Texas Southern University clarifies tenure status for two deans amid lawsuit

Texas Southern University officials informed at least two college deans they did not have tenure, three years after they were hired believing they held the coveted position, according to court testimony. The disclosure arose during a heated lawsuit involving former law school dean Joan R.M. Bullock, who said she was stripped of faculty tenure without cause after losing her deanship in June. The school’s attorneys said in an early November court filing that Bullock was not wronged because she never had a tenured professorship as she thought – and another dean told a federal judge that the university corrected them on their own status just a week earlier. The deans’ accounts raise questions about the Houston HBCU's tenure process, which has broad implications on professors’ academic freedom, several higher education experts said.

They also pose differing explanations for the apparent blunder: Texas Southern’s lawyers said that the university erred in following standard academic practices that typically require deans to hold tenured faculty positions, but opposing attorneys said they fear that deans have become collateral damage in the school’s defense of Bullock’s lawsuit. Tenure is a highly protected status that provides educators job security and safeguards the freedom to teach and conduct research as they choose. “If TSU is now changing the story in claiming that Bullock was not properly granted tenure, and this is the same process that was followed with every other dean at the university, then it is likely that under TSU’s ‘new policy,’ many other deans at the university also do not have tenure,” said Todd Slobin, an attorney representing Bullock. “(Texas Southern is) willing to lose all credibility with every dean at the school simply to try to win on a technicality.” A Texas Southern spokesman declined to comment, as the university doesn’t typically respond to questions concerning pending litigation. But in a court hearing on Nov. 2, Texas Attorney General’s Office lawyers said that any standard Texas Southern did not follow is not unlawful – they would simply add on to prior reputational and accreditation challenges for the Thurgood Marshall School of Law.