Two former faculty members at Texas A&M University’s campus in Qatar have filed federal lawsuits alleging sexual discrimination by the university, the latest controversy to hit the scandal-plagued institution.
In one lawsuit, Sheela Athreya, a professor of anthropology and the only woman with tenure on the Qatar campus, said César O. Malavé, dean of the campus, decided not to renew her contract just eight days after she moved her family to the Middle East. The reasons Malavé gave were “conflicting and nonsensical,” Athreya said in a court filing, and she was replaced by a man.
In a second lawsuit, Joseph Daniel Ura accuses Malavé of removing him as chair of the liberal-arts program after he refused to take actions to dismiss Athreya and a second female professor, Brittany Bounds, an Air Force veteran and co-chair of a campus women’s group. He said he was retaliated against after he reported his concerns about possible sex and veterans discrimination to officials at the main campus, in College Station.
The events that the professors said unfolded in Qatar may, in some ways, be reflective of issues facing overseas campuses, where governance and oversight far from the home institution can be difficult. Branch-campus leaders can also face pressures from local partners who typically fund these outposts. Ura said he was told not to renew Bounds’s contract after she made a comment on social media in support of Israel, angering students and an official with the Qatar Foundation, the campus’s benefactor.
But both Ura and Athreya link their experiences to broader charges of mismanagement and outside interference that have played out recently on the main campus. M. Katherine Banks resigned as Texas A&M president last month over her role in two faculty-employment scandals, including the botched hiring of a New York Times journalist whose appointment raised conservative ire. An investigation found that Banks and other senior officials tried to cover up damage from fallout over the hiring missteps.
The two Qatar-campus professors, who each had tenured appointments on the main campus, filed complaints with officials in Texas but said their concerns were not taken seriously. Texas A&M officials did not respond to a request for comment.
“It’s a circle-the-wagons, fight-off-the-threats mentality,” Ura said.
Athreya called it a “real misconception” to attribute the discrimination she said she experienced to the branch campus’s Middle Eastern location. “It’s very much not happening in the context of Qatari culture. It’s 100 percent happening in the context of Texas A&M culture,” she said. “It’s a main-campus problem.”
Athreya, who began working at Texas A&M in 2003, said she was recruited to teach in Qatar in 2019. While appointments at the branch campus were made on a short-term basis, Athreya, a biological anthropologist whose work focuses on the region, said she was repeatedly assured that contracts were almost always renewed if the faculty member had the support of their department or college back in Texas, which she did. In fact, Athreya said in an interview, administrators seemed primarily concerned that she might not choose to stay after her two-year contract was up.
It’s very much not happening in the context of Qatari culture. It’s a main-campus problem.
After teaching online for a year because of the pandemic, Athreya and her family relocated to Qatar in August 2021. They sold or stored most of their belongings, and Athreya’s husband quit his job and was hired on by his former employer as a contractor, without health or retirement benefits, in order to work remotely.
Just a week after she arrived, Ura told Athreya that Malavé had “unilaterally” decided not to renew her contract, effective August 2022. She was so new she had not yet met the dean.
Both Athreya and Ura said they were given multiple shifting reasons for the decision, among them that the Qatar campus did not need to offer courses in anthropology and that there were no open full-time positions. But Athreya said her course was the only one that met a social-science requirement that is part of Texas A&M’s core curriculum and that there are still open faculty positions in Qatar. Malavé also told investigators from the university’s Office of Risk, Ethics, and Compliance that the position was only meant to be short term. If that was the case, the professor wondered in an interview with The Chronicle, why go through the expense and effort of relocating her and her family?
The decision not to renew Athreya’s contract also ran counter to the university’s stated goal, in its contract with the Qatar Foundation, of attracting more main-campus faculty members to teach in Qatar. Both professors said attracting more female faculty members was also a goal, but in her lawsuit, Athreya said 70 percent of female faculty members hired during Malavé’s tenure had left. The suit included exit interviews with female professors collected by the campus’s Women’s Faculty Forum that cite a culture of sexism as part of their decision to leave.
Ura, who had taught in Qatar since 2019 and been head of the liberal-arts program since 2020, said in addition to Athreya, he was told not to extend the contract of a second professor, Bounds. Ura said he was told that Bounds, who did not have a main-campus appointment, was being let go because of student complaints about her comments on Israel as well as her past military service.
Ura said the “nearly simultaneous” decision to dismiss both women contributed to his “growing concern” that Malavé was discriminating against them because of their sex. At the same time that he was urging the dean to retain Athreya and Bounds, Ura reached out to his predecessor as liberal-arts chair, Zohreh Eslami, a professor of educational psychology. In his lawsuit, Ura said Eslami told him that she had also been a victim of sex discrimination and that she had reported it to Texas A&M officials. The lawsuit said he confirmed Eslami’s allegations with the dean of faculties for the university back then who told him she had forgotten to report the complaint because she was busy.
Contacted by The Chronicle, Eslami said in an email she was “uncertain” about being interviewed. Malavé did not respond to a request for comment.
Bounds said she was “shocked and dismayed” to learn that her contract would not be renewed, saying she had received top teaching evaluations. She ultimately kept her position and continues to work at Texas A&M-Qatar as an instructional assistant professor teaching history. Bounds said she has been trying to build a better relationship with the dean as a faculty senator. “I try to remain optimistic about the future since I love teaching for TAMUQ,” she wrote in an email.
As events unfolded, Ura said he contacted many Texas A&M officials, both in Qatar and Texas, with his concerns. At the end of September 2021, he filed a formal complaint with the university, outlining allegations of discrimination against his female colleagues. Under Texas law, college employees are required to report alleged sexual harassment, assault, or discrimination.
Three weeks later, Malavé asked Ura to resign as liberal-arts chair, saying that he had a “different vision” for the program. When he refused, Malavé removed him from the role. Not long after, the dean announced a sweeping reorganization of the liberal-arts and sciences programs on the Qatar campus, eliminating rolling contracts for professors in these departments and doing away with their research role to focus their positions on teaching and service. At the time, Ura and Athreya were the only two tenured, research-engaged faculty members in the affected programs.
Ura then filed a second complaint, of retaliation, with the university. Athreya also filed her own complaint, and both professors filed charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Although internal Texas A&M investigators cleared Malavé of wrongdoing, the federal commission issued a cause finding against the university in favor of Ura and gave each professor the go-ahead to file a lawsuit.
For Athreya, the employment dispute was complicated by the fact that her husband was diagnosed in early 2022 with an aggressive, terminal cancer, and he would be unable to travel during chemotherapy. She accuses the university of “slow walking” a decision in her case, offering a two-year contract renewal that would have allowed her family to remain in Qatar only after her husband had returned to the United States for treatment. Athreya and her two daughters followed after the end of the school year, their second major move in less than a year. She continues as a Texas A&M professor, although she has been teaching remotely while her husband receives treatment near family in North Carolina.
Ura, who was at Texas A&M for 16 years, has joined Clemson University, where he is chair of the political-science department. He sees parallels between his experience and the recent controversies that have unfolded in College Station.
“The things I experienced in Qatar were a difference of degree,” he said, “not a difference of kind.”
