Opinion ID: 2806404
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Reduction-in-Force Process

Text: To facilitate the reduction in force, 1 the President of UT-Brownsville, Defendant–Appellee Dr. Juliet García, appointed faculty members from each department to serve on departmental review committees. These committees reviewed the credentials of faculty members and recommended which faculty should be terminated. The task fell on the departmental review committee to recommend four English Department faculty members for termination. The English Department had twenty-one faculty members and space for only seventeen under the reduction in force. Under the rules and regulations established by 1 This process and its guidelines were referred to as the “Provost’s Charge.” 2 Case: 14-40469 Document: 00513070674 Page: 3 Date Filed: 06/08/2015 No. 14-40469 the Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs for the University of Texas Regents in accordance with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), 2 the committee favored faculty with terminal postgraduate degrees (most commonly PhDs) in the fields in which they taught. Importantly, the protocol established an overall preference for disciplinespecific degrees over education degrees. As a policy, Ed.D. degrees (short for Doctor of Education) would not be considered “terminal degrees in the discipline or in a related discipline . . . outside of the College of Education.” The SACS protocol also required at least eighteen hours of postgraduate coursework within the discipline taught to qualify as a teacher in that discipline—i.e., to teach English, a professor must have completed at least eighteen hours of English postgraduate coursework. Essentially, the departmental review committee sorted the faculty members by their education into categories numbered from one to seven—the first level containing the most qualified faculty members assured of being retained, and the seventh containing the least qualified faculty recommended for termination. The committee recommended that all fourteen of the faculty with English, rhetoric, or linguistics PhDs be retained (levels one and two), as well as one professor with a PhD “minor in English” (level three). Thus, fifteen slots were filled by professors with PhDs, leaving two remaining slots. The committee also sorted all three of the faculty without postgraduate English degrees into level seven and recommended that they be terminated—this group included Mary Therese Gallegos, as elaborated further below. That left three faculty members in the middle—with English master’s degrees, but without English PhDs—for two slots; one would be recommended for 2 Under Texas law, the UT Regents’ rules and regulations have the force and effect of law. Foley v. Benedict, 55 S.W.2d 805, 808 (Tex. 1932). 3 Case: 14-40469 Document: 00513070674 Page: 4 Date Filed: 06/08/2015 No. 14-40469 termination. These three individuals were Mills, Elizabeth Vidaurri, and Amy Frazier.