Florida A & M University’s president came before the school’s trustees Tuesday for her first annual review.
Less than two weeks ago, HBCU Digest was lauding FAMU president Elmira Mangum as its female president of the year. Now Mangum is facing pretty stiff criticism from the school’s board of trustees.
“Relations with the board have to improve,” Trustee Kelvin Lawson says, summing up the mood around the table. He and many other trustees are upset about recent changes at the engineering school FAMU shares with Florida State University.
“The concern that I leave you all with to ponder is the process by which that decision was made, and the process by which you were informed,” Lawson concludes.
Trustee Bettye Grable echoes Lawson’s criticism saying Mangum should’ve done more to inform the board.
“I think just remembering shared governance, in my opinion, would’ve made it prudent for you to at least inform the board of some of the decisions regarding the engineering school,” Grabel says, “Just to be prudent.”
But some of the harshest words came from Board Chair Rufus Montgomery.
“On a scale of 1 to 100, when you fail four categories that gives you a 60 percent,” Montgomery says. “And it does need to be duly noted that our one employee did rate in this case. And so as we move forward I would suggest we move to requiring a performance improvement plan for Dr. Mangum that’s prescriptive and its’ over a defined period of time say maybe—maybe 90 days.”
The evaluation considered Mangum’s performance in 10 categories. Of the board’s twelve members, two—Spurgeon McWilliams and Robert Woody—gave Mangum the lowest rating in each category. The final tally says Mangum didn’t meet expectations in four categories: organizational management, internal relations, board and governance relations and personal characteristics. But Mangum strenuously defends her record point by point. Here she is talking about organizational management.
“I really believe that I’ve been highly effective in this area,” Mangum says, “and it is a little disappointing that building a team like the one that we have is not recognized by the majority of the board but it is recognized by my colleagues across the country.”
The full board make its final vote on the evaluation at its next hearing, but it appears that vote is merely a formality. Also at that meeting, some trustees seem likely to push for a specific improvement plan.
