Marshall Dean Ellis: No Anger, Just Sadness By A Firing He Considers Unjust

USC students and alumni protest the decision to dismiss Marshall Dean Jim Ellis

USC students and alumni protest the decision to dismiss Marshall Dean Jim Ellis

‘YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED TONIGHT’

On his ride home, Ellis says he was completely perplexed, thinking what is this all about? What happened? “‘You are not going to believe what happened tonight,’” he told his wife, Gail, when he entered his home. “‘My gut is I am probably going to be fired.’ She asked ‘why?’ and I said, ‘I really don’t know.’ It was as weird a conversation as you would ever have with your wife.”

It took only a few hours for him to find out his gut was right. The next morning, Ellis had several appointments with alumni and donors in Orange County and was in his car when Quick called him on his mobile phone.

Tell me what you’re thinking and what you want me to do,” Ellis recalls saying. “What’s the next step we need to take?”

Quick replied that Ellis should talk to Austin and indicated that the interim president wanted to replace him with a new dean. Ellis recalls Quick telling him: “I think she really wants you to continue until we find a new dean. But it’s really going to be up to you to decide what you want.”

‘MY FIRST IMPULSE WAS I’M NOT GOING TO FIGHT THE DECISION’

USC Trustee Ming Hsieh read the OED files and believes Dean Ellis did nothing wrong

Ellis says he was livid, yet hid his anger from the provost. “I have always been a corporate team player and if the team decides they don’t want you on the team, you leave,” says Ellis, who spent 27 years in the corporate world before starting his second career as a teacher at USC. “So my impulse was I’m not going to fight the decision. I’m going to fight to protect my reputation. I worried that it would really impact my team and I had built a great team. The whole thing was so weird.”

Eight days later, on Oct. 12th, a still mystified Ellis arranged to meet with Michael Blanton, a lawyer newly appointed to head up the university’s Office of Professionalism and Ethics that oversees the OED and the university’s Title IX Office. “I said I want to see what the accusations are and he gave me a 50,000-foot-level view,” remembers Ellis. Blanton, he says, told him that OED received 104 complaints against Marshall, but since 20 of those were never investigated the total was actually 84. When Ellis left the meeting 45 minutes later, he was still uncertain about all the details.

When concerned USC Board of Trustee members were later allowed to go to the OED’s office to look at the files, some were surprised by what they saw. The complaints ranged from a female student who called the university hotline after having an argument with a boyfriend to a female teacher who was demoted after a poor performance evaluation, says trustee Ming Hsieh, who looked at the full file of OED reports. “There was no evidence or conclusion from any documents I read that there was racial, sexual or aging discrimination at the Marshall School or by Dean Ellis or his senior administrators,” says Hsieh. “Dean Ellis did everything he was required to do. He did it. He deserved dignity.”

‘WHEN I WALKED INTO THE MEETING, I KNEW I WAS NOT GOING TO BE SAVED’

It was five days after Thanksgiving, on Nov. 27th, that Ellis was pulled into an 11:30 a.m. meeting with President Austin and the university’s general counsel, Carol Mauch Amir. “When I walked in, I knew I was not going to be saved,” he says. During a terse session, lasting just under ten minutes, Ellis was handed written notice that he was being terminated as dean, effective June 30th of 2019. The university would pay out his salary for the remaining three years of his term. University tax documents show that Ellis had an annual compensation package worth $636,000.

The following Monday, Dec. 3, with rumors beginning to spread on campus about his imminent departure, Ellis dashed off an email to faculty and staff announcing that he had been asked to leave his job. “To the best of my knowledge,” he wrote, “this decision was not based on anything I personally had done, but rather a cumulative record of OED cases from Marshall. The vast majority of these cases were never brought to my attention. Nevertheless, this apparently has led university leadership to believe that we do not have a positive culture here. Therefore, they feel a change in leadership is in order. The Faculty Council is asking for a meeting with the President to understand how we came to this, and there are many external stakeholders who have sent in concerns for the school. There are concerns about process, transparency and reputational damage…I will communicate more as I learn it.”

University officials quickly reprimanded Ellis for informing staff of the interim president’s decision. Less than 12 hours after the dean sent his note, Provost Quick sent a memo to Ellis expressing his disapproval. “With that communication,” wrote Quick, “you misused the Office of the Dean to advance your own personal agenda, and you placed your personal interests over the interests of Marshall and the University. Moreover, your email put faculty in a position where they may feel pressured to show support for you because of your current role, and out of fear of retaliation. That showed an alarming lack of judgment. I realize you disagree with President Austin’s decision. However, you cannot abuse your role to try to change her mind. If you do that again, you will be subject to further action.”

‘THE DECISION WAS MADE AFTER CAREFUL DELIBERATION’

USC Interim President Wanda Austin fired Dean Ellis in a terse ten-minute meeting on Nov. 27th

Ellis says he was merely trying to inform his team of the president’s decision, not trying to influence anyone. Still, he quickly apologized to Quick.

The next day, Dec. 4, President Austin sent a letter through the university’s alumni office with her first public acknowledgment of Ellis’ ouster. “Jim Ellis will step down from his position as dean of the USC Marshall School of Business, effective June 30, 2019…[but] will continue to serve as a member of our faculty,” she wrote. “Because this is a personnel matter, we are limited in what we can share about this decision. The decision regarding Dean Ellis’ role at the university was made after careful deliberation. I personally met with Dean Ellis as did several others. In addition, we consulted with outside legal counsel to the Board of Trustees and external human resource experts. At the end of this process, I informed Dean Ellis that he would remain as dean through the end of this academic year, but that a new dean would be appointed for the coming school year.”

The letter offered no other details as to why the dean was fired and made no mention of a review of the OED files that General Counsel Amir had commissioned from a law firm, Cooley LLP. Ellis would later come to understand that the study was commissioned after an OED official, John Jividen, had sent a memo in January of 2018 to Provost Quick about the 83 cases the office had received against the Marshall School over the previous ten years. Yet, he would also learn that Quick had brought the matter up to the school’s previous president and general counsel, both of whom looked into the complaints and concluded there was nothing there.

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