As a result, the Ohio Court of Appeals refused to reinstate Dr. Stephen Hall’s Title VII suit against OSU.
Hall earned his doctorate at OSU, taught briefly at Central State University and initially returned to OSU as a visiting faculty member. In 2002, he was appointed to a tenure-track position.
A 2008 promotion and tenure committee review cited Hall’s “excellent and important body of scholarly research and good service to the department and profession.”
However, committee members expressed mixed opinions about his teaching performance based on “uneven” student and peer evaluations and low standard evaluation of instruction scores. Those scores repeatedly placed him in the bottom 3 percent of teachers of similarly sized courses.
The full department faculty recommended tenure, but the College of Humanities’ Promotion and Tenure Committee and dean disagreed. The provost also refused to recommend tenure.
OSU gave him a seventh year to teach and terminated him in 2010.
