Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, RETALIATION—S.D. Tex.: Totality of circumstantial evidence suffices for former program director to raise question of fact as to pretext for his dismissal, (Jan 9, 2025)

By Robert Margolis, J.D.

Court cites temporal proximity of dismissal to protected activity, in addition to fact that defendant’s proffered reason for dismissal only emerged after protected activity.

An assistant professor who was dismissed as Program Director for the Texas A&M University’s Qatar Campus after reporting concerns that the Dean of the Qatar Campus discriminated against female faculty presented sufficient circumstantial evidence that the bona fide reason for his termination given by the university was pretext, ruled a federal district court in Texas. The court denied the university’s motion for summary judgment, finding that disputed factual issues should be resolved by a jury (Ura v. Texas A&M University, No. 4:23-cv-2934 (S.D. Tex. Jan. 3, 2025)).

The employee joined the university in 2007 and was promoted to Assistant Professor with tenure in 2013. In 2019, he began an appointment with the university’s Qatar Campus, became program chair in January 2020, and his four-year appointment became fully effective in September 2021. He recruited a female faculty member, with the support of her department, to accept a two-year appointment at the Qatar Campus. Prior to the incidents at issue in this case, no professor who had requested an extended appointment at the Qatar Campus with the support of their department, had been denied a renewal. However, when the employee requested that the female professor’s contract be renewed, the dean refused. The employee then suspected that the dean’s refusal may be connected to the absence of women among senior faculty at the Qatar Campus.

At a subsequent meeting where the employee asked the dean again to renew the female faculty member’s contract, and he again refused. The dean also instructed the employee to issue a non-renewal notice to a second female faculty member. This further heightened the employee’s suspicion that the dean was discriminating against female faculty, and he reported his concerns to the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Qatar Campus and the Associate Dean for Faculties at the main campus of the university.

He was told that the non-renewal notice to the second female faculty member was due to complaints about her; the employee then stated he wanted to investigate those complaints before issuing the non-renewal letter. The employee subsequently reported his concerns about the dean’s discriminatory practices to another Dean of Faculties, and then to the university’s Office of Ethics and Compliance. About three weeks after that last report by the employee, the Qatar Campus Dean called the employee into his office and requested his resignation as program chair. Among the reasons he gave was that the employee started the investigation as to the second female faculty member.

The employee brought several claims against the university, only one of which survived motions to dismiss—retaliation under Title VII. The university moved for summary judgment on that claim.

Prima facie case. The court analyzed the claims under the McDonnell Douglas framework. The court first found that the employee provided sufficient evidence to satisfy his prima facie case. There was no dispute that he engaged in protected activity, but the university challenged whether an adverse employment action occurred and that there was a causal link between the protected activity and adverse action. The court rejected those challenges.

First, the university argued that it restructured the administration of the Qatar Campus program, so that the employee’s removal as program director cannot be considered an adverse employment action. The employee did not argue that the restructuring was an adverse action, however, but that his removal was. And because removal from a leadership position is the type of action that could dissuade a worker from reporting discrimination, the removal satisfied the adverse action element.

As to the causal link, the university argued there could not be a causal link because the dean did not have knowledge that the employee had engaged in protected activity. The court found that there were disputed material facts about whether the dean had that knowledge, including the employee’s testimony that one of the reasons the dean gave for seeking his removal as program director was the investigation related to the second female faculty member who the dean wanted to non-renew.

Legitimate nondiscriminatory reason, pretext. The university asserted that the employee was dismissed because he did not support the dean’s vision for the program, and that he was openly antagonistic to the dean. While the employee disputed those assertions, at this stage, the university need not persuade the court as to the reason for its decision, but need only produce evidence sufficient for a trier of fact to find it to be true. The university met that burden, the court held, thus shifting the burden to the employee to raise a genuine issue of fact as to pretext.

To meet that burden, the employee relied on (1) the temporal proximity between his protected activity and his dismissal; (2) his positive evaluation only a few months before his dismissal; and (3) the alleged concern over lack of support for the dean’s vision for the program was not raised until after the dean refused to renew the female faculty member’s contract contrary to the employee’s request. There was no question that the timing of the dismissal closely followed the employee’s protected activity. But temporal proximity alone is not sufficient to show pretext. The court thus looked at the employee’s other two arguments.

The court did not find the positive evaluation to be probative, since the proffered reason for the dismissal was not performance-based. But the court found sufficient evidence that all instances of the lack of support occurred after the employee’s first protected activity. This was circumstantial evidence that lack of support was pretext, and thus sufficient for the employee to survive summary judgment, the court held.

The case is No. 4:23-cv-2934.

Judge: Hanen, A.

Attorneys: Colin William Walsh (Kherkher Garcia) for Joseph Ura. Joseph Daniel Keeney, Office of the Attorney General, for Texas A&M University.

Companies: Texas A&M University

Cases: Retaliation Discrimination SexDiscrimination TexasNews