Two former Lamar University employees believe political pressure related to Governor Greg Abbott's views on COVID cost them their jobs.
Bruce Hodge and Karen Corwin, who collectively have almost forty years of experience at Lamar, say the university did not give them a reason as to why they were getting fired.
Texas is an at-will employment state where employees can be terminated without cause, but Hodge and Corwin believe the publicly funded university was not happy that the two were asking students about their vaccination status.
They are high school students who reside on campus as part of an honors curriculum. They attend Lamar's Texas Academy of Leadership in the Humanities, where the teens get a jump start on college. Bruce Hodge and Karen Corwin were administrators of the program.
Hodge told us they took care of these minors on campus, 16 and 17 year olds living in college dorms. They were the responsible party while the students are in the dorms, responsible for their safety and health.
This responsibility takes on greater importance in the age of COVID, but Hodge says the university was offering little guidance.
The pair say they tried to fill the void, handing out slips of paper to the students, asking about their vaccination status and posing three questions to them:
Have you been vaccinated, have you had the second shot and do you plan to get vaccinated?
Hodge says the students filled out the papers. He says all of them did and the pair didn't force anyone to do so. They didn't ask to see a vaccination card, didn't tell them they could or couldn't come to school. They were thinking it was part of the medical record. They were already collecting a huge amount of medical information on the students because they're not normal college students-they're high school students.
But a few weeks after handing out that questionnaire, the university fired Hodge and Corwin without explanation, but not before expressing unusual interest in those slips of paper.
"We had a visit from the associate provost and the chief of police who came to my office to get the slips," Hodge told us. "Just showed up unannounced."
We reached out to Lamar for its side of the story, but a spokesperson told us the university doesn't comment on personnel matters.
Hodge suspects the state funded institution's actions were a result of political pressure generated by Governor Abbott's strong stance against vaccine mandates.
"Lamar, they encouraged to get vaccinated, they encourage to wear masks, but they don't want you to talk about it, and I have to assume it's just because of Abbott," said Hodge. "I don't know, we don't know."
He and Corwin have consulted with an attorney, but they don't believe they have much legal recourse because of Texas' at-will employment status.
By the way, 25 of the 27 students participating in the program that Hodge and Corwin administered said they had been vaccinated.