U of A staffer alleges wrongful firing; ABOR says it was performance-related

But the Arizona Board of Regents, the defendant in the civil lawsuit because it oversees the UA, told a judge Monday that the staff member’s employment was terminated due to her “egregious” delays in fulfilling her duty to process payments to a student worker. 

Clarissa Siebern, a former business manager with UA’s College of Education, filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the Board of Regents in Pima County Superior Court in May 2025.

Siebern, who had been with the UA since 1997, was let go on Oct. 4, 2023, according to court documents. She had been a business manager with the College of Education’s Department of Disability and Psychoeducation Studies, which she joined in 2014.

An attorney for the Board of Regents, Betsy Lamm, asked Pima County Superior Court Judge Kyle Bryson at a hearing Monday to dismiss the lawsuit through summary judgment. Bryson said he was taking the matter under advisement and will issue a written decision.

At Monday's hearing, Robert Weeks, representing Siebern, alleged the university has given “shifting and contradictory explanations” for termination of her employment. Weeks told the judge there were no performance complaints in Siebern’s almost 20-year record at the UA, including the months leading up to her firing.

Weeks said former College of Education Dean Robert Berry, who made the final termination decision, had initially alleged in testimony that Siebern was let go due to payment delays for a student, but not the student in the initial allegation. However, after Siebern’s attorneys proved she had paid that second student months before, Berry’s testimony changed to completely exclude this student and only included the first student’s payment delays, Weeks alleged.

“So, ‘Student B’ went from being the determinative fact that made the dean decide to terminate Ms. Siebern, to suddenly being irrelevant to the decision that was made,” Weeks said at the Monday hearing downtown at Pima County Superior Court. It became “a decision that was made solely based on ‘Student A.’ These are two contrary explanations,” Weeks said.

Lamm countered that every individual who participated in the decision to terminate Siebern had testified consistently that the reason behind her termination was a four-month delay in paying the initial student they referenced.

Lamm said the student reached out to Siebern multiple times during the four months and received no response, and then had to involve Siebern’s superiors, including Berry, the former dean. Lamm also said witnesses for ABOR’s side alleged Siebern had a “seeming lack of sympathy” towards the student, who they said may have suffered financial hardships due to the payment delays.

Lamm also said that, if Siebern is to be considered a whistleblower, she needed to prove that the concerns she raised to Berry about alleged financial “mismanagement” in the education college were disclosures made to a “public body on a matter of public concern on issues that she believed to be wrongful conduct.” Lamm suggested there is a lack of public interest in the case.

Lamm said Siebern then had to prove her termination was direct retaliation for those disclosures, not just a substantial factor in her termination but the reason for it. She failed to do so, according to Lamm.

Weeks said there was a relation between Siebern’s whistleblowing and her “retaliatory” termination due to the proximity of the two events, time-wise.

Plaintiff’s emails

According to court documents, Siebern alleged financial “mismanagement” by the UA College of Education because staff members felt they weren’t getting paid for the workload they were shouldering, and many were threatening to quit due to the pay and workload conditions.

Siebern “was never complaining about her personal treatment,” said Weeks. “She was raising concerns about the ability of the department to continue functioning in the face of multiple resignations over this inadequate pay issue.”

In emails to administrators in the College of Education, Siebern said there were pending resignations that needed to be processed and that the “department and college cannot sustain these resignations.” She also said employees didn’t want to leave the department but felt they weren’t “being paid for the level of work that they do.”

“It’s clear from these quotes, that are in the plain language of her emails, Ms. Siebern was not raising concerns about her own on-the-job treatment or even her own pay,” said Weeks, who read out a few of the quotes in court. “She was raising concerns about other employees, many of whom were threatening to quit over their inadequate pay, and she was concerned that the department would no longer be able to function if all these people resigned in mass.”

The timeline

Court documents show Siebern’s termination took place a few months after she started raising concerns about staff pay and workloads with the college’s administration.

Prior to her termination, Siebern claims in the lawsuit, she was given “exclusively positive” performance reviews by her supervisor, who had also recommended her for a merit-based pay raise a few months before she was fired.

Siebern worked at the UA since the late 1990s, and "there was never one piece of evidence documenting any concern about her performance,” Weeks said Monday. “And then suddenly, with no warning or investigation, they terminated her.” 

However, Lamm told the judge that the head of the Department of Disability and Psychoeducational Studies, Carl Liaupsin, “repeatedly received complaints about Ms. Siebern and he addressed them with her in a collaborative way to solve the problems,” which still counts as “informal discipline.”