Sometimes you get into litigation through no substantial fault of your own. Someone hits you with a car (or you hit them). You get sexually harassed or laid off at work. Things like that. You end up in court and you have to deal with the hand that you got dealt.
Whereas sometimes, like here, you're your own worst enemy.
Ramakrishna Akella is a professor at UC Santa Cruz. It's a relatively cushy job -- as entirely fits that typically laid-back institution (and occupation in general). The normal teaching load for professors is ostensibly five "classes" a year. But, in reality, it's only three: you've got to teach three "podium" (i.e., actual) classes, and the other two classes entail "advising, mentoring, research supervision, and training activities associated with our graduate and undergraduate programs." So basically during research or any other professor-like things (e.g., "academic mentoring and advising of graduate and undergraduate students, teaching assistant training and mentoring, curriculum maintenance and revision, and advertising and outreach for the department").
Now, normally, basically anything counts for those two additional "classes" -- or at least anything that your department chair decides counts. But Professor Akella's department chair basically thinks that he's deadwood, so decides that Akella needs to teach four actual classes instead of three. That'll make up for Akella's alleged failure to have any "undergraduate advising or curricular leadership roles" and purported "'catastrophic' record on graduate advising and graduate curricular leadership."
One can adopt such a strategy for good reasons or for bad ones. Sometimes, a faculty member is indeed just going through the motions on research etc. and hence perhaps legitimately assigned other work in order to even out the various professorial burdens. (Mind you, sometimes faculty members are similarly going through the motions on their teaching duties, and that rarely gets the faculty member in trouble. Sadly.) By contrast, sometimes, it's not that the faculty member isn't doing anything extra, but is instead that that the department chair (or Dean) doesn't like or appreciate the qualities of those extras -- or simply doesn't personally like the underlying faculty member -- and so assigns extra workload in an effort to harass the person and/or get them to quit (or leave). Ditto for assigning tough courses, inconvenient dates and times for classes, etc.
For whatever reason, Professor Akella's not having it. He's assigned four classes, but says he's only going to teach three. Period. (Actually, he "buys out" a class, so only has to teach three, but says he's only going to teach the two.) His theory being that the department chair doesn't have the authority to add an extra podium class to a professor's workload.
So when 80 students show up for the class the department chair scheduled, Prof. Akella doesn't show up, and the University scrambles to get a replacement. In response, the University imposes discipline for Professor Akella's failure to appear; he gets a 15% reduction in pay for the next year, plus a letter of censure in his file. Which, in the scheme of things, isn't all that serious of a penalty, IMHO.
But Professor Akella files a petition for mandate, claiming that the extra class wasn't allowed. And the trial court agrees.
The Court of Appeal reverses. The opinion describes in exhaustive detail the underlying policies, and decides that, yeah, the department chairs can indeed add an extra "real" class to the teaching load if the professor isn't doing sufficient other stuff.
Okay. Fair enough. The issue is a clearly a relatively close one, if only as evidenced by the fact that the trial and appellate courts disagreed. It's a fair amount of litigation for a fight that's merely about whether a professor has to teach an extra class once a year, but okay, let's put the whole thing down to principle and the need to get a final ruling. Maybe that justifies all the costs and attorney's fees that everyone's spending on the thing.
So after reading the opinion, I wanted to find out how Professor Akella is doing these days. So I consulted Mr. Google.
At which point I discover that although the opinion (understandably) doesn't mention it, Prof. Akella ultimately did even worse for himself. His department at the University was subsequently abolished, and while other departments absorbed pretty much all the professors, none of 'em wanted Akella. So he got assigned to a Dean for his course assignments, and Prof. Akella insisted -- sort of similar to what he said in today's opinion -- that if there's no department, there's no department chair to assign him to teach any classes, so he doesn't have to teach any.
At which point the University revoked his tenure and fired him. One of only two professors at UCSC to have ever had their tenure revoked.
A little backstory on professorial relations.
