The Phone Under Oath. The Training Didn’t Stick.

Sworn testimony and the high-school logic of UTSA public hiring

The 1976 University of Texas at San Antonio Faculty Handbook already had the plain civic vocabulary a more recent faculty search needed. UTSA said its work should happen “in a climate of intellectual freedom” and serve the “multicultural community of metropolitan San Antonio and the South Texas region” (p. 9). It said faculty should know the operating documents: Regents’ Rules, administrative memoranda, the HOP, catalogs, and other official publications (p. 10).

Under “Rights and Responsibilities,” it said faculty serve as “teachers, scholars, artists, and as sources of expertise,” with duties that include committee service, advising, “promoting diligence and honest work,” and conforming to the rules governing “the proper and orderly discharge of their work” (p. 21). That was 1976. The later policies said it in newer language. The depositions revealed an old civic obligation, still sitting there, now surrounded by screenshots.

Kurt Vonnegut’s line about true terror is useful because it is funny until it quits being funny, which may take forever depending on who or what you are. One wakes up and finds the high-school class running the country. The joke works because most of us recognize the room. Class officers. Cheerleaders. Friends at the table. The small committee of people who already know what everybody is.

A phone under oath sounds like a prop from a student play written after too much cafeteria coffee. The testimony came from adults with faculty titles, public salaries, and doctorates. The setting was a deposition. Lawyers were present. A notary administered the oath. A record was made.

The joke needs careful handling. The record contains adolescent language, but the subject was public employment.

Before the phone starts talking

The people need names before the phone starts talking. Stacey Davis was then-acting director of the UTSA School of Music and a professor of music theory. Jennifer Beavers chaired the Digital Music search committee. Laura Kelly appears in the ‘Support hoes’ thread. Ivan Hurd appears in the produced record through a text exchange with Beavers about the search. Glenn Martinez was dean of the UTSA College of Liberal and Fine Arts during the events discussed here. These were adults inside a public hiring process.

Davis is central here because her deposition gives the cleanest training and manual record. She knew the language of standardized review, same factors, same materials, fairness, bias, and discrimination. Beavers is central because she chaired a search. This installment turns on the gap between these two worlds: the committee table and the high school hallway inside the iPhone.

The rulebook was real

UTSA had adult words for all of this. It had policies. It had a Faculty Recruitment Manual. It had a nondiscrimination policy. It had faculty rights and responsibilities. It had compliance offices, legal offices, public-records language, and training. The institutional furniture was all there, polished and arranged.

The problem was never a shortage of forms.

My UTSA compliance complaint asked the basic rulebook questions directly. Did every Digital Music search committee member attend faculty recruitment training before beginning its work as a search committee? Could UTSA provide the Faculty Recruitment Manual? In hindsight, those questions were the axis.

Current UTSA HOP 2.04: faculty searches must follow EEO guidelines, university procedures, and a standardized process for evaluating all candidates.

In the Davis deposition, UTSA’s nondiscrimination policy was read into the record. The policy defined retaliation as adverse action threatened or taken because someone opposed a discriminatory practice, filed a complaint, supported a complaint, provided information in connection with a complaint, or engaged in other legally protected activity. It also included intimidation, threats, or harassment against a complainant, witness, or third party. Davis was asked whether that was an important policy for UTSA to have. She answered yes. Asked whether sexual-harassment reporting should be protected from retaliation, she answered yes again. (Davis Dep. 12:18–13:24.)

Then, the Faculty Recruitment Manual. Davis testified that search committee training was a typical part of being appointed to a search committee. Asked whether she had undergone search committee training, she answered yes. Asked whether she knew UTSA had a Faculty Recruitment Manual, she answered yes. (Davis Dep. 10:12–19; 14:2–8.)

The manual’s Statement of Purpose was then read to her. It said the manual provides guidance to ensure that a fair and effective standardized process is followed while recruiting colleagues to serve UTSA’s diverse population, and that the recruitment process is designed as a collaborative process whose result is general concurrence about the best qualified candidate. (Davis Dep. 14:21–15:6.)

Davis was asked why such a process was important. She answered that all candidates should be assessed on the exact same factors and materials, so the process is fair for everyone involved. Asked why everyone should be assessed using the same standards, she answered, ‘To avoid any possibilities of bias or discrimination or any such thing.’ (Davis Dep. 15:7–16.)

