So at the same time, there was a case involving Earl Peacock who is now a
first year law student. Earl Peacock had been on the medical school
faculty and during the Korean war he had been at Valley Forge Hospital
and he had been assigned to burns on the hands. He had done three or
four thousand operations on hands. His father had been in the business
school. So he came back to Chapel Hill where held been born and bred and
started a hands department over at the med school and a burn center.
That still goes on, The Burn Center and the hands. And he got a lot of
money from HEW to do his thing. He was very competent, very
well-regarded, writes well, does research, writes papers, does
operations. Arizona was looking for a dean of their medical school and
hired him to be the dean of their medical school. So he left and went
out to Arizona as their dean. Two or three years after he went there he
had some altercation with the president and the president fired him as
the dean of the medical school. So Earl Peacock is not one to take this
lying down, so he filed a suit saying, "You can't
fire me without due process," and asked for judgment. He got
something like a million and a half dollars from the jury against the
University and the governor and everybody else. Well, that was appealed
and the court said, "That's too high," and
sent it back. At the time that we were having our dispute, Earl Peacock
had won the million and a half verdict. You can't fire a dean
of a medical school without due process. Earl Peacock had been here ten
or fifteen years and a lot of people on the
Faculty Council knew Earl Peacock. So I was relying on the Earl Peacock
case and a couple of others involving college presidents and said,
"I have the law on my side and I have justice on my side.
There's no reason why you should stab a man in the back. Come
out front and tell him what you have against him and let him respond.
Let the decision be made by an impartial peer group and if
he's doing something bad, remove him." And the
Chancellor and others were arguing, "No, directors are
different." So I lost on Freymann, but we reached a compromise.
Directors are not to be protected as are professors, but department
chairmen are. The reason for that distinction is that the faculty
recommend department chairmen to the Chancellor for appointment, but
directors are appointed by the Chancellor without consultation with the
faculty. Directors are the creatures of the Chancellor and department
chairmen are creatures of the faculty. So that was the compromise. And
so with three-fourths vote we had gotten the department chairmen
protected. I had more than a majority, but not the three-fourths
majority for directors. I was talking about retroactive, you know,
ending cases. So Freymann lost there.
Then you can appeal to the Trustees which I did, which I lost. Then you
can go to the governors and I took it to the governors. They appointed a
subcommittee to hear my appeal. I went there and there was a
case…. I was arguing constitution and if there is a liberty
interest, you're entitled to due process procedure. There had
been a Supreme Court case out of Wisconsin where Wisconsin law says that
the sheriff can go around at every place where they sell liquor and post the names of known alcoholics and the sheriff up
there had posted the name of this woman as a known alcoholic and she
sued him and the Federal Court saying she had been denied Constitutional
rights. She wanted a chance to respond before he publicly identified her
as a known alcoholic. And the Supreme Court said she had a liberty
interest in her good name and therefore, that triggered the requirement
of a due process hearing. I had that case. That was my prime case; easy
to understand the feeling. I'd written my brief and it
centered around that case. The week before we had our argument before
the governors the Supreme Court came down with another case where the
Chief of Police in Louisville, Kentucky around Christmas time had sent
out mug shots of known shoplifters and had their name and a picture of
them all and sent them to all the retail outlets so they could watch out
for these people. Well, he had mistakenly included a guy who worked for
the Louisville Courier Journal. So he had filed a suit relying on my
known alcoholic case and the Supreme Court reversed and said that
it's something that's protected by the state. Your
good name is protected by the states, but not by the Federal
Constitution, so I was arguing that Freymann, you know, you remove him
summarily, obviously he raped somebody or he went off with some money or
he did something bad and he has a chance to defend and that's
his liberty interest in his good name. I lost on that case, so the
governors ruled against me.