Four professors to be laid off allege discrimination; FMU says cuts are data-driven
%20-%20Copy.jpg "City of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez speaks at an event at Florida Memorial University’s Miami Gardens campus on Monday, Jan. 31, 2022.")
Four tenured faculty members who were recently told by Florida Memorial University they would be laid off at the end of the semester are threatening legal action against the private school and its board of trustees, accusing administrators of pushing them out because of their age, race, gender or origin, and bypassing the procedures to fire a tenured professor.
The four are among 10 professors that FMU said it will lay off at the end of the semester due to financial issues at the school, or 13 percent of its workforce.
“My clients are prepared to sue not only the university but each of the Board members and the administration personally for the grossly negligent actions detailed in this letter,” labor lawyer Randy Fleischer, who’s representing the four academics, wrote in a Feb. 17 letter to the Miami Gardens university — South Florida’s only Historically Black College or University (HBCU).
The four professors learned of their fate in early February, when FMU informed them they were being laid off due to the school closing certain programs, effective May 14, 2022. FMU has faced a steep enrollment drop in recent years.
The four professors are:
▪ Economics professor Abbass Entessari, 72, who’s been at FMU since August 1989 and claims he is being pushed out because of his race, age and national origin.
▪ Chemistry and environmental science professor William Hopper, 69, who first joined FMU in January 1984 and says he is being laid off because of his race and age.
▪ Mathematics professor Telahun Desalegne, 74, at FMU since August 1985, who contends he is being let go because of his age.
▪ Music professor Richard Yaklich, 58, and at FMU since August 2001. He alleges FMU is letting him go because of his race, gender, age and retaliation.
FMU did not disclose the names of the other six professors being laid off.
FMU links layoffs to financial issues
In June, FMU’s accreditation agency, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, or SACSCOC, put the school on “probation for good cause.”
The sanction, which could lead to FMU losing its accreditation, came after the agency monitored the school for two years for failing to comply with all of its standards, a problem rooted in financial difficulties.
FMU’s financial difficulties have stemmed from a sharp reduction in the number of students attending the school, plunging from 1,878 in 2012 to 915 in 2020. In 2021, for the first time in a decade, FMU increased its year-over-year number of admitted students in the fall to more than 960.
READ MORE: South Florida’s HBCU rallies from drop in enrollment, financial difficulties
SACSCOC is set to visit the FMU campus in April and to make a decision on the case in June. The SACSCOC board will decide whether FMU will remain on “probation for good cause,” be downgraded to “probation” for a year, gets its accreditation revoked or be fully cleared.
To solidify its finances, FMU announced in November it would cut back degree programs that had a high cost and low enrollment, as well as some staff. It has eliminated 16 degree programs.
Sharee Gilbert, FMU’s director of communications and marketing, said in a March 14 statement emailed to the Herald that FMU won’t comment on pending administrative actions. When reached Tuesday via email, she denied the professors’ allegations of discrimination.
“There was no discriminatory intent, rather, all of the decisions made were legitimate, objective, and in the best interest of the University and its students,” she wrote. “There is no evidence of discrimination by FMU.”
Gilbert said FMU employs 75 faculty members. Of those, 85% are over 40 and nearly half of the faculty is over 60. The 10 faculty members who will be laid off in May are three Black women (ages 64, 72, 80), two white men (ages 58, 69), two Black men (ages 68, 74), one Asian man (age 72) and two white women (ages 55, 88), Gilbert wrote in the email Tuesday.
“The remaining faculty are a diverse group ranging in age from 28 to 83,” she wrote.
Fleischer pointed to the ages of all those being laid off — 55 and older — saying that represents further evidence of age discrimination.
READ MORE: Florida Memorial ends 18 degree programs, announces pay cuts for more than 80 employees
EEOC complaints filed
In his letter, Fleischer notified FMU that he filed four complaints against the university on Feb. 14, 15 and 16 with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency in charge of enforcing civil rights laws against workplace discrimination.
The EEOC usually takes years to investigate complaints because of a backlog of cases, but as long as the agency doesn’t close a complaint after six months, employees can sue. That’s the employees’ plan unless FMU addresses their allegations before they are laid off.
In addition to discrimination, the four professors are alleging that when FMU administrators delivered their letters alerting them they would be out of jobs come May 14, the administrators didn’t follow the appropriate steps guaranteed because of their tenure: a 12-month notice and an effort to relocate the employees to other positions. In academia, the highly coveted tenure status comes with detailed protections.
READ MORE: What is tenure, and why do college professors get it? Here’s what you need to know.
“The decision to terminate, tenured, senior faculty without cause and without legally required notice is an egregious violation of written approved policy and federal law and if the Board ignores this, they too will be violating their fiduciary duty to the institution,” Flesicher wrote in his correspondence.
FMU hasn’t responded to Fleischer’s letter, but the university filed a statement to the EEOC on Tuesday denying any discrimination in Desalegne’s case, Fleischer said. It did not respond to the other complaints, Fleischer said.
In its statement, FMU said it terminated the professors for non-discriminatory reasons related to the financial challenges and accreditation issues, Fleischer told the Herald.
READ MORE: Florida Memorial, facing enrollment decline, looks at cutting back degree programs, staff
Gilbert, the FMU spokeswoman, said the decision to lay off the professors was due to the overhaul of academic programs with low enrollment, which “is not sustainable to the overall budget alignment or the viability of the university.”
In all, FMU eliminated seven programs in the School of Arts and Sciences, three in the School of Business and six in the School of Education. The university also got rid of 18 positions, including some already vacant.
“Decisions such as these are not easy to make — they are certainly decisions most businesses and organizations have had to make more recently,” she wrote in her email on Tuesday. “The decisions were a part of a data-driven process, which in turn created data-driven results and were not personal in any way.”
‘I’m still insulted, really insulted’
The professors and their attorney maintain that the program closures are irrelevant, because they have skills that can be taught in other courses. And at least in one case, Entessari said the closures don’t apply to him because he’s an economics professor and FMU didn’t eliminate an economics program.
Entessari, who served as the dean of the school of business for nearly 30 years, said he teaches four undergraduate courses offered every semester: principles of macroeconomics, principles of microeconomics, money and capital markets and quantitative methods for business and economics. He also teaches managerial economics in the MBA program every fall and said he has never experienced issues with lack of students for any of his classes.
“I was really shocked. I thought I was really disrespected, all of my hard work for this institution, all of it gone. Its like a bucket of cold water,” said Entessari, who has been at FMU for nearly 33 years. “I’m still insulted, really insulted.”
Some of the four professors are fighting their employer’s decision through an internal appeal process, in addition to Fleischer’s public one. They are also grappling with how their careers could be over.
Yaklich, the music professor, said he doesn’t understand how FMU determined whom to cut, because he teaches about 130 students each semester and he doesn’t consider that low enrollment.
When he was called into a mandatory meeting Feb. 10 with the provost and a human resources representative, he didn’t think much of it. Then he discovered it was to give him a two-month notice, two months short of what the faculty handbook requires.
“Part of the conversation was them saying something like, ‘This is a chance for us to talk,’ and my first thought was ‘No, just give me the letter.’ Then I stepped out and called my attorney. I knew this was wrong. I knew it was absolutely wrong.”
This story was originally published March 31, 2022 at 6:00 AM.