Condescending attitudes toward students a recurring problem in Mangum administration

Almost one year ago, hundreds of FAMU students booed President Elmira Mangum’s first permanent athletic director at the 2014 Homecoming Convocation following his disrespectful treatment of the football team.

Earlier that week, Athletic Director Kellen Winslow, Sr. had angered many FAMU students with a set of comments he made to a group of football players who visited him to express their disagreement with his decision to terminate Head Coach Earl Holmes.

Winslow tried to shoo them away by saying “Don’t y’all have a book to read?”

The football players did not attend the Homecoming Convocation, where Winslow was scheduled to introduce them. But students in attendance spoke out by booing him until they drowned out his voice on the microphone.

The student booing went on for several minutes more as Winslow and Mangum stared back with confused looks on their faces. Mangum finally calmed things down by going to the podium asking the students to let them continue the program.

Winslow resigned that December, but condescending attitudes toward students have remained a problem in the Mangum administration.

Valerie D. White, a FAMU associate professor of journalism, recently took Mangum to task for “bullying” the campus student newspaper. She said that the administration gave The FAMUan newspaper “a directive” to publish an open letter from Mangum after Editor-in-Chief Reggie Mizell wrote an opinion column that criticized the president.

“The letter was sent to The Famuan with a directive to publish it. That is not how this works. It is bullying, the same action Mangum accuses the board of trustees of doing,” White wrote in an opinion column for the student newspaper.

Back in 2014, it looked like the hiring of Winslow might have just been a first-year mistake made by a president who had very little administrative experience related to athletics. But now it looks like Mangum probably appointed Winslow because he shared much of her same way of thinking, especially when it comes to how FAMU students deserve to be treated.