From Classroom to Courtroom

The Clements Office Building on the northwest corner of Guadalupe and West 15th Streets in downtown Austin houses the Office of the Attorney General of the State of Texas. There, on September 9, 2002, I submitted to a court deposition, under subpoena by the Defendants, in a court case called “Aman Attieh vs. The University of Texas at Austin” [= UT].

My deposition, and seven or eight others before and after mine, came at the end of eight years of strife in UT’s Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. The strife began when a Dean of the College of Liberal Arts named a Palestinian Christian Arab to serve as Chair of that department of fifteen faculty colleagues in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish. There followed almost constant complaints and allegations of favoritism, intimidation, abuse, harassment, and racism. On the heels of the later naming of an American-born Orthodox Jewish rabbi to the same position came charges of prevarication and dishonesty, harassment, ethnic, religious, and gender discrimination, initiation of three faculty grievance procedures, contested promotions cases, and allegations of plotting, wrongdoing, immorality, plagiarism, and ghost writing of faculty research writing. In addition, there were charges “so serious” they were never revealed to the departmental faculty at large, along with an even larger number of student complaints, the wholesale exodus of graduate students from the department, and graduate student petitions to transfer supervision of their dissertations out of the department. Five or six UT faculty careers ended in the process, most dramatically and publicly among them that of a Lebanese Shi’ite Muslim Arab woman who had taught Arabic in the department for sixteen years. A Dean of the College of Liberal Arts threatened the first department Chair with dismissal from the faculty and dismissed the second from his Chair position.

I sat at the head of the long conference table in the 11th floor conference room of the General Litigation Division of the Attorney General’s offices. A video camera stared at me from the other end of the table. The Shi’ite Muslim Arab woman’s attorney sat halfway down the table to my left. Assistant Attorney General Judith Horowitz, representing UT, sat on the right side of the table. A room-length, floor-to-ceiling window behind her framed the landmark, 307–foot high University of Texas Tower.

As I was being sworn in, the thought crossed my mind that the fact of a court deposition made me much farther away from The Tower than the physical distance of eight blocks. Or maybe not. Under the Tower in the “Main Building” are UT’s Office of Legal Affairs, which had initiated investigations of faculty in my department, including me, and the Office of the Provost, where our departmental faculty affairs underwent special review for years and where decisions which brought me the subpoena took place.