Persaud battled against interests of FAMU faculty during search for 11th president

Narayan Persaud’s faculty senate presidency was much like Mary Diallo’s. He started out as a strong advocate for FAMU professors but later threw them under the bus as he sought personal power.

Back when she was the FAMU Faculty Senate president in 2004, Diallo voted to hire an interim president who, by all measures of common sense, was not qualified to run a public, four-year university. She threw her support behind Castell V. Bryant, the former president of the Miami-Dade Community College Medical Center Campus.

Diallo seemed to relish being a part of the new interim president’s “inner circle.” But she soon learned the hard way that it was all a sham and that Castell had little respect for her or any other member of the FAMU faculty.

Persaud defends Maupin, who effectively ended tenure system at Meharry Medical College

That cycle seemed to be on its way to repeating itself when Persaud was the faculty representative on the FAMU Board of Trustees (BOT) during the search for the 11th president.

Ahead of the application deadline, Rattler Nation learned that certain FAMU-associated individuals who were eager to please Gov. Rick Scott had passed an unofficial short list of presidential candidates up the ranks. It was said that Morehouse School of Medicine President John E. Maupin, Jr.’s name was on that list.

Maupin had gotten along well with the George W. Bush White House and his success in effectively eliminating the tenure system at Meharry Medical College also fit with the direction in which Scott is pushing public education in Florida. The Meharry Faculty Senate voted “no confidence” in Maupin in 2003.

Maupin formally applied for the presidency days after Rattler Nation ran a story about the unofficial short list.

Persaud should have led the fight against Maupin’s candidacy. But he actually voted to make Maupin a semifinalist. Persaud acknowledged Maupin’s past at Meharry, but tried to dismiss it as a non-issue with a long, rambling excuse that made little sense (like so many of Persaud’s other jumbled public statements).

It looked like Persaud might have thought he could get more personal power by possibly helping other trustees hand Maupin the keys to Lee Hall and then becoming part of the new presidential “inner circle.” But Maupin finally withdrew his application after real Rattlers who care about the school much more than Persaud does continued to raise the issue of Maupin’s poor treatment of the Meharry faculty.

BOT didn’t vote to bar Robinson from applying to be 11th president of FAMU

Yesterday, Persaud repeated the inaccurate claim that the BOT made a “decision to exclude [Larry Robinson] from applying to be permanent president” when it named him interim president in 2012.

The BOT NEVER adopted a policy that restricted Robinson from submitting an application to lead the school on a permanent basis.

Article 5.6 of the FAMU BOT operating procedures that were in place at that time said: “No business will be transacted without an affirmative vote of the Board, and a majority vote of all the members of the Board is required for establishing policy, for making rules and regulations, for appointing and removing the President, and for approving or terminating programs.”

The FAMU Board of Trustees NEVER voted to restrict Robinson from applying for or being considered for the permanent position. The minutes of the trustee meetings held on July 16, 2012 and August 15, 2012, which have been accepted by the full board, prove that fact.

No vote. No policy.

When he was appointed interim president in 2012, Robinson said that he wasn’t going to apply to apply for the permanent position and kept his word.

The BOT had the option to appoint Robinson to the permanent presidency without receiving an application from him, but it chose not to.

When Maupin withdrew, a number of the Scott cronies who had supported him made last-minute push to seat John Ellis Price. But trustees soon began to realize that his past disrespectful treatment of his University of North Texas at Denton faculty members would lead to an ugly public battle if they picked him. That had the potential to become an embarrassment for Scott during his 2014 reelection campaign.

So that led to Elmira Mangum getting the nod as a way to avoid the charge that the BOT had wasted thousands of taxpayer dollars on a presidential search that ended in failure.

Persaud worked against the interests of the FAMU faculty during the search for the 11th president. He is far from an example of the best in FAMU leadership.