The decision to terminate two engineering instructors, Trevor Carlisle, Ph.D and Natasha Mallette, Ph.D, has been rescinded, and the instructors are being reassigned for the 2020-21 school year, following a month of student-led opposition and faculty complaints aimed at engineering administration.

Despite sustained claims of a need for budget restructuring, Dean of Engineering Scott Ashford and School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering Department Head, Greg Herman, announced to CBEE faculty and staff on May 11 that the College of Engineering was able to keep both instructors with changes to their responsibilities. While Carlisle will stay within CBEE, Mallette is moving to a different school within the College of Engineering. Mallette believes administrator bias played a part in her original non-renewal and subsequent move to a new school. Ashford also noted that there would still be significant expense reductions to the College of Engineering aligning with the announcement made by Ed Ray regarding financial deficits due to COVID-19, the day prior. 

“The college plans for Trevor to remain in CBEE with the same instructor title, salary, and FTE for Academic Year ‘21,” said Ashford and Herman in the all-staff email. “In addition to teaching college-wide ENGR courses on behalf of CBEE, Trevor will have an increase in the number of assigned sole-instructor CBEE courses.”

Carlisle confirmed this, and said his new contract will be the same as the one he held this year. 

“My PD and yearly contract remain unchanged. I will be teaching 3 ENGR courses next year in addition to CHE courses that I have taught previously,” Carlisle said in an email statement. 

Carlisle is teaching the same amount of courses as years prior, but is now teaching three new lower level courses. These courses have been taken on by CBEE from other engineering schools to offset their course loads, and in return, allow Carlisle to remain in CBEE.

Mallette, on the other hand, was transferred out of CBEE and into the College of Nuclear Science and Engineering, where she will teach undergraduate courses on thermo-fluids along with helping to develop their new first-year engineering program. Despite the transfer, she was able to keep her position title as a Professional Practice Engineer and salary.

Mallette said she sensed biases involved in her non-renewal after a lack of transparency from CBEE administrators regarding the decision. 

“I’ve learned that when people experience discriminatory environments at the university level, often instead of fixing the environment, they move the person out of it,” Mallette said. “If I had taken other measures to resolve this issue on my own, it’s likely that I would’ve been moved. So really, it’s the best outcome I could’ve hoped for and I’m happy to have the opportunity.”

Herman, the CBEE department head, declined to comment on the matter. 

According to Ashford, the decision to move Mallette happened when the school was notified that there were increased instructional needs from NSE that Mallette is qualified to teach. The courses she previously taught in CBEE are now being transferred to other instructors in the school.

Despite these circumstances, Mallette is set to begin teaching in NSE in the fall, and is looking at the transition optimistically.

“I had a former student say to me about all of this, ‘the reason the students got so upset is because we sort of felt, this is our family, and we felt they were tearing it apart.’” Mallette said. “I met the school head [of NSE] and he seems really reasonable and nice, and in some ways it’s exciting [because] I know a few of the professors over there… I’m looking at it as a positive. I could be part of a different family on campus.”

Students who were a part of the original petition against the non-renewals have mixed opinions about the reassignments, including Kaylene Lim, the fourth-year Chemical Engineering major who created the petition right after the public notification of their terminations. 

“It’s really encouraging to see that the people have power, in this case it was the students,” Lim said. “I think it brings me a lot of hope, especially with everything you’re seeing on the news. I’m hoping that with the implementation of Student Advisory Boards in each college students will continue to have a way to speak up and be involved in major decisions like this.”