A Tarleton State University instructor complained about parking fees. He said it cost him his job.

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An email landed in Ted Roberts’ inbox one morning last April. The acting dean of Tarleton State University’s liberal and fine arts college, where Roberts taught history, wanted to meet that day. He asked her what it was about, but got no response. At 4:45 p.m. that afternoon, Aimee Shouse, the acting dean, showed up at his office and asked if they could talk.

“The decision was made to non-reappoint,” she said, according to a recording of the meeting.

“So they’re firing me?” Roberts said.

As a senior instructor, Roberts was not tenured. But for 12 years, there had never been any question that his yearly contract would be renewed. He earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Tarleton and channeled his experience as a veteran into a popular military-history class that he taught in addition to several other history courses. Roberts was well-liked by students, particularly those in the Reserve Officers Training Corps, or ROTC program. They were who he was there to reach.

Roberts could not believe he’d lost his job. His student evaluations were strong and he believed he was in good standing at the university. The faculty senate would later, in a letter, write that the administration’s decision “resulted in a widespread impression of a retaliatory environment, which in turn has created a chilling effect throughout the university.” What Roberts had done was complain, passionately, about something that people complain about all the time on college campuses: parking.

Finding his mission

Roberts’ career in higher education was not inevitable. In 1992, after a short stint in college that did not last due to too much partying, he joined the Marines. He spent time in Japan and South Korea working as an intelligence analyst before returning home to Texas to try college again. Even with the GI Bill, Roberts said Tarleton, which is part of the Texas A&M University System, was the only place he could afford. Five years in the Marines had matured him, and he earned a bachelor’s in 1999 and a master’s in history in 2003. He worked as an adjunct professor at Tarleton for another year.

By then, the United States was at war in Afghanistan and Iraq and many young Americans felt the pull of patriotism. Roberts was not exactly young, but he believed his country needed him again. He figured he would work in a combat-support role, but American forces were getting clobbered in Iraq and he was deployed as an officer in the infantry. Between 2006 and 2009 he served an exceptionally long tour in Iraq — 17 months — then was deployed again. When he got back in 2010, he returned to civilian life.

A Tarleton professor he had been close to had become the department chair and offered Roberts a job. The university, whose main campus is in Stephenville, about an hour southwest of Fort Worth, was dealing with an influx of students, and though Roberts wanted to go to law school, he agreed to help his former mentor so long as the position could be as a visiting professor rather than an adjunct. One semester turned into two, which turned into a yearslong profession. Roberts taught five courses per semester, including military history, a requirement for ROTC students.

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“The more I stuck around the more I started to see similarities between the young men I commanded and the young students that were showing up in the classrooms,” Roberts said.

Teaching suited Roberts, but as anyone who works on a campus knows, it comes with regular frustrations. One of the most universal is parking. Last year, the gate to the faculty and staff parking lot that Roberts uses was broken and the lot filled regularly with drivers who weren’t supposed to park there, he said.

To make matters worse, Tarleton jacked up parking fees — by a lot. Roberts’ own cost jumped from $105 a year to $400. “I can afford it,” he said. “I was thinking of all these administrative assistants, staff folks that cut the grass, trim trees, and they’ve got to pay $400.”

Voicing concerns

In January, Roberts wrote to parking services explaining the gate problem and calling the fee hike “racketeering at worst, exorbitant at best.” The parking gate was later fixed, but Roberts was not satisfied with the response he got about the fees. The vice president for campus operations, David V. Martin, wrote that the increase was needed to fund more parking construction and told Roberts that there are “pains with growth.”

So when an email popped into Roberts’ inbox in February announcing that the university president would be “embarking on a comprehensive listening tour” in which faculty members and staff were encouraged to attend sessions to “voice concerns and propose solutions,” Roberts saw an opportunity.

Before the meeting, he did some research. He typed up a list of parking fees at other Texas A&M universities ($50 at Texas A&M at Texarkana; $190 at Texas A&M at Corpus Christi) as well as those at other institutions outside the system. He included the average annual salary at Tarleton, according to Glassdoor, and listed the salaries of the university’s top earners (the president made $400,000 in 2022). His research was cursory, he said, and there may have been some errors, but he stands by his point.

