A Tarleton State University instructor whose contract was not renewed after he questioned the university president about increasing parking fees will be rehired, a university spokesperson said in an email on Wednesday. Ted Roberts, whose effective firing was first reported by The Chronicle last month, said his reinstatement was made official on Wednesday.
Nate Bural, assistant vice president for marketing and communications, wrote that Roberts would receive the same pay and job title, but would work in the Texas university’s Leadership and Military College. Previously, he had been a senior instructor in the history department.
Roberts said in an interview that he is apprehensive about taking the new position at Tarleton because of the controversy surrounding his exodus from his former position.
“I’m not worried about the department,” he said, referring to his new colleagues. “I don’t know what the president is thinking, and I have no idea what the provost must be thinking.”
Roberts, a two-time Tarleton alum, had worked at the university as a history instructor for 12 years following a career in the military. He taught U.S. and military history and was well liked, his colleagues have said, especially by Reserve Officer Training Corps students. Roberts was not tenured, but said he’d never had trouble getting his yearly contract renewed.
But when his annual parking fee rose from $105 to $400, he said, he worried about the other campus employees who make less than he does and might struggle with such a sharp increase. At a meeting in April between James Hurley, the president, and faculty members that was billed as a session to “voice concerns,” Roberts raised the parking issue.
“We are much lower” when compared with parking fees at other public universities in Texas, the president told faculty members, according to a recording of the meeting that was published by a local news outlet.
“That’s not true, sir,” Roberts said. He had brought with him a typed-up list of parking fees at other institutions in Texas and beyond, some of which were lower than at Tarleton. Roberts and Hurley went back and forth for several minutes about the issue.
Two and a half weeks later, Roberts’s acting dean, Aimee Shouse, told him his contract would not be renewed. In a meeting that he recorded, she told him the provost, Diane M. Stearns, had made the decision after what was considered his “intolerable behavior in terms of toward the president.”
Tarleton’s Faculty Senate wrote a letter to the provost in support of Roberts. The letter said her decision had “resulted in a widespread impression of a retaliatory environment” at the university. Roberts’s chair also wrote a letter on his behalf.
In a June 26 letter responding to the Faculty Senate, Stearns wrote that no retaliation had occurred because Roberts’s comments were not a “protected activity” because “defamatory speech is not a protected activity.”
“No one is exempt from the consequences of unprofessional behavior in the workplace,” Stearns added.
Roberts cleaned out his office, thinking June 28 would be his last day at the university. But on June 29, he received an email offering him a job from Doug Simon, dean of the university’s Leadership and Military College. He accepted that night. On Wednesday, Roberts said, he got confirmation from Simon that he had the job.
“He’s got a top-notch program,” Roberts said of Simon. “It will be good to get back in the classroom.”