That is the adult version. The sentence wears a belt. The nouns comb their hair and brush their teeth twice daily.

UTSA’s recruitment language, read into sworn testimony: same factors, same materials, same standards.

The other policies had teeth too

The same deposition moved through UTSA’s Faculty Rights and Responsibilities material. Under ‘Impartial Application of University Policies,’ Davis was shown language saying faculty shall endeavor to ensure UTSA policies and procedures are enacted and enforced impartially, without regard to rank, background, or perspective. (Davis Dep. 16:19–17:24.)

Another section carried the heading ‘Right to Expect Civility in the Workplace.’ It said faculty have an obligation to promote a culture of civility and respect. Under professional responsibilities to colleagues, faculty were told to interact with faculty colleagues and the wider university community in ways free from bullying, discrimination, and harassment. They were also told to acknowledge contributions to intellectual pursuits and strive to be objective in professional judgment of colleagues. Davis agreed with those statements. (Davis Dep. 18:1–24.)

The examples of unacceptable conduct were even more useful. They included factionalism within a department or school, or ganging up on specific faculty members. They included evaluating professional competence using criteria beyond professional performance, including personality and favoritism. They included seeing unethical behavior and doing nothing or saying nothing. They included language or behavior that is threatening, humiliating, intimidating, abusive, or hostile. (Davis Dep. 19:1–20:10.)

A manual, a policy, a training, a rule against bias, a rule against personality, a rule against ganging up, and a rule against the little club that already knows what it thinks.

Then there were all the phones in the hallway between classes.

The phone had other standards

The produced text record contains one line that belongs in the official room. In a message, Stacey Davis wrote that she had spoken with Dean Martinez, and he said to move forward with the search ‘based solely on qualifications.’ She added that it was okay that Jack was a semifinalist and that the committee could see what happened next through interviews, references, and selection of finalists. (PROD4, UTSA_0005098.)

That bit is almost ceremonial. Based solely on qualifications. The little trumpet plays. The folder opens. A puff of dust settles.

The same produced records include: ‘Take out Stamps.’ Then: ‘I simply do not want him on the list.’ Then: ‘I find him arrogant. And crazy. He’s inappropriate and I’m not certain about the legal thing at Austin. My Austin friend circle says otherwise … but it’ll wash out in the water I hope.’ (PROD4, UTSA_0005102.)

This is where the essay could become too easy. The temptation is to underline the ugliness until the page begs for mercy. The sharper point sits in the contrast. The policy told them to avoid bias. The training world told them same factors, same materials. The faculty-rights world told them personality and favoritism should not determine professional competence.

The phone said friend circle. The phone said legal thing. The phone said crazy.

Two produced UTSA text-message pages, side by side: UTSA_0005098 says the search should proceed “based solely on qualifications.” UTSA_0005102 answers with “Take out Stamps,” “legal thing at Austin,” and “My Austin friend circle.”

The credentials are real. So is the cafetorium.

Here the Vonnegut line comes back, rollicking. The absurdity starts with the setting: a public university, a public hiring process, a trained search structure, and adults whose professional lives are built around judgment, evidence, teaching, and language. Humans gossip, posture, repeat each other, grow tired, get defensive, and say dumb shit into tiny devices. The record puts ordinary weakness inside an official search.

For reals!! Fuck it. Take out Stamps. Gah! Nope. Nada. Bye bye! Ummmmm ok Jack! What??? Weirdo! My head is exploding!!!!! Stacey!!!! Jack!!! Couldn’t you feel it in your bones? Why couldn’t they have hired Jack?

These lines come from the produced UTSA text record, not a satire performed during B-lunch in a cafetorium. Some are fragments. Some are exclamations. Some are just the refrigerator buzz of adults texting as if the principal would never walk in.

The search chair and the iPhone

Jennifer Beavers supplied the search-chair version of events. In the unofficial, non-certified Beavers transcript, she testified that she was asked, as part of service, to chair the Digital Music search committee. She also testified that she communicated with faculty and administrators by text message about the search. (Beavers Dep., unofficial transcript.)

Her account of the search process used the language one expects from committee life: rubric, score, discussion, long short list, qualifications. She said every faculty member scored candidates according to the rubric and that, before the committee met, there was no candidate communication unless clarification was needed. She said the committee discussed the candidates and that the list grew larger than expected. She also said that, in her view, my personality had ‘absolutely nothing to do with it,’ and that the committee agreed I was qualified for the Digital Music job. (Beavers Dep., unofficial transcript.)

