Today, Lucas County Common Pleas Court Judge Gary Cook denied UT-AAUP's request for an injunction to maintain the status quo while its grievance over the Jacobs Reorganization Plan is processed.  A link to the decision appears below with the substantive ruling beginning at page 10.  This means the Administration may move forward with implementation of the reorganization, which it has been doing while the injunction case was pending, and that the UT-AAUP will ask an arbitrator to turn back the decision when it gets to arbitration on the underlying grievance filed on September 30, 2010.

The Court based its decision on a balancing of harms to determine if an injunction should be issued.  Judge Cook accepted the unsubstantiated testimony of Dr. Lloyd Jacobs to determine that the harm in granting the injunction "greatly" outweighed the harm in NOT granting the injunction.  Put another way, Judge Cook determined the harm to the University in delaying the implementation of the reorganization outweighed the UT-AAUP's harm in not being able to effectively remedy a breach of its collective bargaining agreement.

The University Board of Trustees (BOT) presented the testimony of  Dr. Jacobs to "prove" the harms it claimed would occur if an injunction prevented the Reorganization Plan from moving forward. Those harms are identified in Footnote 12 of the Judge's decision. This testimony was not supported  by any evidence.  On the other hand, the UT-AAUP countered Dr. Jacobs' claims of harm with testimony from an expert witness, Dr. Gary Rhoades, General Secretary of the National AAUP, who testified that the Reorganization Plan will not accomplish what Jacobs claims it will, and that none of the harms claimed by Dr. Jacobs would occur if the reorganization was delayed for any period of time.  Dr. Rhoades cited studies and testified  that the claimed harms were  both overstated and unsupported by any evidence.  Judge Cook determined otherwise and accepted the testimony of  Dr. Jacobs over that of Dr. Rhoades, a nationally-recognized scholar in the organization, structure, and accreditation of universities and colleges.  Judge Cook does not acknowledge in his decision that an AAUP expert witness provided testimony to specifically contradict the harms claimed by Dr. Jacobs.