Freedom Of Religion, Freedom Of Speech, Due Process, And Group Think
By
Leonard Zwelling
For the past two blogs, I have outlined the case that three faculty members brought against UT M.D. Anderson and six of its executives. The details of the case are pretty simple. President Pisters invoked a Covid-19 vaccine mandate. Several members of the faculty and staff requested religious exemptions from having to take the shot. A committee was established to sort through who would get an exemption and who would not although the criteria for this decision remain unknown. Many people were initially denied the exemption and there was no appeal process. It was essentially, get the shot or get fired.
The three faculty members who sued the institution had their clinical privileges revoked because they were not granted exemptions and would not go against their religious principles. This decision was reversed a month later, but the damage had been done to these individuals as they would have to declare that their privileges had been revoked on all subsequent requests for licensure and privileges.
In order to dive more deeply into the details of the case, I consulted with this web site:
This is the Court Listener web site and on it, at this url, are 122 entries concerning the case. Most of these require an account and payment to view. However, it does not take any financial investment to ascertain what was going on here. UT M.D. Anderson was seeking to deny some of its faculty their First Amendment rights of freedom of religion, their Fourteenth Amendment due process rights, and their Title VII rights not to be discriminated against in their employment.
A reading of the free documents on Court Listener makes it clear that the Defendants in this case (UT M.D. Anderson) harassed the Plaintiffs with regard to their revealing personal documents that were going to be used to prove their religious sincerity. Furthermore, none of this was necessary if UT M.D. Anderson had just followed the law. Instead, in a zealous attempt to prove the Governing Body could inoculate every last faculty member and staff member, the executive team made a series of catastrophically ill-informed decisions that led to the harassment of faculty and the placing of the institution and the UT System in an embarrassing position with regard to employment law and religious rights.
This was an excellent demonstration of group think. The order had come from above and the entire apparatus in the executive suite was collectively going to make sure it happened even if they trampled on people’s rights. No one throughout the two-year process said, “wait, this isn’t right.” That’s all it would have taken to stop this fiasco of a law suit that resulted in a triumphant win for the Plaintiffs.
UT M.D. Anderson was completely out of line in its stance about religious freedom in this setting. Furthermore, to not only threaten, but also to condemn three faculty members to a loss of privileges and employment over this was unprofessionalism as its greatest.
Someone needs to hold this leadership to account and, in particular, the president and head of HR. What were they thinking?
This was all unnecessary. Better advice from legal counsel and better reasoning from people who should know the Constitution was needed. It was absent. Will the Board of Regents finally do its job?
