Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
UCF asks judge to strike ruling in ‘Dr. Coach’ case
Arbitrator decided university shouldn’t have fired professor
The University of Central Florida should not have fired an up-and-coming professor accused of helping a Ph.D. student and local basketball guru known as “Dr. Coach” earn his degree in exchange for research funding, an arbitrator ruled last year.
But the university now is asking a judge to strike that decision. Its attorneys are arguing that the arbitrator, who died just months after weighing in on the case, was ill when he made the“haphazard” decision.
It’s the latest turn of events in the controversy surrounding Lauren Reinerman-Jones, former director atUCF’ s Institute for Simulation& Training. The university says the former rising star helped Irwin Hudson, an Army employee and local basketball coach, get his Ph.D. — and he, in turn, helped obtain funding from his employer for the institute.
Reinerman-Jones challenged her February 2020 firing, saying the university’s allegations were unfounded and that she had been “scapegoated” for the actions of others. She filed a grievance the following month through UCF’s faculty union, seeking reinstatement of her job with full back pay.
In September, arbitrator Roger Abrams agreed UCF had not proven Reinerman-Jones had been involved in any plagiarism that helped Hudson attain his degree.
“The university did not have ‘just cause’ to terminate Dr. Reinerman-Jones,” Abrams wrote. “The university is ordered to reinstate her and make her whole.”
Abrams acknowledged that reinstating Reinerman-Jones in her former position may be difficult since the lab she ran is no longer operating but said the two parties should devise “a suitable substitute.”
“While monetary awards certainly help, the real injury here was to Dr. Reinerman-Jones’ reputation in her field,” he wrote.
Reinerman-Jones, who had been at UCF since 2009, named her workspace at the university the Prodigy Lab. She started college at 14 and earned her Ph.D. in human factors psychology from the University of Cincinnati at age 23.
Her LinkedIn profile says she is now working in Ohio for a research organization. She could not be reached for comment for this story.
UCF took issue with the arbitrator’s award. The school’s attorneys, Michael Mattimore and Jason Vail, argued the letter contained inconsistencies that were “substantive and irreconcilable because they are not supported by the record.”
“On its face, the award is haphazard and raises questions about the capacity of the author and its authenticity,” the university’s attorneys wrote.
For example, they wrote that the arbitrator’s letter explaining his decision was submitted as a “non-final Word document,” was dated incorrectly, repeatedly misnamed a key witness and included a duplicate “statement of the facts” section.
The arbitrator also ignored his own findings of academic integrity, conflicts of interest and the findings of the initial investigation, the lawyers said. The errors, they wrote, “impact a legitimate record or support for the award’s conclusions.”
In September, the parties learned through the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service that “the arbitrator was very ill and not hearing or taking cases,” UCF’s attorneys wrote. Abrams died on Nov .12.
In addition to firing Reinerman-Jones, UCF said publicly in 2020 that it planned to take away Hudson’s Ph.D., and he filed a lawsuit in Orange County Circuit Court seeking to keep it. That case still is ongoing. But in March 2022, Hudson received a letter from Provost Michael Johnson saying the university was revoking his degree immediately.
University spokeswoman Courtney Gilmartin declined to confirm the current status of Hudson’s degree or comment on any other aspect of the case, citing the lawsuit.
But Hudson and his attorney, Jan Williams of Jacksonville, argue that the university did not have any “statutory or other legal authority” to revoke the degree. School leaders engaged in “arbitrary and conscious shocking conduct,” Williams argued because they passed a policy cited in Johnson’s letter with the specific purpose of revoking Hudson’s degree.
Hudson said the university’s accusations against him were false and that the past four years have been the toughest of his life.
“I never thought anything like this could happen to anyone,” Hudson said in an interview. “Now that I see that it’ s happened tome, I believe it could happen to anyone.”
Hudson is a civilian employee at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center and, until a 2018 reorganization, worked for the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. He also is a former boys varsity basketball coach at Trinity Preparatory School and runs his own basketball training company, with a gym set up at his Seminole County home.
He refers to himself as “Dr. Coach,” on the website for his basketball training company, which seems to sum up his dual worlds.
Hudson has argued in his suit that UCF failed to follow its own rules for investigating alleged academic misconduct and has wrongly damaged his “reputation and earning capacity” and embarrassed him through a bungled investigation it outsourced to a law firm in Washington, D.C.
Both Reinerman-Jones and Hudson said in 2020 the university took action against them in part because Reinerman-Jones was among a group of faculty that, a couple of years earlier, complained about a now discredited cybersecurity review conducted by another UCF employee.
In 2018, UCF hired a law firm to investigate both those cybersecurity concerns and whether there was a “scheme where candidates are obtaining PhDs fraudulently with the assistance of advisors in exchange for grants,” according to the report written by attorneys with the Cohen Seglias law firm.
In the 109-page report, given to UCF in December 2019, the attorneys said they found evidence that Reinerman-Jones had “facilitated” plagiarism by allowing a Ph.D. student she was advising to use research “designed and conducted” by others in a dissertation but “pass it off ” as his own.