But now, a growing number of the FAMU faculty members who gave
their support to the vote to appoint Mangum that year are expressing
disappointment about the way she is treating FAMU professors.
Faculty Senate President and Board of Trustees member Bettye A. Grable gave Mangum a “Does
Not Meet Expectations” rating for eight of the ten questions in her presidential
evaluation. Some of her biggest criticisms were about a lack of shared
governance by the administration.
Grable wrote: “Although the establishment of the FAMU Sustainability Institute is laudable, the concern regarding this accomplishment is that the protocol expressed in the FAMU Constitution and By-Laws was not followed. Does the president plan not to follow agreed upon procedures in the creation of such entities?”
The FAMU Constitution and By-Laws calls for the Faculty Senate
to approve new Institutes at the university before they are created.
Grable also said that “the decision to move the [FAMU-FSU
College of Engineering’s] budget control to FSU was based on a unilateral
approval without the prior approval by the Board of Trustees and other
constituents.”
The Mangum administration has said that the switch that gave
the engineering budget to FSU and sent the line for the deanship to FAMU
needed to happen because it would help FAMU. But despite that claim, the FAMU
administration agreed to let a professor with tenure at FSU become the interim
dean of the COE. FAMU has a number of tenured professors who were qualified for the job. Mangum still hasn’t explained why a professor with tenure at FAMU
wasn’t chosen for the interim deanship.
Some trustees are now questioning whether the decision-making
process that Mangum used when she appointed Marcella David as the new vice-president for academic affairs showed
respect to the FAMU faculty who report to that position.
“I looked at the search process, and I’ll leave it alone, but
the search process for the provost, there were other people who had actually
been provost, not professors at law schools,” Board of Trustees Chairman Rufus
Montgomery said at a June 9 committee meeting. “I still don’t know to this day
how being an associate professor in a law school in Iowa qualifies you to be
the Chief Academic Officer at Florida A&M University. I just don’t get
that.”
Grable added that Mangum has not done enough to try and
communicate with the faculty. She said that Mangum “has attended 2 or 3
meetings of the Faculty Senate during the past year out of the nine (9) Faculty
Senate Meetings that were held and has not set up the constitutionally accepted
two (2) meetings per year with the full faculty.”
FAMU United Faculty of Florida Chapter President Elizabeth Davenport
told the Tallahassee Democrat last month that Mangum has been disrespectful to
professors at the university.
“I was 150 percent in agreement of the board of trustees
hiring Dr. Mangum,” Davenport told the newspaper. “But in the last year, she
has demonstrated a disrespect for faculty and faculty concerns.”
According to the Tallahassee Democrat, “Davenport said she
supported [a June 10] motion by trustee Kelvin Lawson to reprimand Mangum
because she feels Mangum has disassociated herself from the faculty.”
Lawson has said that he might make another motion to
reprimand Mangum when the Board of Trustees meets next week.