Opinion ID: 2806404
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Frazier Resigns and Mills Appeals

Text: Frazier opted to accept a voluntary buyout, but Mills appealed the termination decision. 4 Thus, Mills was next in line after Gallegos for the 3 The Provost is the chief operations officer at UT-Brownsville, and the Vice President for Academic Affairs is the chief academic officer. 4 ROA.2164. 5 Case: 14-40469 Document: 00513070674 Page: 6 Date Filed: 06/08/2015 No. 14-40469 coveted seventeenth slot, as the faculty hearing committee’s report notes. 5 The hearing committee heard argument and received testimony from Mills, Provost Artibise, and minority-recommendation author Dameron, among others. The hearing committee found that Mills had proven by a greater weight of the evidence “that the decision to terminate her was arbitrary and unreasonable.” 6 Specifically, the committee’s report noted that Dameron testified “that he had double counted the [linguistics] courses and that there were only 9 hours” of pertinent English coursework in Gallegos’s postgraduate transcript. The committee found that the “reassignment of Mary Therese Gallegos to Level 5 was unreasonable” to a professor who has a master’s degrees in the teaching discipline, and that, because Gallegos does not have a master’s degree in English, she should have been placed in level seven as initially recommended. The committee also found that because “Amy Frazier [was] taking severance, Susan Mills now becomes eligible for nontermination,” and it unanimously recommended to the president that she “accept Professor Susan Mills’[s] appeal of her termination.” The president rejected the faculty hearing committee’s recommendation and denied Mills’s appeal.