A hearing was held Friday to determine if UF improperly laid off Andrea Pham, assistant professor of Vietnamese language and linguistics.
A decision on Friday's hearing should be reached within 60 days.
Pham was one of eight faculty members and 65 staff given layoff notices after last year's $47 million budget cut.
Pham and two others, Czech language and linguistics assistant professor Hana Filip and Swahili language and literature lecturer Rose Lugano, filed grievances with UF after they were given layoff notices, said Angel Kwolek-Folland, UF's assistant provost.
Pham's grievance is the only one that has reached the point of arbitration, which is the third and final stage of the process.
The grievances filed by Filip and Lugano are currently in the second stage and could be resolved before arbitration, Kwolek-Folland said.
Of seven laid-off faculty members in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, which had to cut about $6 million, all were foreign-born and six were women.
But Pham's attorney, Tom Brooks, dropped a discrimination charge early in Friday's hearing.
After the hearing, Pham said that she has filed a discrimination complaint with the Florida Commission on Human Relations, which is better suited to hear those charges.
Her attorney instead argued that UF broke its contract with the United Faculty of Florida, the faculty union.
Under the contract, Brooks argued, UF could only eliminate certain organizational units, like departments or programs, and the two Vietnamese courses Pham teaches that are being cut did not constitute a proper organizational unit.
Brooks also argued that there were others in Pham's department with less experience.
Pham, a tenure-track professor who is in her seventh year at UF, is scheduled to lose her job on June 10. She said she likes UF and hopes she's allowed to stay and attain tenure.
"That's what I'm fighting for," she said.
