The Vermont Labor Relations Board (VLRB) has issued its decision in response to my wrongful denial of reappointment grievance  — the VLRB “dismissed” it, stating there was no evidence to support the claim.  As I have written before, I  knew the VLRB would have a difficult task making a decision in my favor. So it was not a surprise. And for a variety of reasons (read on). But the shock came when I read the Board’s “Findings of Fact [sic], Opinion, and Order” more closely. It read as if UVM’s press office wrote it. And this is not an exaggeration.

None of the evidence that I uncovered during two full days of hearings (calling 6 witnesses and entering dozens of exhibits into evidence) received a mention, nor exhibits accepted into evidence.  Also expunged from the Board’s official findings were witness statements I provided to the Board in my final legal brief proving falsification of key claims about my teaching. Meanwhile,  VRLB cited one UVM exhibit after another, essentially re-writing almost verbatim the Dean’s denial of my grievance as if the two-day hearing never took place. This is not typical of VLRB decisions that I have researched and read.

The Board simply conducts a straw-man summary of my grievance points and then dismisses all of them (these were not the arguments submitted to them; those were ignored along with the supporting facts); strangely; the VLRB even summarized some of these grievance points incorrectly.  Meanwhile, the VLRB did not engage any of the more than 100 facts presented by me to the three members of the panel hearing my case, and instead buried the facts by omission (nothing I supplied to the Board in my final legal brief was cited or even alluded to in its  “Findings…”). Fortunately, I have the full hearing on videotape, and I will be releasing relevant clips to show how the Board, led by Richard Park (VLRB Chair and UVM graduate who is well connected to the Burlington educational establishment from the employer side) has the proof showing the Chair of the Dept. of Economics and other faculty members falsified claims (including the “biggest” concern) about my teaching.

As I demonstrated with facts and evidence presented to the Board, the “biggest” purported concern of the Chair was about not teaching the standard model “fully and fairly” before criticizing it; yet this concern, which I showed influenced the Dean’s decision to deny my reappointment, was unquestionably proven false by me at the hearing. The claim had no factual support whatsoever. The evidence supplied to the VLRB is thus definitive proof of  exaggeration and mischaracterization (aka, defamation) of my teaching (which the Dean relied on), and thus represents evidence of the Chair’s motivation to get rid of me. The Chair defended her claim, under oath, and related statement she sent to the Dean, and pointed to the sources for her claim, which I then showed through examination of witnesses (peers she cited as the basis for her claim) was a claim that both logically and factually was false. It was fiction writing by the Chair. Even UVM’s own Faculty Standards Committee (voting 5-to-0 in favor of my reappointment) saw the Chair as “out to get” me.

Yet the VLRB does not mention any of this, and instead states there was no evidence to support the claim that the Chair was intent on removing me for what I was teaching. The Board reiterated approvingly UVM’s defense that I was removed because of how I was teaching — citing the standard model again as not being taught fully and fairly before criticizing it. But this is exactly what I proved was a false claim, which is why the truth revealed to the Board had to be ignored (or it would have destroyed its key conclusion). I proved the Dean relied on a false claim, one that was cited as the “biggest” concern by the Chair, yet this was not mentioned in the VLRB’s decision, not one word about it. Is this an old-boy network at work, linked to UVM’s deep state?

The VLRB, therefore, led by Mr. Richard W. Park (the former UVMer), did not have the judicial integrity to even engage my evidence, which it had in its possession, and then attempt to refute it. I would have expected at least this much from the VLRB. To the contrary, the Board omitted the facts and evidence and this amounts to suppressing the truth in an apparent effort to protect UVM’s reputation (at my expense)  — hence this leads me to conclude that the VLRB appears to have conducted a cover-up. More on these developments later. ~JS