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March 25, 2009, 02:12 PM ET
Hearings Begin for Laid-Off Faculty Members at Flooded Medical School in Texas
Hearings are under way for about 30 of the 127 faculty members who were laid off after Hurricane Ike ravaged the University of Texas Medical Branch last fall, according to The Daily News, a local newspaper in Galveston, Tex.
The faculty members, who are fighting to get their jobs back, will present their arguments to three-member panels of tenured professors from academic departments other than that of the appellants. The panels will then make recommendations to the Galveston institution’s president, David L. Callender.
Many of the dismissed faculty members had tenure and were renowned in their fields. They are among about 2,500 employees laid off after the Medical Branch declared “financial exigency” in the wake of the September 13 storm, which flooded much of the island campus and forced the temporary closure of its main teaching hospital.
In December the Texas Faculty Association sued the University of Texas system’s Board of Regents, accusing it of illegally debating behind closed doors before authorizing up to 3,800 layoffs.
Some of the professors argue that the university used the disaster as an excuse to do what it had been allegedly planning to do for some time: cut the ranks of tenured faculty members. The Medical Branch relied on the recommendations of department chairs in making the layoffs, so some cuts may have been motivated by personal feelings and politics, critics say.
Charles E. Holzer III contested the decision to dismiss him as a professor of psychiatry in an appeal he made public online.
University officials defend how the dismissals were handled. “There was tremendous effort to make this process as fair as possible,” said Jacqueline Genovese, a Medical Branch spokeswoman. “We spent at least four weeks working on the faculty reduction in force.”
Categories: Faculty-hiring
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