Years of negotiations by Friday-Stroud and her SBI team led to $5M Thompson gift

FAMU President Elmira Mangum had only been on the job less than five months when she announced on October 3, 2014 that the university had received the largest single financial gift in its history. John W. Thompson, an alumnus of the School of Business and Industry (SBI) and chairman of the Microsoft Corporation Board of Directors, agreed to give $5 million to FAMU.

Mangum has repeatedly called the gift one of the biggest accomplishments of her administration.

“It is this administration that secured the largest single gift in University history,” she told the FAMU Board of Trustees (BOT) in a memo on October 21, 2015.

A change.org petition that asks the BOT to grant Mangum a contract extension claims that “her leadership was also responsible for…an increase in fundraising from $3.3 Million to $5.7 million in 2015.”

But FAMU United Faculty of Florida President Elizabeth Davenport says the petition is wrong to give Mangum all of the credit for the $5 million Thompson gift. She said the petition ignores the years of hard work by SBI Dean Shawnta Friday-Stroud that made the historic achievement possible. 

“Giving sole credit to Mangum for raising $5.7 million in 2015 ignores the fact that $5 million came from years of negotiations between Dr. Shawnta Friday-Stroud and Microsoft Corporation Board Chair John Thompson, an alumnus who wanted give back to the School of Business and Industry from which he graduated,” Davenport wrote in an op-ed in the Tallahassee Democrat.

The $5M Thompson gift wasn’t secured in a mere five months by Mangum. It was the result of years of effort by Friday-Stroud and her team that followed the fundraising model of founding SBI Dean Sybil C. Mobley.