Price tried to terminate entire UNT Dallas campus faculty, backtracked under pressure

Back in 2010, John Ellis Price (who is now a finalist for the FAMU presidency) sent termination notices to the entire 35-member faculty of the Dallas branch campus of the University of North Texas at Denton (UNT).

Price, who’d been selected to lead the process of changing the Dallas campus into a stand-alone university, tried to use the transition as an excuse to deny contract renewals to all the professors. He told the affected personnel that they were free to reapply for their soon-to-be-former jobs.

“I can’t take faculty from UNT-Denton and say that they're automatically going to be our faculty,” Price said in a quote published by The Chronicle of Higher Education on March 19, 2010. “That would be inconsistent with the law.”

But the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education pointed out that “Two branches of the Texas A&M University system have also gone out on their own in recent months, but jobs on those campuses were transferred over, and faculty members did not have to reapply.”

After receiving weeks of negative publicity and a letter of protest from the American Association of University Professors, Price finally backtracked.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Price “issued a memo…offering terminal, one-year contract extensions to everyone who does not get a job offer as the branch makes the transition.”

The article added that: “Mr. Price announced the offer during a Faculty Senate meeting at the Denton campus, where faculty members were scheduled to vote on a resolution criticizing the way in which Mr. Price had terminated the entire Dallas faculty. The 35 faculty members who received the notices in March were all on renewable one-year contracts, and many had worked there for most of the decade the branch campus has been open.”