All 10 terminated tenured faculty members who appealed their firing won their appeals with the Professional Standards and Responsibilities Committee of Faculty Senate, committee co-chair Linda Joyce Brown told the Faculty Senate during their meeting Friday.

Each appeal was unanimous in support of the terminated faculty member. The final decision for these faculty members rests with the Board of Trustees. The committee will forward their decisions to the Board, who will meet in January.

“We’ve been looking specifically at what the faculty rules and regulations requires,” Brown said in an interview Thursday. “There are processes laid out in that document and our job is to essentially assess whether the processes were followed in the planning of the termination of the tenured faculty, whether those processes were consistent with rules and regulations.”

Fourteen tenured faculty members were terminated in August. As tenured faculty members, they are able teach through the end of the fall 2016 academic semester.

“Tenure is a widely accepted practice in higher education and the termination of a tenured faculty member is considered a very drastic step that a university would take,” Brown said on Thursday. “First of all, in rules and regulations, there are grounds that could cause this action to happen. Certain events have to transpire first. We also looked at how the decision to eliminate specific lines of faculty, not individuals, but faculty from individual departments, how those decisions were made. We looked at how, once it was determined that a faculty member in such and such a program, such and such a department would be eliminated, how that specific individual was selected.”

In August, a committee met to identify individual faculty lines from programs to be eliminated. From there, individuals were identified by university administration to be terminated. That process is outlined in the faculty rules and regulation, according to Brown.

At this point, the committee’s work is done, and is waiting to hear from the Board.