Loyola University must pay nearly $300,000 to two former professors who sued the institution over the post-Hurricane Katrina restructuring plan called “Pathways.”

Another six former professors’ cases are still moving through the courts — one of which is set for a hearing later this month. The remaining five are still pending trial dates.
The eight professors filed suit against Loyola after the university eliminated their departments or programs in the months following the 2005 hurricane.

According to court documents, in the two cases already settled, Loyola paid $160,000 to Mary Ann Doyle and $120,000 to Janet Melancon, former professors from the Education and Counseling Department.

Margaret Dermody, from the former Department of Education and Counseling, Bogdan Czejdo and Kenneth Messa from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, and William Hammel, Nancy Dupont and Mary Blue from the Department of Communications filed the other lawsuits. Nancy Dupont’s case is scheduled for trial May 18.

Meredith Hartley, spokeswoman for Loyola University New Orleans, said she consulted Loyola’s legal counsel, who told her it was not appropriate for Loyola to comment on pending litigation.

According to Nancy Picard, an attorney who represents Melancon, Doyle, and Dermody, her clients’ lawsuits, which were originally filed in April 2007, contend Loyola violated her clients’ tenure contracts when the university fired them.

According to Larry Samuel, Messa’s attorney, tenure protects educators from being terminated “at-will” for no reason. Professors who have earned tenure at Loyola may only be fired for “adequate cause,” and only after the university follows well-established procedures, he said.

The university can choose to not renew the contracts for faculty who do not have tenure for any reason once their contract has expired, he said.

“Adjunct faculty, for example, have the right to serve only for the duration of their individual contracts. Tenured faculty have the right to teach from year-to-year.”

By comparison, certain university staff members are “at-will” employees, meaning they may be terminated any time at the will of their employer.

According to Picard, Loyola applied Chapter 9 of the faculty handbook to fire Dermody, Melancon and Doyle. Chapter 9 says, among other things, that the university may terminate a tenured professor only for adequate cause. The chapter includes discontinuing a program as adequate cause. However, Picard said her clients’ contracts required the university to make every effort to place them in another position before terminating them due to program discontinuance – something she says Loyola didn’t do.

Samuel said when Loyola discontinued the computer science program, it hired part-time instructors to teach mathematics courses, rather than assigning those courses to Messa. Messa taught mathematics courses before and after Katrina, and there were enough math courses for Messa to teach, Samuel said.

Hammel taught film studies courses, Dupont taught broadcast journalism and Blue taught broadcast production.  According to court documents, their program, communications, was not discontinued, but the sequences they taught within the program were eliminated.
“So far every group which has reviewed the facts has agreed that LUNO violated the Faculty Handbook and the tenured professors’ contracts,” Hammel said.

After Loyola notified these professors that they were fired and that their program was being discontinued, all of them filed an appeal with the University Rank and Tenure Committee.  According to a letter signed by chairwoman Maria Calzada, sent on March 8, 2007 to the university President the Rev. Kevin Wildes, the URTC found that Loyola did not follow mandated procedures to discontinue the computer science program, the education and counseling program and the communications sequences.

“The committee found that the administration failed to demonstrate that it followed the provisions in the Faculty Handbook Section 9.E.1,” the letter say.

That section reads, in part, that if the university plans to discontinue a program, the Standing Council for Academic Planning must apply criteria set by the University Senate. 
“Instead, the administration created its own process,” the letter express. “URTC hearings determined that although criteria were discussed at the Standing Council for Academic Planning (SCAP) prior to the Pathways plan, these criteria were never established by the University Senate and were never applied by SCAP in evaluating Pathways.”

Picard said her client, Dermody, hopes the court sets a trial date so she can prove her claims.

Samuel said he will file a motion to ask the court to set a trial date as well. “We feel that we have a very good case,” Samuel said.

Andrea Castillo can be reached at [email protected].