holding that a professor could not demonstrate a proee-dural due process violation where the Board of Regents had ultimate decision-making authority on tenure and rejected the hearing committee’s recommendation to grant the professor tenure
How later courts described this case
- holding that a professor could not demonstrate a proee-dural due process violation where the Board of Regents had ultimate decision-making authority on tenure and rejected the hearing committee’s recommendation to grant the professor tenure
- holding that a professor could not demonstrate a procedural due process violation where the Board of Regents had ultimate decision-making authority on tenure and rejected the hearing committee's recommendation to grant the professor tenure
- finding genuine issues of material fact barring summary judgment as to whether the First Amendment covered the speech of a law professor denied tenure about "law school admissions policy, the size of the student population, administration of the school budget, and the failure to certify graduates for the Texas bar examination in a timely fashion.”
- holding board of regents, which held ultimate decisional authority on whether to grant tenure, did not violate faculty member’s right to procedural due process when it rejected faculty committee’s recommendation to award tenure
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
PATRICK E. HIGGINBOTHAM, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I agree that this case must be remanded for the reasons stated in Judge Politz’s fine opinion, except in one respect. I am unpersuaded that the state deprived Honoré of any substantive due process rights. We otherwise have concluded that the university gave Honoré all his procedural rights. It is true that Honore’s entitlement to automatic tenure is fairly debatable. Honoré, however, has no constitutional claim to a favorable resolution of that dispute. Characterizing as arbitrary the university’s decision that Honoré has no such tenure rights does not transform this contractual dispute into a dispute of constitutional magnitude. I would affirm the district court’s decision in all respects except the question of whether Honoré was denied tenure because he engaged in protected first amendment activity.