Tenure critic Jim Wetherbe’s cancer diagnosis fuels request to give deposition in case

In the latest chapter of a nine-year dispute with Texas Tech University, professor Jim Wetherbe is asking a federal judge to lift a stay in his case so that he can testify in a deposition.

Wetherbe’s filing in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas also asks that the court order the deposition of Texas Tech University President Lawrence Schovanec.

The court document says Wetherbe is a 2021 survivor of advanced colon cancer, but the cancer now has returned. Likewise, his lawyer says, Schovanec had a well-publicized medical emergency resulting in his hospitalization this past summer.

“Neither of these men is getting any younger, and both apparently have some rather serious health issues,” says attorney Fernando Bustos of the Bustos Law Firm in Lubbock. “It is in the interest of justice to have both of them give testimony while they are still here to provide it.”

Wetherbe, the Richard Schulze Distinguished Professor at Texas Tech’s Rawls College of Business, is the plaintiff in a lawsuit that seeks to hold the university accountable for retaliation for exercising his First Amendment right to speak out against academic tenure.

Wetherbe has been awarded and resigned tenure four times in his career at the University of Houston, University of Minnesota, University of Memphis and Texas Tech. In a 2013 article in the Harvard Business Review, Wetherbe advocated for radical change in higher education by abolishing tenure and the “guaranteed job for life” it provides recipients.

Wetherbe has written and spoken on the subject and testified before a Texas Senate committee that considered banning tenure for public university professors in 2023. That bill passed in the Senate, but failed to gain approval in the Texas House.

His lawsuit claims that former Rawls College Dean Lance Nail retaliated against Wetherbe for these views, which included, among other acts of retaliation, stripping him of $100,000 in grant money awarded by Best Buy.

Ironically, Nail himself relied on tenure to maintain a teaching position at Tech after he was forced to resign from the dean’s office in the face of grade tampering and Title IX scandals in 2015.

Wetherbe succeeded in defeating a motion to dismiss from Texas Tech, which appealed. However, the appeal is in legal limbo at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans, which heard the case in September 2020 but has yet to issue a ruling.

In 2006, Texas Tech recognized Wetherbe, who received his master’s and doctorate degrees from the university, as a distinguished alumnus. Wetherbe has funded scholarships, doctoral fellowships, two endowed professorships, and supported the Rawls College building fund.

The case is James C. Wetherbe, Ph.D. v Lance Nail, Ph.D. et al., No. 5:15-CV-00119 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas Lubbock Division.

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