Earlier that week, Athletic Director Kellen Winslow, Sr. had
angered many FAMU students with a set of comments he made to a group of
football players who visited him to express their disagreement with his decision
to terminate Head Coach Earl Holmes.
Winslow tried to shoo them away by saying “Don’t y’all have
a book to read?”
The student booing went on for several minutes more as
Winslow and Mangum stared back with confused looks on their faces. Mangum
finally calmed things down by going to the podium asking the students to let them continue the
program.
Winslow resigned that December, but condescending attitudes
toward students have remained a problem in the Mangum administration.
Valerie D. White, a FAMU associate professor of journalism,
recently took Mangum to task for “bullying” the campus student newspaper. She
said that the administration gave The FAMUan newspaper “a directive” to publish an open letter from Mangum after Editor-in-Chief Reggie Mizell wrote an opinion
column that criticized the president.
“The letter was sent to The Famuan with a directive to
publish it. That is not how this works. It is bullying, the same action Mangum
accuses the board of trustees of doing,” White wrote in an opinion column for
the student newspaper.
Back in 2014, it looked like the hiring of Winslow might
have just been a first-year mistake made by a president who had very little administrative experience related to athletics. But now it looks like Mangum probably
appointed Winslow because he shared much of her same way of thinking, especially when it
comes to how FAMU students deserve to be treated.