The saddest thing is that Lee has a small, but loud social
media following of gullible Rattlers-in-name-only who believe him.
On Monday, FAMU Interim President Larry Robinson terminated
Lee’s contract as a special assistant in the Office of the President. Lee
responded by putting his termination letter on display in an unofficial FAMU Alumni
Facebook page and then posting rants with conspiracy theories about recent events at the university.
Gov. Rick Scott and Florida Board of Governors (BOG) member
Alan Levine definitely aren’t friends of FAMU, but they weren’t the ones who
pushed for FAMU to lose budget control at the COE. Thrasher drove that goal and
Mangum’s assistance was one of the keys to his success.
Mangum started out as a strong advocate for FAMU in the COE.
She led the fight against a 2014 proposal by Thrasher, then a state senator, to
split the college in a way that would have harmed FAMU. She even had a legislative language and state funded study on her side.
But things changed after Mangum made the poor decision to
make an insulting statement about Scott in the Tallahassee Democrat shortly
before he was reelected and to initiate a petty scuffle over reimbursing FAMU trustee
travel to the 2015 gubernatorial Inaugural Prayer Breakfast held on campus.
Mangum, who appeared to know she was in hot water with the
governor’s office, started making efforts to placate Scott’s reelection campaign
chairman Thrasher, who had become president of FSU in 2014.
In February, she supported shifting the $12.9M COE
appropriation from the FAMU general revenue line to a new budget entity. Mangum
then went along with Thrasher in stating that a new Joint College of
Engineering Governance Council would call the shots on the COE operating
budget. That made it possible for the FSU representatives and BOG Chancellor
Marshall Criser, III to out-vote FAMU on budget decisions.
At a July 21, 2015 FAMU Board of Trustees (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 former President
Frederick S. Humphries came before the BOT in October 2015 and said that FAMU
did control the COE budget after he struck a deal with FSU President Bernie
Sliger in 1987. He said that the deal gave FAMU control of the budget in
exchange for him agreeing to support Innovation Park as the building site for
the COE. Humphries told the BOT that the deal was made final by the 1987
“Memorandum of Agreement.”
A press release by the Mangum administration had claimed
that FAMU would be “gaining the responsibility of selecting the dean” of the COE
as a result of the changes she backed. But that didn’t happen. The new dean was
jointly appointed by Mangum and Thrasher in compliance with the selection
process approved in 1987.
Those facts appear to be lost on Lee and the clueless
Facebook posters who look to him as their source of FAMU information because
they’re too lazy to find out what’s really happening.
Mangum showed that she was working for Thrasher’s interests,
not FAMU’s interests, in the COE. That was the breaking point that sent her
support among the leadership of the FAMU National Alumni Association into a
decline.
Lee and Mangum weren’t up to task of defending FAMU from
Thrasher, but now FAMU finally has a new administration that is dedicated to
battling attacks against the university.