A White assistant dean at Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law can pursue her Title VII employment discrimination and retaliation claims, a federal judge in Houston has ruled.
U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison rejected the university’s bid to throw out the suit by Patricia Garrison, an alumna of the law school who was appointed assistant dean for academic support in 2007.
Garrison still holds the position, but her lawyer, Katherine Butler of Houston, said, “It becomes increasingly difficult. Nobody wants to be in the position of suing their employer.”
“There will be a trial,” Butler said.
Garrison had received strong performance reviews by Dean McKen Carrington, who hired her, but the suit contends that current Dean Dannye Holley began a racially motivated campaign to force her out after his interim appointment in 2009. Holley was a longtime TSU faculty member, and Garrison had been one of his students.
“Texas Southern University treated one of the hardest working employees in its law school poorly for one reason and one reason only — she is Caucasian,” Garrison’s court complaint says. “It denied this woman compensation she earned, stripped her of job duties she was performing well and steadfastly put up roadblocks in an attempt to make her life so difficult that she would resign.”
After Holley rejected Garrison’s attempt to hold an underperforming Black subordinate accountable, he told her, “If you do not wish to work for me, you have options, and I suggest you begin to consider them,” the complaint says.
