A University of North Florida professor is under fire from some of the school’s students as he faces a misdemeanor battery charge after a contractor was attacked at the educator’s Queen’s Harbour home.
Tayeb Giuma, an associate professor of engineering at UNF since 1987, had a pretrial hearing Tuesday in Duval County Court. It was continued to Feb. 2. He has pleaded not guilty.

Guima, 56, was charged after a Sept. 25 Jacksonville police report said a contractor was attacked at Giuma’s home in Queen’s Harbour, a gated subdivision just west of the Intracoastal Waterway off of Atlantic Boulevard.

Police said contractor Dustin Brown was beaten with an 8-foot piece of lumber about noon that day. Brown, owner of All True Construction, was at Giuma’s house finishing work on a gazebo the professor asked to be built. The attack followed an argument over the cost of the work, the police report says.

“I couldn’t believe it was actually happening. I had known the guy for about a year,” Brown said Wednesday. “It wasn’t a big job; it only took us a day to do.”

Brown said the cost for labor and materials amounted to $3,200, which Giuma didn’t want to pay.

“The adrenaline was going, so I didn’t feel it [the lumber blow],” Brown said “The next two or three days, there was a bruise and there was pain there.”

Brown called for help from one of his employees, Travis Garrett.

“[Brown] wrestled him to the ground until the police were on their way. … Dustin is not violent in any type of way,” Garrett said this week.

Garrett called 911 and summoned police to the scene. When police asked Giuma what happened, he denied any attack, the report says.

But Brown told police there was a security video camera at a house next door to Giuma’s home. Police looked at the hazy video, which shows a man hitting another man in the back with lumber, then arrested the professor.

Giuma did not return two messages left on his voice mail this week.

UNF has placed Giuma on administrative leave but disciplinary action should go further, according to some students.

The UNF Spinnaker, the campus student newspaper, has been aggressively covering the Giuma case and the editorial staff in November called for the professor’s firing.

“Giuma’s actions are repugnant and far beyond the pale,” said a Nov. 21 Spinnaker editorial. “He should be dismissed immediately.”

UNF spokeswoman Sharon Ashton said this week the school’s General Counsel’s Office and Academic Affairs Division are investigating. She said the university was unaware of Giuma’s arrests prior to the September incident.

Ashton said the university is sensitive to the criticism within its own community.

“We’re always concerned about what the student body thinks, what the community thinks, what our faculty think, what visitors to our campus think. These are all things that play into what goes through our minds,” she said.

Beyond the misdemeanor battery charge, Giuma has arrests dating back to 1999, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

He’s been arrested about a half-dozen times on various criminal charges. His most recent arrest before the September incident involved a theft from a store; the charge was settled in November 2008. While the Duval County Court withheld judgment, Giuma was ordered to pay $283 in court costs after pleading no contest to the misdemeanor.

The previous arrests coupled with the battery charge prompted the Spinnaker staff to question the university’s administration for keeping Giuma employed.

The Giuma allegations “raise serious questions about his fitness to teach, just as it places the competence of the administration’s policies in doubt,” said the Spinnaker editorial.

Regardless of the pressure, Ashton said the university will review Giuma’s case before deciding what to do next.

“We have an obligation to make sure we do a thorough and complete investigation. And if it takes longer than some people are comfortable with, then I apologize for that,” said Ashton. “We owe it to a long-term employee to make sure that we have all of the facts in front of us as we go through this investigation.”