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Tuesday, December 1, 2020

What actually happened at the Regents

Blog readers will recall our posting about the unusual Regents meeting on November 19 during which a dismissal of a tenured faculty member was considered in the public component. Regental decisions are required in such cases. (Many of them are resolved discretely with a resignation.) In this case, the faculty member involved asked for a public hearing during which both he and his lawyer spoke.

Excerpt from the earlier posting:

The main part of the first full board meeting was quite unusual. A tenured faculty member of the engineering school at Santa Cruz was recommended for firing by the chancellor and UC president. He requested an open board hearing. (Normally, such matters are handled in closed session, as are other personnel matters.) The hearing was held and ran over two hours. In general terms, the matter revolved around a reorganization in the engineering school that produced a new departmental structure. However, the faculty member was not placed in a new department but was given a divisional appointment, i.e., reporting directly to the dean. 

Ultimately, in 2019-20, he refused to teach three courses assigned by the dean on the grounds that only a department chair could assign courses. In the course of this dispute, which ran over several years, there were internal academic senate reviews and litigation outside the university. The upshot was the recommended firing. The grievance and his lawyer both testified and answered questions from the Regents. In the end, the board went into closed session to decide the case. There is no public record of the outcome.

Source: http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2020/11/listen-to-regents-meeting-of-nov-19.html

Links to the audio of the meeting can also be found at the link above.

Yours truly had a recent inquiry as to what happened when the Regents met in closed session to consider the case after the public hearing. The faculty member in question was dismissed. Here is the outcome:

Source: http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2020/11/listen-to-regents-meeting-of-nov-19.html

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