Cummings-Martin turned Alumni Affairs around and fixed its
broken relationship with the FAMU National Alumni Association (NAA). She and
her staffers provided critical services such as managing financial transactions,
processing memberships, and helping to coordinate NAA elections.
But it looks like the Office of Alumni Affairs is being politicized all over again by the current FAMU administration.
FAMU President Elmira Mangum has never gotten along well with the current NAA leadership. The NAA Executive Board urged the FAMU Board of Trustees to consider then-Interim President Larry Robinson for the permanent presidency during the 2014 presidential search instead of endorsing Mangum’s candidacy. It also passed a “no confidence” vote in her first athletic director, Kellen Winslow, who later resigned.
Since that time, Mangum has begun to make a number of big changes
to Alumni Affairs. She hired John Michael Lee for a new $130,000 “assistant
vice-president for alumni affairs and university relations” job earlier this
year. An April press release called him the “New Head of Alumni Affairs.”
The decision to choose Lee as the “New Head of Alumni
Affairs” was suspicious because one of the most important jobs for any
university’s top alumni affairs official is communication. Cummings-Martin is a
former news anchor who proved that she was one of the best communicators in the
city of Tallahassee. But Lee’s poor writing recently became the subject of a
discussion at a FAMU Board of Trustees (BOT) meeting.
At a June BOT committee meeting, Chairman Rufus Montgomery
said that he was baffled by the writing problems that he saw in a November 8, 2014
email from Lee despite the fact that Lee has a Ph.D. degree. The email from Lee
criticized a number of actions that the BOT had taken.
“It just baffles me why a person takes this type of umbrage
with the Board of Trustees but doesn’t get their spelling correct or their
grammar correct,” the chairman said. “I mean he lectures us here, talks about
protocol, talks about petty politics, and questions: I’d like to caution the
Board, can’t spell ‘legislature’ or ‘statutes.’”
The rift between Mangum and the NAA leadership has continued
to grow. Back in July, NAA President Tommy Mitchell expressed the concerns that
many alumni had about Mangum’s support of a decision to shift the $12,996,539
core operating budget of the College of Engineering (COE) from FAMU to Florida
State University. The NAA later declined an invitation to join a group of state
lawmakers who held a press conference to request the resignation of the current FAMU BOT
chairman, who is a big critic of Mangum.
The Mangum administration has now started making even more
dramatic changes to Alumni Affairs that Mitchell says are harmful to the
NAA. The university recently laid off Regina Gardner, assistant director of
accounting, and Brandon Hill, coordinator of alumni engagement and membership
services.
Mitchell said that Gardner and Hill carried out “duties that
are crucial to the FAMU NAA accomplishing its mission and goals for this
academic year with success” and added that the position cuts were “an
unwarranted setback for Florida A&M University’s greatest arm of support.”
Mangum affirmed her support of those layoffs in a letter she
sent to Mitchell on September 18.
The decision to hire Lee to be the “New Head of Alumni
Affairs” and give him a higher rank in the division than Cummings-Martin was
already a big insult. But now the Mangum administration has taken it even further
by getting rid of two of Cummings-Martin’s essential staffers while keeping the
useless $130,000 position for Lee, who was one of Mangum’s most vocal defenders
before he was hired.
The unprofessional treatment of Cummings-Martin appears to
be a result of what looks like an increasingly politicized battle that Mangum
is waging against the current FAMU National Alumni Association leadership.