The meeting was held in a lecture hall and drew roughly 40 attendees, Roberts estimated, plus more on Zoom. No other university leaders were invited in order to foster “an environment conducive to open dialogue,” the invitation had said. Beforehand, faculty members were asked to submit questions and concerns anonymously. To start it off, James Hurley, the university’s president, spoke at length. According to Roberts, Hurley mentioned parking but did not get into detail. Then he moved on.

Roberts felt a sense of urgency. Was that it?

Ten years of military service that instills how to address a senior-ranking officer kicked in and he stood up. He held his typed notes in his hand and referred to it as he challenged the president. Hurley pushed back, disputing Roberts’ numbers. The exchange went on for about three or four minutes, Roberts estimated, and ended with Hurley asking if he could see Roberts’ notes. Roberts handed over the page and sat back down.

Three other faculty members who attended the meeting said the exchange was tense but cordial and never got out of hand. They thought that would be the end of it.

About two and a half weeks later Roberts got the email from Shouse, the acting dean, who also serves as associate provost and associate vice president for curriculum and faculty, asking for a meeting. At first, Roberts thought it was about the tenure and promotion committee: Shouse had appointed him to that committee, he said, even though he is not on the tenure track. He said she told him it was because he was experienced.

“Very rarely do things make it to the administration building as quickly as they did after the listening session with the president,” Shouse told Roberts, according to a recording he made of their conversation and shared with The Chronicle. “And I mean from a variety of sources.”

It was ultimately the provost’s decision not to renew Roberts’ contract, she said. The provost, Diane M. Stearns, had been clear “that they’re not going to tolerate intolerable behavior. And I think the way it was perceived was intolerable behavior in terms of toward the president,” Shouse told Roberts.

A few minutes later she said that “cordial isn’t the word I’ve heard” and that “other deans” had heard about the exchange. “I think the perception was it was a big enough noncordial event that people were talking about it.”

She explained that Roberts could appeal the decision to the provost. And she left.

Shouse did not return a request from The Chronicle for an interview. Sven Alskog, director of university communications, declined a request for interviews with Stearns, the provost, and Hurley, the president, saying the “university does not comment on personnel matters.”

Roberts considered himself someone who did things right, a military man who followed the rules and respected his superiors. A day after the meeting with Shouse, he wrote to the provost asking for an explanation. She responded that he would not get one.

A chilling effect

“Having gone through the trauma of war and thinking everything is going to be easy after Iraq,” Roberts said, “it’s bothered me more than I thought it would.”

Roberts’ colleagues were equally surprised. In a letter to the provost, the faculty senate wrote that Roberts had a “competitive track record” of teaching and service and that his role as a teacher and adviser to many ROTC students was critical. The administration’s decision, they wrote, made faculty feel less safe to speak up. If they could not raise concerns about parking, how could they bring up problems they considered more serious?

“Mr. Roberts spoke up about the parking issues, and although those in attendance agreed he was passionate about his research into the topic, he did not represent his fellow faculty members in a negative way,” the May 9 letter said. “Certainly, no one left that meeting thinking he would lose his job because of the interaction.”

The history department chair, Jensen Branscombe, also wrote a letter to the provost describing Roberts as “one of the most dependable, hardworking, and upstanding members of the department” and that he was well-liked by students and peers. Roberts got high marks on student evaluations, Branscombe wrote, and regularly served on search committees, and mentored students. Every summer he volunteered to help undergraduates register for classes. Branscombe wrote that Roberts had met or exceeded expectations in his annual evaluations for the last five years.

Roberts appealed the decision and met with Stearns for about 10 minutes. In the meeting, according to a recording he made, he explained that he believed the decision not to reappoint him was made in retaliation for his exchange with the president. He provided Stearns with the faculty senate letter and the letter from Branscombe, both of which she said she had.

Stearns still would not give a reason, quoting system policy that states that institutions are “not required to give a non-tenure track faculty member a reason for a decision not to reappoint.” Roberts told her that he was prepared to hire a lawyer.

In a May 28 letter, Stearns wrote to Roberts saying “that there are not adequate grounds to overturn the decision of non-reappointment.”

Roberts is not sure what he will do next. His 84-year-old mother lives in the area and he visits her every weekend, so he would rather stay close. But so far he has not found another teaching job nearby, so he may have to look elsewhere. His position at Tarleton will officially end on June 28.

“I feel like this was kind of a stab in the back to not just me as a veteran, but other veterans,” Roberts said. “At the very least, the university needs to answer questions about firing a veteran like that.”

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