Persaud, FAMU faculty senators, need to develop more self-respect

FAMU is not some for-profit diploma mill stuffed in a half-empty strip mall. It’s a multi-million dollar Carnegie Doctoral Research University.

One duty of the FAMU Faculty Senate is to guard the academic dignity of the school. That’s why the faculty senators must approve any candidate for an honorary degree. Honorary degrees are reserved for those who demonstrate the very best principles that research universities represent. If honorary degrees are awarded in a manner that is careless or driven by politics, then they become valueless sheets of paper.

So it’s difficult to even guess what was going through the minds of Narayan Persaud and his fellow faculty senators when they voted to grant ex-FAMU trustee Bill Jennings an honorary degree. Jennings’ long record of dismissing the concept of shared governance and looking the other way as problems that affected the faculty reached the crisis level should have disqualified him for such an award. But it looks like Persaud, the faculty senate president, and the majority of the faculty senators lacked the self-respect to vote down his candidacy.

Back in 2001, Jennings led the Presidential Search Committee charged with finding a successor to President Frederick S. Humphries. He quickly started talking down to the FAMU professors who believed they should have voting representation on the committee. At a town hall meeting on October 31, 2001, Jennings confirmed that that he told the Tallahassee Democrat that it would be “counter-productive” to appoint a faculty representative with full voting power to the BOT Presidential Search Committee. BOT Chairman Art Collins later selected Faculty Senate President Ada P. Burnette to serve as a voting member of the committee despite Jennings’ negative comments.

Jennings also continued to take a dismissive stand against shared governance while serving as vice-chairman of the board. When professors complained that Interim President Castell V. Bryant hired a provost and vice-president of research without any faculty input, Jennings showed no signs of caring.

There was little improvement in Jennings’ attitude toward faculty members after he was elected BOT chairman in 2007. He refused to summon Developmental Research School (DRS) Superintendent Ronald Holmes before the board to answer tough questions about what he had done to the K-12 program. Ronald’s failure to recruit enough students to satisfy the demands of the 2009-2010 year’s budget threatened nine teaching jobs before the senior administration dipped into university coffers to provide a $425,802 bailout for the school.

Many FAMUans openly wondered whether Jennings was trying to protect Ronald because his brother, R.B. Holmes, personally nominated Jennings for chairman in 2007 and 2009.

Jennings still hasn’t voiced any public regrets for any of those decisions.

The FAMU Faculty Senate has fallen asleep at the wheel numerous times since the creation of the Board of Trustees in 2001. It failed to fight aggressively against the under-the-table board politics that wrecked the 2002 presidential search, reelected a faculty senate president who voted for a 2004 interim president candidate who was not remotely qualified, and is now celebrating a former trustee who disrespected FAMU faculty members for years.

If FAMU professors don’t step up and demand that their representatives in the Faculty Senate get their acts together, then they’ll soon be living with the fallout of yet another broken FAMU presidential search process.