Alpine 

Last Tuesday, Barbara Tucker—a dean in the College of Education and Professional Studies at Sul Ross State University in Alpine—filed suit against the university for gender discrimination. Tucker seeks reimbursement of her court and legal expenses as well as “any and all amounts recoverable and/or recognizable as damages” and has demanded a jury trial. 

Tucker has been on faculty at Sul Ross since 2009, when she was hired as an adjunct professor while she worked on her Ph.D. in educational psychology. She began a tenure-track position as a full professor in 2012 and served a number of leadership roles within her department until 2019, when she was appointed dean of the College of Education and Professional Studies. 

According to Tucker’s complaint, the trouble began in early 2024, when the university’s four academic deans—all women—got together to discuss their employment. They discovered that two of the four women were paid $119,000 annually, and the other two were paid $125,000. 

Both figures felt like a significant lowball, so the four women decided to investigate with the help of Provost Bernie Cantens. The team discovered that the lowest-paid deans at a comparable small state university—in this case, Angelo State—were paid around $145,000, and approached university leadership to ask for a three-year salary adjustment plan to bring the four female Sul Ross deans up to that standard. It seemed like a reasonable ask. “Even with a raise to $145,000, which the deans requested be implemented over the course of three years, the deans at Sul Ross (all female) would still be among the lowest-paid, if not the very lowest-paid, deans anywhere in Texas,” Tucker’s complaint reads. 

University leadership rejected the deans’ three year catch-up plan and instead offered Tucker a small raise of around $7,000 annually, with no promise of an increase in the future. Tucker was frustrated by the university falling short, especially given her track record—she had never received a negative performance review, and more than half of Sul Ross students were enrolled in courses that fell somewhere under her purview, which included the departments of Education, Business, Kinesiology, Criminal Justice, Homeland Security and the Law Enforcement Academy. 

The situation soured over the fall of 2024, when Sul Ross “created two new dean positions, hired male deans, and paid them each more than Tucker’s new salary, for overseeing a fraction of what she had previously overseen single-handed,” her complaint emphasized. Those new staff members were Sumatra Sengupta, dean of the Rio Grande College of Business, and Dean Culpepper, dean of the College of Health Sciences. Sengupta and Culpepper were hired with salaries of $150,000 and $135,000, respectively, both to do jobs that had previously fallen under Tucker’s purview.

During this time, Tucker also alleges sexist conduct on behalf of the university president, Carlos Hernandez. The complaint outlines an incident that took place at a professional development retreat for deans at Cibolo Creek Ranch. Tucker claims that she walked by Hernandez and Provost Cantens smoking cigars outside on her way to the pool with three other female staff members, of whom Hernandez asked, “Will there be any skinny dipping?” 

In December 2024, Provost Cantens informed Tucker that she was being removed as dean, “effective immediately,” and would be returned to faculty. “He provided her with no reason for this move, other than the university was going in a different direction,” her complaint alleges. She eventually discovered that this meant her salary would drop from $126,467 to $80,000 in the fall of 2025, while a male professor in the same department with less experience was making $113,000. (The university would eventually short her contract by three months.)

While this was going on in the background, the university hired a third male dean to take on responsibilities Tucker said she had previously overseen—Kevin Badgett, who would make $135,000 to take on the Department of Education. “Thus, Dr. Tucker had literally been doing the work of three men, each of whom are more highly compensated than she had been when covering all their duties,” she argued.

At press time, Sul Ross had not yet filed a response to Tucker’s complaint, and the university declined to comment on pending litigation.