The names circulating as the possible “targeted” deans were
School of Architecture and Engineering Technology Dean Rodner B. Wright, School
of Business and Industry Dean Shawnta Friday-Stroud, College of Pharmacy and
Pharmaceutical Sciences Dean Michael D. Thompson, and School of Journalism and
Graphic Communication Dean Ann L. Wead Kimbrough.
There were legitimate reasons to believe that some dean
changes were needed. But the bigger question was whether the Mangum
administration could be trusted to treat deans fairly.
The abrupt resignations of College of Law Dean LeRoy Pernell
and FAMU-FSU College of Engineering (COE) Dean Yaw D. Yeboah in 2015 only added
to doubts about whether Mangum and David were committed to the fair treatment
of professors.
College of Law Dean LeRoy Pernell
Pernell served as the dean of the FAMU law school from 2008
until to June 2015. He led the college to full accreditation from the American
Bar Association in 2009 and full accreditation reaffirmation in 2014.
One of Pernell’s biggest contributions was the creation of
the Academic Success & Bar Preparation Program in 2009. The Bar Exam Success
Training program, a centerpiece of the initiative, helped FAMU’s first-try
passage rates on the Florida Bar dramatically improve over those six years.
After Pernell announced his resignation in 2015, questions
have swirled about whether he was pushed aside despite his strong performance
in order to make way for a replacement who would be less likely to stand firm
against harmful micromanagement.
Florida Bar Exam first-try passage rates took a nosedive
under Angela Felecia Epps, who became the new permanent dean on January 4,
2016. A total of 46.2 percent of the FAMU Law graduates who took the February
2017 Florida Bar Exam passed on their first try. That is the first time the
FAMU first-try passage rate has been below 50 percent since the college’s reopening
in 2002.
FAMU-FSU College of Engineering Dean Yaw D. Yeboah
Yaw Yeboah also stepped down from the COE deanship in 2015.
The announcement came amid a shakeup that handed FSU President John Thrasher
all the cards for deciding the future of the deanship.
Back in 2012, then-FAMU President James H. Ammons and FSU
President Eric Barron agreed to choose Yeboah to head the COE.
Ammons liked Yeboah’s proven commitment to historically
black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Yeboah had previously served as an associate
dean at Clark Atlanta University (CAU), an HBCU, and built an engineering
program there. He was also the technical director of the Research Center for
Science and Technology at CAU from 1995 to 2004. One of Yeboah’s
accomplishments at CAU was serving as the co-principal investigator for a
$498,966 National Science Foundation grant for a Computer Science, Engineering
and Mathematics Scholarship Program from 2000 to 2004.
Yeboah had emphasized the diversity component of the COE
mission during his short time as the dean beginning on July 1, 2012. He spoke
on a regular basis about the need to increase diversity at the college and in
professional engineering jobs. Yeboah was also advocating for more funds to help
bring the average salaries of FAMU engineering professors up to that of FSU
engineering professors.
The work for additional funding for FAMU engineering
professor salaries has continued since Yeboah left. But the new top focus of
the COE appears to be Thrasher’s goal of helping FSU become one of the top 25
public universities.
Less than three years after Yeboah started, a June 2015
press release said that he, as a professor with tenure at FSU, would step down
on July 31. Mangum agreed to jointly appoint an FSU associate dean as Yeboah’s
interim replacement. She then agreed to jointly appoint former FSU presidential
candidate J. Murray Gibson as the permanent dean on a FAMU tenure line.
At a July 21, 2015 FAMU BOT committee meeting, Mangum said
“our daily involvement in the College of Engineering will emanate from the
leadership position of Dean of the College of Engineering.” But if Gibson is
still working toward the goal of becoming the president of FSU, there’s little
chance that he will take any risks to help FAMU that might hurt his relationship
with the FSU BOT.
Yeboah’s exit from the deanship appears to have nothing to
do with how well he did his job and everything to do with the political dealings that cleared the way for Thrasher and the FSU BOT to take hold of the
direction of the COE.
The suspicious exits of Pernell and Yeboah hurt Mangum’s
credibility with many FAMU faculty and alumni. Job performance, not politics,
is supposed to be the basis for making decisions about deans.