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

Heading: Mills or Gallegos?

Text: As discussed further below, Frazier voluntarily left, and Gallegos was recommended for retention; so this appeal boils down to the question whether the UT-Brownsville officials arbitrarily preferred Mary Therese Gallegos to Mills in violation of substantive due process. This question turns on a serious miscalculation of Gallegos’s relevant credentials. Mills has a B.A. in English and an M.A. in English, both from UT-Brownsville; whereas Gallegos has an Ed.D from Harvard University and an M.A. in secondary and adult education from the University of New Mexico. Thus, under the protocol, Gallegos did not initially receive preference for her postgraduate education degrees, and the committee placed her in level seven—recommending her for termination. Within level six, the committee sorted the three professors with English master’s degrees. The committee deemed all three “good teachers.” Because Vidaurri served as department coordinator for dual enrollment, the committee concluded that she had distinguished herself positively from the other two candidates. As between Frazier and Mills, the committee concluded that, because Frazier received an “Exceptional Merit” award in 2009 that Mills had not received, Frazier should be ranked ahead of Mills. That left Mills as the eighteenth-ranked English Department professor, so the committee recommended that Mills be terminated. As the only terminated professor with a postgraduate English degree, Mills was ranked the highest among the faculty recommended for termination. Mills was later rehired by UT-Brownsville to a non-tenured position as a lecturer.
Dr. Charles Dameron, the English Department chair, dissented from the committee’s recommendation and filed a minority recommendation. In that 4 Case: 14-40469 Document: 00513070674 Page: 5 Date Filed: 06/08/2015 No. 14-40469 recommendation, he expressed his view that Gallegos should be retained over anyone within level six. He justified this position based on Gallegos’s education, experience, and value as “a workhorse in the department.” Dameron noted that there was an issue whether Gallegos’s credentials (namely, her lack of a postgraduate English degree) qualify her to teach undergraduate English at all under the SACS protocol—which, as noted, requires at least eighteen postgraduate hours of study in the discipline taught. Dameron explained that Gallegos’s postgraduate “transcripts show that she has at least 24 graduate hours in linguistics and writing courses, so,” in Dameron’s view, “she meets the SACS minimum requirement of 18 hours that all UTB faculty must meet.” As explained below, this last point turns out to be false. Based on this misimpression, Dameron recommended that Gallegos be included in Priority Level Five and retained over “the three M.A.-qualified faculty in Priority Level Six.” Defendant–Appellee and UT-Brownsville Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs 3 Dr. Alan Artibise agreed with the minority recommendation and instructed the departmental review committee to “consider Mary Gallegos’ Master of Arts degrees in Secondary/Adult Teacher Education and Elementary Education to be ‘in the teaching field’” of English. The committee accordingly submitted a second recommendation—this time, categorizing Gallegos as level five and recommending that she be retained, and that Frazier and Mills be terminated. President García adopted this recommendation.
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.