when I was studying there. It's a bureaucratic job that gets in the way of what professors usually want to do: research. It's a big, important job, and you want someone doing it who isn't dealing with the fed :)

Exactly. In every science department I have been in, being chair is not seen as a privilege, but as a burden. Attitudes mostly range from "hell no, I'll quit if you try to make me chair" to "okay, I'll do it, but only if you can't find anyone else, and for a single 3-year term, and you better not ask me again for the next 12 years".

In my current department, we were lucky to have someone who liked doing it, so they were given the job repeatedly. When they went on leave and it was time to find a replacement, we had to beg someone to step up to the job.

Faculty who want to be chair eventually shift to administration. The remaining faculty want to do research and/or teach, not be chair.