Opinion ID: 480204
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Denial of Tenure

Text: 15 Merrill chose to frame her claim as a case of disparate treatment. The Pretrial Order makes this clear. In a disparate treatment case, as the district court understood, the plaintiff bears the burden of proving intentional discrimination. Cunningham v. Housing Authority, 764 F.2d 1097, 1099 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 106 S.Ct. 530, 88 L.Ed.2d 461 (1985). Judge Fish found that SMU had not intentionally discriminated against Merrill, and we review that finding under the clearly erroneous standard. Pullman-Standard v. Swint, 456 U.S. 273, 102 S.Ct. 1781, 1789, 1791, 72 L.Ed.2d 66 (1982); Cunningham, 764 F.2d at 1100. Unless we have a definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been committed, we will not reverse. United States v. United States Gypsum Co., 333 U.S. 364, 68 S.Ct. 525, 541, 92 L.Ed. 746 (1948). We have no such conviction in this case. 6 16 The record discloses ample evidence that SMU had legitimate justifications for denying Merrill tenure. Merrill's publications were sufficiently weak to prevent us from saying that the district court clearly erred in finding that SMU's reliance on this justification was not a pretext for intentional discrimination. Merrill asserted that she published as frequently as her male colleagues. However, academic scholarship is not measured by volume alone, but by the comprehensiveness and direction of the research. Moreover, much of Merrill's work was printed in journals with little or no recognition in the academic community. Merrill's colleagues, including females, overwhelmingly rated her deficient in this area. 17 Merrill's complaints that SMU should not have weighed its needs in deciding whether to grant her tenure are also not well-founded. There was testimony at trial that enrollment in the education graduate programs was dangerously shrinking at the time Merrill was denied tenure, and the subsequent dissolution of the Education Department lends credence to SMU's position that it did not need Merrill as a tenured faculty member. Title VII does not require employers to ignore harsh economic realities; the district court did not clearly err in rejecting Merrill's arguments based on this factor. 18 Merrill presented a number of charts and tables comparing her teaching load, salary, and other characteristics with those of her male colleagues. This evidence tended to show unequal treatment of Merrill, but the district court gave these charts and tables little weight because many of them were based on hearsay evidence and they all drew from a very small sample. We have cautioned against over-reliance on raw numbers in Title VII litigation because numbers can be misleading if not properly compiled. See, e.g., Hill v. K-Mart Corp., 699 F.2d 776, 780-81 (5th Cir.1983). In at least two instances, flaws in Merrill's homemade comparisons were revealed at trial. She admitted that one statistic, student clock hours, which suggested her load was disproportionately heavy, failed to reflect time consumed by the administrative responsibilities of some of her male colleagues. Another chart compared the total percentage increase of her salary with the increase in male salaries. The chart suggested that the men had received a higher increase than she, yet Merrill admitted that the percentage increase of at least one man who had started several years before she had was calculated from the year he was hired, rather than from the year she began. The district court did not abuse its fact-finding powers in determining not to attach controlling significance to Merrill's statistical evidence. 19 After carefully examining the entire record in this case, we hold that the district court's finding that SMU did not intentionally discriminate in its tenure decision is not clearly erroneous. 7