Diallo’s anger at Ammons misplaced

FAMU faculty member Mary B. Diallo made national headlines last week by criticizing President James H. Ammons’ decision to phase out the university’s French and Spanish degree programs. Due to budget cuts, the Department of Foreign Languages will no longer offer majors. Students will still be able take French and Spanish classes and earn minors in the subjects.

FAMU’s French and Spanish baccalaureate programs have only produced three graduates in the past seven years. Ammons has responded to the rapid decline in state funding by moving to close low-enrollment majors and shift more of the institution’s limited financial resources into high-enrollment majors.

There is nothing wrong with Diallo speaking up and being an advocate for her department. But she also needs to accept her fair share of the blame for creating the budget crisis that has forced Ammons to make tough restructuring changes across the university.


As FAMU’s Faculty Senate president and a member of the FAMU Board of Trustees in 2005, Diallo voted to hire an interim president who, by all measures of common sense, was not qualified to run a public, four-year university.

That interim president, Castell V. Bryant, immediately proved her lack of competence by killing the university’s recruitment program and sending FAMU’s student numbers into a nosedive. FAMU went from 13,070 students in Fall 2004 to only 11,567 students in Fall 2007. FAMU’s failure to meet its required student numbers led to multi-million dollar cuts in FAMU's state enrollment funding.

Because of Diallo and the other trustees who let Castell stop recruiting students, FAMU underwent big budget cuts two years before the national economic crisis began in 2007.

Diallo should ask herself how much more money would be available for small academic units like the Department of Foreign Languages if she had done her job as a trustee and made sure that Castell kept the enrollment numbers where they were supposed to be.

The faculty senators who re-elected Diallo to another two-year term in 2005 also made a poor call that made a bad situation worse. The Faculty Senate had an opportunity that year to replace Diallo with Pharmacy Professor Henry Lewis, III, who ran on a platform of holding Castell responsible for her actions. But instead, the Faculty Senate decided to give Diallo more time to continue protecting the anti-recruitment interim president.

Diallo and R.B. Holmes, Jr. are two examples of former trustees who seem to want Rattler Country to forget all about the multi-million dollar train wreck they started when they gave Castell control of FAMU. They have no business criticizing Ammons until they own up to their roles in creating FAMU’s current financial challenges.