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Texas Southern and its former dean fight it out over her firing

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Joan Bullock has not exactly enjoyed a smooth career in law school leadership. She was dean and president of Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego when the American Bar Association hit it with sanctions for poor performance in 2017. She stayed at that post for only about a year before resigning.

She then became dean of Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law in Houston in 2019. Again, it was unfortunate timing. Soon after her hiring, she learned that the dean of admissions was allegedly accepting students in exchange for boosted scholarships with money going back to him.

The school also suffered from a dismal bar passage rate and has consistently faced ABA sanctions. In July of this year, Bullock was fired after three years at the helm with school leaders saying they “were taking a different direction.”

Now she’s suing the school and the Board of Regents for her termination, claiming it’s because she’s a woman and that she should have had tenure protection, just as male deans enjoyed in the past. They returned to the classroom after their deanships. She was the first female to hold the position in the school’s 75-year history.

She’s currently not employed even though she is seeking work.

“Undoubtedly her firing has affected her job search,” said her attorney, Dorian Vandenberg-Rodes.

Vandenberg-Rodes knows of no other comparable circumstance in which a dean was let go in such a manner, she said. Normally, for that to happen, the cause has to be “extreme misconduct,” she said.

That was not the case here, she said. According to the federal suit:

“On June 15, 2022, Plaintiff was stripped of her Deanship and her tenured faculty position without cause. She was summarily removed from teaching classes. Plaintiff was terminated and stripped of her tenure and faculty position without good cause, without a rational basis, arbitrarily and capriciously in violation of her constitutional rights as a tenured faculty member.”

The Texas Attorney General’s office is handling the defense and argues that Bullock was never given tenure.

Bullock was hired by Texas Southern, in part, because of her experience at Thomas Jefferson. It stated at the time:

“Bullock is no stranger to overcoming institutional adversity and challenges, having represented Thomas Jefferson School of Law before the ABA regarding issues of compliance related to admissions, finances, academic support and instructional rigor. Her leadership efforts were instrumental in moving the law school toward compliance while improving the law school’s financial stability.”

Bullock claims she did the same at Texas Southern.

“During her tenure, Bullock cleaned up ethical and criminal scandals that she inherited,” the suit says.  “In September 2019, Bullock terminated the Associate Dean of Admissions for admissions improprieties, retained Michelle Rahman as a consultant to review the Law School’s Admissions Department, and later hired Rahman as Associate Dean of Admissions. Rahman’s review uncovered instances of gross mismanagement and led to a further investigation that uncovered the pay-for-admittance admissions scandal within the Admissions Department.”

But poor bar passage continued to plague the school and the faculty later took a vote of no confidence in her. Students were so upset that they complained of her leadership to university leaders, according to the state’s attorney general office’s documents on the matter.

Mike Stetz

Mike Stetz

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