Joyner recommended confirming Carter after he publicly mocked FAMU alumni lawmakers

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Florida Senate Minority Leader Arthenia Joyner voted to recommend the confirmation of Matt Carter to the FAMU Board of Trustees (BOT) last month despite his previous decision to publicly mock the FAMU alumni in the state legislature.

At the February 8, 2016 meeting of the Florida Senate Higher Education Committee, Joyner personally asked that Carter receive a favorable recommendation for confirmation.

“I’d like to move for confirmation of Mr. Carter,” she said.

The committee then unanimously approved Joyner’s motion. Carter, an appointee of Gov. Rick Scott, was later confirmed by the full Florida Senate for a term that ends on January 6, 2018.

Joyner has been one of FAMU President Elmira Mangum’s biggest supporters ever since she was hired in 2014. But when Carter was a member of the Florida Board of Governors (BOG), he responded negatively to Joyner and the other FAMU alumni lawmakers who asked the BOG to intervene to help Mangum.

Back in June, the BOG said that it would review the claims from a group of alumni in the legislature that included Joyner who said that then-FAMU BOT Chairman Rufus Montgomery’s treatment of Mangum has been “bordering dangerously close to bullying.”

The tension between Rufus and Mangum continued to increase in the weeks after the lawmakers took their concerns to the BOG.  On August 17, Mangum accused Rufus of violating her “employee rights according to University Regulation 10.103(3b) -Nondiscrimination Policy and Harassment Procedures.” She later told the Florida Times-Union that she thought Rufus was working toward the goal of firing her.

But Carter downplayed the seriousness of the problem. He told a reporter that “I don’t think the relationship is broken.”

A relationship between a president and a BOT chairman can’t get any more broken than when the president says she thinks the chairman is violating her employee rights and is trying to fire her. 

Carter went as far as to make sarcastic statements about the group of FAMU alumni in elected offices that called for Rufus to be removed as the FAMU BOT chairman on August 20. The group included Joyner, Rep. Alan Williams, Sen. Dwight Bullard, Rep. Mia Jones, Rep. Shevrin Jones, and Rep. Bobby Powell and Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum.

According to the Tallahassee Democrat, he “said ‘a limited group of outsiders’ who last week called for trustee chairman Rufus Montgomery to step down need to let FAMU officials handle their own issues without interference.”

The article went on to state that Carter said “the mayor should be reducing my taxes in Tallahassee, and let the people with responsibility for leading FAMU lead FAMU.” It added that: “He also said the legislators should have been focusing their attention on redistricting maps, an urgent matter for the state.”

An article by the News Service of Florida also reported that: “As to the role of the state university system in the FAMU leadership dispute, Carter said he didn’t think mediation by the Board of Governors was necessary.”

There’s already talk in Tallahassee that moving Carter from the BOG to FAMU is part of an effort to fast-track him into the FAMU chairmanship in time for a likely presidential search in the upcoming months. June 30, 2016 is the deadline for a discussion on whether Mangum’s employment will be renewed.

Carter’s former colleagues on the BOG can create a vacancy in the FAMU chairmanship as soon as they get ready. Current Chairman Cleve Warren’s term expired more than a year ago on January 6, 2015.

View the video of Joyner’s motion to confirm Carter here (beginning at 4:35).

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