CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST: GARCIA'S FAVORITISM BARED

By Joe Molina
The Collegian

Susan Mills, a tenured professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville has filed a federal lawsuit against President Juliet V. García, Provost Alan Artibise, former College of Liberal Arts Dean Daniel Heimmermann and the university as a domestic political corporation, seeking to enjoin university officials from “perpetuating an unconstitutional violation of her due process rights that have resulted in her termination.”
Mills, an associate master technical instructor in the English Department, is seeking a temporary restraining order and “an injunctive relief in the form of a decree that she be reinstated to her former position as tenured faculty member at UTB,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed April 22.

Her complaint states that after the University of Texas board of regents voted to terminate the partnership between UT-Brownsville and Texas Southmost College on Nov. 10, 2010, the UTB faculty was advised that as a result of the separation of the institutions the number of faculty would be reduced.
“The actual need, however, for a reduction in force (‘RIF’) is undercut by the reality that UT-B subsequently began hiring instructors for the English and other departments at the very same time that it was acting to terminate Susan Mills and other tenured professors similarly situated,” the lawsuit states.
According to the lawsuit, “Acting upon Artibise’s recommendations, defendant Garcia then officially appointed the members of the departmental review committee [DRC] for the Department of English to review the credentials of each of the faculty members and to make recommendations for termination of faculty members based upon the academic qualifications of the faculty members as derived from their academic transcripts.”
“Significantly, the Provost’s Charge recognized that the executive vice chancellor for Academic Affairs of the University of Texas System had instructed UT-B that the faculty retention priorities must reflect that the decision-making criteria utilized by the departmental review committee had been based upon criteria approved by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. One of such mandated criteria was the enunciated position that ‘Ed.D. degrees are not terminal degrees in the discipline or in a related discipline for the purpose of SACS accreditation outside the College of Education,’” the lawsuit states.
The departmental review committee undertook to make evaluations of the English Department faculty, which included Mills, according to the complaint. The Provost’s Charge required that a majority of the five members must agree on the classification of faculty members into the various levels based upon their academic qualifications. Upon the conclusion of its evaluation the DRC submitted its evaluations of each of the faculty members to the Provost’s Office.
“Appended to the original evaluation submitted by the majority of the DRC was a minority recommendation … submitted by one of the five committee members, Charles Dameron, to elevate a certain faculty member … from a lower level of classification to a higher level of classification which would allow the Subject Faculty Member to leapfrog over three faculty members, including the Plaintiff,” the suit states.
According to the complaint, “In and of itself, the minority recommendation was not sufficient to merit action by either the Provost or the DRC. More damaging, however, is the fact that the minority recommendation was later proven to have been based upon false assumptions which were later acknowledged by Charles Dameron to have been mistakes.”
The suit states that Artibise adopted the “Minority Recommendation” offered by Dameron “without even conducting his own evaluation or investigation into the matters raised within the “Minority Recommendation.”
“This action allowed the subject faculty member to leapfrog over three other faculty members which action resulted in the termination of plaintiff Susan Mills,” the complaint reads.
On April 23, 2012, Mills received a letter of her recommended termination, effective May 31, 2013. On July 31, 2012, Mills received her official termination notice and appealed it as “arbitrary and unreasonable.” On Oct. 11, 2012, a hearing committee of three faculty members appointed by the provost “unanimously found in favor of Plaintiff and rendered its decision on Nov. 5, 2012. The hearing committee concluded that the Provost’s decision to terminate Mills was “arbitrary and unreasonable” and recommended that Garcia accept the appeal, according to the suit.
On Dec. 19, 2012, Garcia rejected the hearing committee’s findings and imposed the decision to terminate Mills. “Garcia, however, does not even get close to explaining how the hearing committee was ‘right’ in its determination that the Subject Faculty Member did not merit the reclassification, but was ‘wrong’ in its conclusion that the Plaintiff should be re-hired,” the suit states.
“Further, Defendant García ignores the practical effect on the ultimate adverse employment decision by UTB of the decision by one of Mills’ fellow colleagues (with whom the Plaintiff was in competition for a continuing position) who voluntarily ‘resigned’ in exchange for compensation from UT-B. Finally, Defendant García resorts to a semantic trick in stating that she ‘upholding’ the decision to terminate plaintiff when, in fact, the Hearing Committee reversed the ruling of the DRC and had reversed that termination.”
The suit further claims: “ … the UT-B administrators established the protocols and procedures (the Provost’s Charge) which were supposed to protect the due process rights of the faculty members by ensuring fair and impartial treatment. The same UT-B administrators then ignored such protocols and procedures in dealing with Susan Mills. They obviously ignored the protocols and procedures because they wanted to achieve [an] intended result, which result did not contemplate maintaining Susan Mills as a faculty member. The academic community needs protection from outside interference in order to perform its mission. The academic community cannot tolerate actions that hinder or make less effective the carrying out of that mission. The protections for the academic community are grounded both in the First Amendment’s free speech clause and also in the due process clause.”
Mills began working for the university in 1992 as an English writing tutor and achieved tenure status in August 2010.
Asked what outcome she hopes will result from the lawsuit, Mills told The Collegian: “I’d like my tenured position back. ... I just want them to follow the rules, their rules.”
She told The Collegian she could not comment further on the case without the guidance of her lawyer, Dennis Sanchez, of the Sanchez Whittington Wood & Dijkman LLC law firm in Brownsville.
The Collegian attempted to reach García and Sanchez for comment but they were not available.
Artibise told The Collegian Tuesday that he was unaware of Mill’s lawsuit and could not comment on the matter.
“I know nothing about a lawsuit,” he said. “ … This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
Heimmermann, who now works at the University of Mississippi for Women in Columbus, said he had no comment.
--Collegian reporter Marlane Rodriguez contributed to this report.