Back when he tried to make Gov. Rick Scott happy by asking FAMU trustees to suspend the university president, Rufus Montgomery used a football comparison.“If the quarterback has thrown seven interceptions, you pull him from the game,” he told the Board of Trustees on December 8.
Rufus apparently took his own advice last Wednesday by voluntarily benching himself. After failing to get the job done for Scott, he didn’t even bother to show up or call in for the board’s presidential evaluation meeting.
So much for the Florida governor’s quarterback on the FAMU Board of Trustees.
Rufus made a big mistake on December 8 by assuming he actually had enough respect among the other trustees to be taken seriously. He turned off a number of board members during the first months after he received his appointment by bragging about how politically important he thinks he is.
To make things worse, Rufus’ ego would not let him see that he didn't even have the votes to get rid of President James H. Ammons. He only got Bill Jennings and Charles Langston to vocally support his motion to oust the president.
Rufus seemed to be counting on the support of Richard Dent, Karl White, and Torey Alston. He failed to understand that the three of them are in a much different position than Jennings and Langston. Jennings and Langston are retirees and do not have much to lose reputation-wise.
Dent and White are employed by big companies and have to be careful about how they represent their workplaces. Alston is running for the Broward County School Board and doesn’t want to turn the local FAMU alumni voters against him. None of them can afford to be pure political hacks like Rufus who just wait for GOP higher-ups to tell them what to do.
Seven days after Rufus dropped the ball, Scott finally went public to show that he was the real leader behind the push to remove Ammons from office. That led the governor to get a scolding from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and a weeks of negative headlines. All that embarrassment would have been avoided if Rufus had delivered a victory for the governor on December 8.
With all his fumbles at FAMU, it is no wonder that Rufus didn’t suit up to play last week.