It is useful to have that in the record.

In the unofficial transcript, Beavers described some of the texts as ‘gossipy and snarky.’ She also said her care for how people were treated face to face and in the search was conducted ‘to the T’ and with ‘the utmost professionalism.’ Asked whether Stacey Davis was her supervisor at the time, Beavers said Davis was acting director. Asked whether she had snarky comments with her supervisor about me, Beavers answered, ‘That’s correct.’ She added, ‘She is a very close friend, and I was talking to my friend, not my chair.’ (Beavers Dep., unofficial transcript.) That line is the trapdoor.

Friend, chair. Chair, friend. Search, chat. Rubric, phone. The transcript has one job here: preserve the gag-me-with-a-spoon contradiction.

The training did not stick

Davis explained the rulebook under oath. Beavers explained the search under oath. The texts explained the hallway between classes in ethics, civics, and presumably, basic human decency.

A public hiring process can have all three at once. The official version can be true in its limited way: there was a committee, a rubric, a manual, and a process. The phone version can also be true: there was side-channel judgment, gossip, litigation stigma, mental-health language, and the little social arithmetic of who would be a desirable colleague.

The training could fail quietly, in the place where people told the truth with their thumbs.

The deposition did one clean thing

A policy is an institutional promise, not proof that the promise governs. Still, the deposition did one clean thing. It placed the adult sentences next to the hallway sentences.

Davis: exact same factors and materials, to avoid bias or discrimination. Beavers: rubric, committee, professionalism. Phone: Take out Stamps. Legal thing at Austin. Austin friend circle. Weirdo. Mental health issues. Unstable/unsafe.

The phone had a custody chain

A separate essay has to follow the phone backward.

The text record came out in pieces, rather than one clean bundle. First fragments. Then more fragments. Then a larger Bates-numbered production. Some messages appeared in one person’s production while raising questions about another person’s production. Some threads had missing context. Some records forced the next obvious question: which phone, which search terms, which dates, which custodians, which accounts, which exports, which gaps?

That is chain of custody.

If this essay is about what sworn testimony taught, the next one is about how the phone got dragged into the record at all.

Source notes:

A cafetorium is a multipurpose school room that serves as both cafeteria and auditorium. It is where lunch becomes performance and performance smells faintly like lunch.

This essay draws on UTSA-produced text messages, UTSA complaint and compliance records, UTSA policy materials, and deposition testimony taken in Stamps v. University of Texas System & University of Texas at San Antonio, No. 5:24-cv-00294-HJB. The case resolved before trial. Deposition quotations are presented as sworn testimony rather than judicial findings. Settlement terms are omitted.

The Davis deposition references come from the full transcript titled Davis Stacey 08.06.25, including 10:12–19, 12:18–13:24, 14:2–15:16, and 16:19–20:10.

The Beavers deposition references come from the unofficial, non-certified transcript of Jennifer Beavers’ December 17, 2025 deposition. The deposition was taken on the record. Beavers was sworn before testimony began, and counsel for Defendants appeared. The transcript cited here was provided to me by the deposition company after the deposition. It is a vendor-provided deposition transcript, but it is not the certified court-reporter transcript.

At the November 17, 2025 motion hearing (Dkt. 70), Defendants’ counsel represented on the record that, if deposition testimony were used in dispositive-motion briefing, Defendants would provide the official transcript they had ordered. The docket reflects that the Court then ordered private settlement offers after that hearing (Dkt. 71). No summary-judgment motion followed. A Notice of Settlement was filed on January 15, 2026 (Dkt. 83), and the case was dismissed with prejudice on February 23, 2026 (Dkt. 89).

I therefore use the Beavers transcript here as a good-faith working record of sworn testimony provided by the deposition vendor, while acknowledging that any Beavers quotation should be checked against the certified transcript or deposition audio before use in a court filing or another setting requiring formal transcript accuracy.

Produced text-message references include PROD4 / STAMPSVUTSA_PROD4, including UTSA_0005098, UTSA_0005102, UTSA_0005107–UTSA_0005109, UTSA_0005114, and UTSA_0005127–UTSA_0005129.