2015: Lawson says Mangum refuses to trust anybody

Back in July of 2015, FAMU lost budget authority for the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering (COE) after 28 years. FAMU President Elmira Mangum supported the changes that led to this.

The next month, FAMU alumnus and former state Sen. Alfred “Al” Lawson told a reporter that he had offered his help to Mangum a number of times but she wasn’t interested in hearing what he had to say.

The News Service of Florida report stated that “Lawson said Mangum doesn't trust anyone.”

“I told her I wanted her to be successful,” Lawson said in a quote in the article. “I've been around for a long time, and I could keep her from running into roadblocks. … I was not trying to be hired or anything. I did that on three different occasions, and it did not work out.”

Lawson could have helped Mangum understand that the changes she agreed to for the COE without Board of Trustees approval were harmful if she had been willing to listen.

Lawson was a state representative back when FAMU President Frederick S. Humphries struck a deal with FSU President Bernie Sliger for FAMU to receive control of the COE budget in exchange for him agreeing to support Innovation Park as the building site for the COE. Lawson worked with FAMU alumna and state Sen. Carrie Meek, who was a role model for him, to move the annual appropriation for the COE into the FAMU general revenue line that year.

When Lawson became a state senator in 2000, Meek had already served eight years in the U.S. House of Representatives where she courageously battled with Speakers Newt Gingrich and Denny Hastert. As a Florida senator, Lawson continued the work Meek had done to keep control of the COE budget at FAMU. He led the way in stopping a 2007 legislative plan to move the COE fiscal agent duties from FAMU to FSU. Then-FSU President T.K. Wetherell said the plan would have let FSU make the management choices for the budget.

In May 2015, after the legislature created a new budget entity for the COE appropriation, a new Joint College of Engineering Governance Council decided that it was going to start calling the shots about what happens to the $12.9M COE budget instead of FAMU. This has made it possible for the FSU representatives and Board of Governors (BOG) Chancellor Marshall Criser, III to just outvote FAMU on budget decisions.

At a July 21 FAMU BOT committee meeting, Mangum tried to downplay the seriousness of the loss of the $12.9M COE budget by claiming that FAMU didn’t have control over that money during the years that those operating dollars were at the university. But Humphries came before the BOT on October 18 and said that FAMU did control the COE budget after the deal he struck in 1987.

FAMU could have held on to the budget authority for the COE if Mangum had listened to someone like Lawson who was successful in keeping that control at FAMU for decades.