Only a couple of the former University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) faculty members who challenged their terminations made in the aftermath of last year's Hurricane Ike have won their appeals in what some are calling "show trials," although some of the defeated professors have been rehired to the same or similar positions.

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"The way that the whole thing was set up and executed, I think it was a farce," Roger Vertrees, a former non-tenure track associate professor of surgery who had his appeal denied, told The Scientist.

Last November, following the devastation wrought by the September hurricane, UTMB declared a financial crisis and laid off thousands of employees, including 124 professors, 30 of which appealed their terminations. As of June 1, when Texas Faculty Association advocate and blogger George Reamy requested the results of the appeal hearings, 18 cases had been decided. Of these, only two faculty members were reinstated.

Victor Reyes, a tenured professor in the departments of pediatrics and microbiology & immunology, won his appeal after his hearing panel judged that other, less qualified faculty members had been retained, which made the termination "arbitrary and unreasonable" under the University of Texas (UT) Regents rules. Reyes credited his victory to his "significant contributions" in research, teaching, and administration. "My productivity had been high in the previous couple of years and the panel found out there were less qualified individuals that had not been considered for the [termination]," he told The Scientist.

The other victorious professor, who did not respond to phone and email requests for an interview, had his position restored because the appeal panel ruled that the layoff was made in retaliation as part of an ongoing dispute with a departmental director.

Charles Holzer, a former tenured psychiatry professor who lost his appeal and posted all his appeals documents, correspondence with the university administrators, and audio recordings of the appeal hearing on his website, believes that the hearings were rigged to be favorable to the UT administrators and that only token reinstatements were made to create the semblance of fairness. "It was definitely a kangaroo court and a show trial," he said. "Almost all the people [on the appeals panels] were vice deans or program directors. They were picked because of how close they were to the dean."

Barry Burgdorf, vice chancellor and general counsel for the UT System, dismissed this claim out of hand. "We just disagree with that," he told The Scientist. "I think the faculty committees have been very deliberative. They asked hard questions. They're not just patsies for the administration."

"In general, what they've done here is terrible," said a faculty member, who lost his appeal but was retained with a different job title and funding source, and asked to remain anonymous. "I managed to survive at UTMB, as did a few others, but the morale here is still not good. Many faculty members who don't themselves feel mistreated have friends and colleagues who they think were. There's a sense of mistrust between the faculty and the administration, and that wasn't the situation before this happened."

Bhupendra Kaphalia, a non-tenure track associate professor in the department of pathology, also lost his appeal but was hired back to the same post only weeks later. The university is a "bit run down because of everything but we'll come back," he said.

Earlier this month, UTMB was appropriated a combined total of approximately $1.4 billion for restoration and expansion from the state legislature, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Sealy & Smith Foundation (a charitable local trust and longtime financial backer of the university), the Social Service Block Grant program (which provides federal funding to states to support social services), and insurance payments. As part of its rebuild, the medical school has advertised hundreds of job postings, including new positions for more than 40 assistant and associate professor jobs, both tenure- and non-tenure-track, on the UTMB Jobline website.

Under the UT Regents rules, fired faculty members wishing to overturn their dismissals had to prove either that the financial exigency was not the true rationale for axing academic positions, or that others in comparable positions were better candidates for termination. Vertrees, who spent 40% of his time doing research and the other 60% as a perfusionist in the medical hospital, claimed the latter, arguing that there were sufficient funds to cover the research portion of his salary and that his clinical services were highly cost-effective.

He cited a gift account from ThermaSolutions, a Minnesota-based company that manufactures infusion technology for use in medical therapies, which he claimed had around $155,000 in it at the time of the hurricane and could continue to cover his salary and research, and a Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant from the NIH with Michigan-based medical device company MC3.

After Ike, the STTR grant was transferred to Vertrees's collaborator Joseph Zwischenberger at the University of Kentucky. Vertrees' appeals hearing committee ruled that this "reduced support for his work and salary at UTMB," according to their report, which The Scientist obtained. Courtney Townsend, the chairman of the surgery department, also stated that the ThermaSolutions gift account was in deficit by around $70,000 as of February 18, 2009, and could no longer cover Vertrees's salary, the report says. (Townsend did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.) The appeal was ultimately denied because Vertrees "provided no information on other comparable individuals" and "provided insufficient information to recommend that the termination be reversed," according to UTMB president David Callender's April 17 decision letter.

A week later, Vertrees wrote back to Callender contesting his decision and pointing out what he saw as a number of factual inaccuracies in the committee's report. The STTR grant was transferred to Kentucky only after his November 24 termination, and the lack of funds in the gift account was because Townsend had gone behind Vertrees' back and reallocated the money for other expenses, Vertrees claimed. "I had plenty of money to fund the lab for the next two years," Vertrees told The Scientist. "After Hurricane Ike, it was gone." On May 21, Callender wrote back to say that his decision was final. Vertrees, 61, whose funding ran out on June 1, is now working one day per week in a bicycle shop and trying to find work as a researcher or perfusionist in the Houston area. "I've got to figure out how to survive for the next few years."

Many of the faculty members who lost their appeals are now deliberating over further legal action to challenge the financial exigency claims; some are also considering filing complaints of age discrimination since most of the fired faculty members were in their 50s and 60s. "Things aren't over yet," said Eric Smith, a former tenured psychiatry professor who worked at UTMB for 29 years. Joe Jaworski, a Galveston attorney who sued the UT System in December for violating the Texas Open Meetings Act (the dispute was settled in April), said, "I've had a number of people ask me about their legal options," but he declined to go into further specifics. The American Association of University Professors is also currently conducting its own inquiry into the mass dismissals.


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