Texas school hired while firing

by Elie Dolgin

The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston is bringing in new assistant professors at the same time as around 30 fired faculty members, many of them tenured, fight for the jobs they lost in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. After the Sept. 13 storm hit the island campus, UTMB declared financial exigency and conducted mass layoffs that ultimately cost around 2,500 jobs, including the posts of 127 faculty members, 83 of which were tenured or on a tenure-track. Around a quarter of these fired staff are now appealing those layoffs, some arguing that the medical branch used the disaster as an excuse to undermine the tenure process. "Clearly the 'financial exigency' as narrowly defined did not drive the process of selecting programs and positions for termination, but instead, became a convenient excuse or explanation for what appears to be a general reduction in force that is not specifically related to Hurricane Ike or related financial shortfalls," Charles Holzer, a fired psychiatry professor who worked at UTMB for 24 years and is appealing his termination at a hearing today (Mar. 31), wrote in an statement posted on his website. "You don't make long term changes in your staff unless you have some other agenda," Holzer told The Scientist. At the same time as tenured faculty were given the pink slip, the medical branch brought on board more than 20 new hires, many on a tenure track, in the months after Ike, according to a document requested from UTMB on January 19th under the Texas Public Information Act by George Reamy of the Texas Faculty Association, an organization that represents Texas faculty members. The Scientist contacted half a dozen of the newly appointed faculty on the document's list, all of whom said they were offered jobs either formally or verbally before the hurricane hit. But bringing in new people at the same time as quashing tenure contracts "suggests that the university has not acted consistent with its tenure promises," said Jeffrey Kramer, a trial lawyer specializing in employment law at the Los Angeles-based firm Troy and Gould, in an email. "It does suggest that some priority is being removed from the concept of tenure by leapfrogging these people" who didn't join the faculty until after the hurricane, Joe Jaworksi, a Galveston attorney with an ongoing lawsuit challenging the mass layoffs, told The Scientist. Under regulation 4c(6) of the American Association of University Professors' (AAUP) Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure, an institution shouldn't replace a professor who was terminated on the grounds of financial exigency within a period of three years, "unless the released faculty member has been offered reinstatement and a reasonable time in which to accept or decline it." Replacing tenured faculty with more junior staff "filling the same roles and qualifications would certainly be a violation of many of our standards, and would be an attack on tenure," said Eric Combest, an associate secretary in the AAUP's department on academic freedom, tenure, and governance. After the hurricane, Regino Perez-Polo, chair of UTMB's biochemistry and molecular biology department, fired five faculty members from his department, two of whom were tenured. These people were chosen, he told The Scientist, because they were either retiring or not bringing external grant money into the department. Since December, his department has hired three new tenure track assistant professors, though he said that they are all funded from outside the department's coffers. The department is "not contributing a single cent to their compensation," he said. At least one of these new hires, however, does not have any grant money to add to the department. Yong Sun Lee, who joined UTMB in January, said that he's funded with "nothing other than the [university's] start-up money." The other two new hires declined to comment. Tian Wang, who joined UTMB in November with a dual appointment to the microbiology & immunology and pathology departments, brought with her two NIH grants and is "paid by both my NIH grants and the university," she said. But Thomas Green and Harold Pine, tenure track assistant professors who joined UTMB in January, said they have no external sources of funding and are being paid solely from their respective departments. (Green's pharmacology department laid off two non-tenure track professors after Ike, while Pine's otolaryngology department cut three positions, including one tenured and one tenure-track professor.) "There's been some underhanded stuff," said Reamy. The UTMB officials "used Ike as the excuse for all kinds of things." He noted that the original Nov. 12 announcement of mass layoffs asserted that the UT System "does not have the resources available to cover the ongoing operating expenses and needs of UTMB." Yet, in the two months between the hurricane and the job cut announcement, the medical branch made 11 new faculty appointments. At a "town hall" meeting on Thursday (Mar. 26), which is available as a webcast, UTMB president David Callender said, "We don't have any specific plans that I am aware of to recruit back any of those faculty who were involved in the [layoffs]. That's not to say that that couldn't happen." Callender and UTMB executive vice president and provost Garland Anderson did not respond to requests for interviews. Under the UT Regents rules, the fired faculty members who are appealing their terminations must now prove either that financial exigency was not the true reason for cutting academic positions, or that the decision to eliminate their position instead of axing someone else was "arbitrary and unreasonable." Three-member panels of senior faculty are hearing the ongoing appeals. These panel members then have 30 working days to make a recommendation to Callender, who in turn has 30 working days to make a final decision.