A Texas community college that fired an African-American tenured history faculty member for disciplinary reasons has won a racial discrimination and retaliation case.
A state appeals court ruled in favor of College of the Mainland in Texas City in a suit by Ernest Navy, who became an adjunct faculty member in 2001 and a full-time associate professor in the Social and Behavior Science Department in 2004.
The college’s president, Dr. Beth Lewis, said, “We feel the court made the right decision in dismissing the case against the College of the Mainland and are pleased to have this issue behind us.”
Navy’s initial tenure application in 2007 was rejected because of plagiarism, spelling and grammatical mistakes, the court said. Ultimately, the board of trustees allowed him to revise and resubmit his application and awarded tenure in 2009. He was terminated in 2010.
However in the months that followed, the department chair and dean of general education progressively disciplined Navy for “repeatedly making false and unsubstantiated allegations against his colleagues, repeatedly violating Mainland’s policies for proctoring exams and administering student evaluations, assigning an excessive number of incomplete grades and inappropriately soliciting emails from students,” the Texas Court of Appeals said.
In an opinion by Justice Jeffrey Brown, the court said Navy had “received excessive student complaints regarding his incorrect grade calculations, his failure to respond to students’ emails and the lack of organization of his online courses.” The decision noted that a high school principal whose students took classes at Mainland had asked that they “be assigned to any instructor other than Navy.”
The decision said that, despite “disciplinary interventions, Navy consistently failed to correct his behavior.”
