A Pima County Superior Court judge is expected to rule soon about whether a lawsuit brought by a former University of Arizona employee can proceed to trial, leaving unresolved for the moment a legal dispute that offers a window into dysfunction inside the UA’s College of Education in the months before the university’s financial crisis became public.
The lawsuit was filed by Clarissa Siebern, a former business manager in the UA’s College of Education who says she was fired in October 2023 in retaliation for raising concerns about labor law violations and financial mismanagement — complaints she was making inside the university months before its financial crisis became public.
Arizona Luminaria reached out to the University of Arizona and the Arizona Board of Regents for comment on the case and did not receive a response by publication time.
Fired after raising alarms
Siebern spent 26 years at the University of Arizona, working her way up from administrative roles to business manager in the Department of Disability and Psychoeducational Studies. She had never received a written disciplinary action, according to court records, although an attorney for the regents said in a June court hearing that she had informal disciplinary conversations with her boss. Siebern told Arizona Luminaria there were never any disciplinary discussions. Her supervisor had nominated her for a staff excellence award and approved her for a merit raise just months before her termination.
Siebern was also a student in the same department — one semester from finishing a master’s degree in special education, driven by her interest in assistive technology used by her son, who has cerebral palsy and was also a UA student. He attended the hearing in June wearing a blue polo shirt with a Block A university logo on it and sat with Siebern’s husband.
Siebern is Hispanic and Indigenous and a first-generation college graduate. The UA is a federally-designated Hispanic-Serving Institution, which means at least 25% of the student body is Latino.
Starting in 2022, Siebern began raising concerns with college leadership, including then-Dean Robert Q. Berry III, about what she described to Arizona Luminaria as violations of federal and state labor law: staff forced to handle multiple roles without additional pay, and hiring practices that she said put workers in violation of I-9 requirements. In an August 2023 email that is part of the court record, she warned Berry that staff “feel that they are not being paid for the level of work that they do” and that resignations were coming.
She was right. A university compensation review found the department’s staff had been underpaid and in the wrong pay category and bumped them up two pay grades. Siebern learned of that result in the days before she was fired, she said.
One hour after a meeting with HR, she went home and found her access to university computer systems had been cut off. Shortly after, she was fired over Zoom.
“I felt I was banished for doing the right thing,” Siebern told Arizona Luminaria in an interview.
A window into the financial crisis
Siebern’s case offers a glimpse into the turmoil building inside the UA’s College of Education in the months before the university’s financial crisis became public.
In November 2023 — just weeks after her firing — then-CFO Lisa Rulney disclosed to the Arizona Board of Regents that the university was carrying a cash reserve deficit that would eventually be pegged at $177 million, exposing that the school’s administration had been overspending heavily with minimal oversight and setting off a period of layoffs, budget cuts and leadership upheaval that continues today.
Siebern says she saw trouble building long before the public did. The College of Education was running a $5 million budget deficit — information Siebern says was withheld from her and other business managers and department heads who were responsible for managing departmental finances — that is acknowledged in Berry’s testimony.
Lisa Rulney, vicepresidenta senior de Asuntos Comerciales y directora financiera de la Universidad de Arizona, escucha a un miembro del público en la llamada a la audiencia de la Junta de Regentes de Arizona el 16 de noviembre de 2023. Rulney renunció el 13 de diciembre. Credit: Michael McKisson
The university’s defense
The university’s position is that Siebern’s internal complaints were ordinary workplace grievances — not protected whistleblowing — and that she was fired for a legitimate performance reason: a delay of nearly four months in processing payment to a graduate student worker, court records show.
University officials say the decision to terminate her was made Sept. 30, 2023, two days before she sent what the university characterizes as her most explicit warning about labor law violations. An independent investigator retained by the university found no retaliation. Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs Andrea Romero upheld the termination, according to court records.
A two-day external hearing before a neutral hearing officer in February 2025 also went against Siebern. Hearing officer Gregory Falls found that her complaints “did not alert them to something they did not already know,” records show.
The Arizona Board of Regents argued in its motion for summary judgment that Siebern’s communications with Berry about staff morale, workloads and pay did not constitute protected disclosures of wrongful conduct on a matter of public concern — the legal threshold required under its whistleblower protection policy.
Not every grievance rises to the level of public concern, attorney Betsy Lamm argued at the hearing in June.
Siebern’s attorneys previously countered that her warnings about labor law violations, risks and underpaid staff and faculty were disclosures the policy was designed to protect, and that the timing of her firing — coming shortly after she pushed for staff pay reclassifications, and days after a compensation board vindicated her concerns — points to retaliation.
Her direct supervisor, department head Carl Liaupsin, testified at the external hearing that he liked working with Siebern, had a good working relationship with her, and would not have made the decision to terminate her himself. Berry made the call.
A parallel federal lawsuit
Siebern is also pursuing a separate First Amendment lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Tucson against Berry personally, alleging he violated her constitutional rights by terminating her in retaliation for speech on matters of public concern. That case survived a motion to dismiss and is now in the discovery phase.
Berry left the University of Arizona in April 2025 and is now dean of the School of Education at Indiana University. His salary at the UA was $358,750.
A costly fight
The legal battle has taken a severe personal toll. After losing her job, Siebern lost her health insurance, life insurance, tuition benefits, and retirement equity. She developed frozen shoulder, then got bronchitis and went to hearings sick and in pain. In early 2025, a mammogram revealed she had an aggressive form of breast cancer, with cancer in her lymph nodes, she told Arizona Luminaria.
“I was absolutely lucky,” she said. “They caught it at Stage 3.”
She underwent chemotherapy. Between the illness, the treatment and the stress, she lost almost 70 pounds. She lost her long brown hair. She has spent more than $100,000 in legal fees, she said. Supporters set up a Go Fund Me page for donations.
Siebern said she rejected two small settlement offers from the board of regents saying neither reflected what she had lost. It wouldn’t have covered the cost of a semester of classes to finish her degree, she said. And, if she hadn’t been fired, she would have been eligible for full retirement from the university this year.
It’s also a loss for the school, Siebern told Arizona Luminaria.
“Staff had the knowledge to help build it back,” she said of the College of Education. “But instead we were pushed out.”
Pima County Superior Court Judge Kyle Bryson said he would take under advisement the attorney’s arguments, with a ruling coming soon.
Editor’s note: Arizona Luminaria journalist Becky Pallack is an adjunct instructor at the University of Arizona.
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