Last week, the Chronicle posted two stories by Matthew Tresaugue reporting that Texas Southern’s board of regents was agitating to replace current interim president General J. Timothy Boddie with another interim president drawn from the board of regents.
Oddly, no substantive reason for the proposed change was forthcoming in either story. Rather, the stories just offered praise of General Boddie accompanied by vague assertions that another interim president would do a better job.
Here are the purported reasons for change in the first story:
State Rep. Garnet Coleman, a Houston Democrat, praised Boddie for getting “the tools” the university needs to move forward but said someone else should finish the job.
“The baton needs to be passed,” said Coleman, whose district includes the campus. “This is a different stage, and there is a need for someone to prepare the way for a permanent president.”
The next interim president, he said, must hire a strong chief academic officer, restore the confidence of students and their parents, and dig the university out of a financial hole created by the unauthorized construction of two new parking garages.
Actually, an informed and involved board of regents (NOT the interim president) should make that hiring decision and provide guidance. That’s how university governance usually works.
“General Boddie restored some credibility, but we need a different set of skills now,” Bledsoe said. “We need to give the new (permanent) president every chance to excel, and so we have to do some heavy lifting first.“
If General Boddie has done a good job restoring credibility, why not let him remain as the interim president while the board of regents conducts a search for a president who meets criteria set by the regents? Again, that’s how university governance usually works.
Here is a dissenting view in the same story:
“It’s not just unwise, but stupid to trade one interim for another,” [Rev. Bill] Lawson said. “It sends a sign of internal conflict. It’s best for the university to maintain constancy until a permanent replacement can be found. Right now TSU is very vulnerable.”
Boddie’s military-style leadership may have rubbed some people the wrong way, Lawson said, but he viewed it as firm.
“General Boddie was brought in to stabilize the school,” Lawson said. “He’s done that. … I don’t know what else it could be, but politics.”
By all accounts, General Boddie has been a fine interim president. If he has somehow failed to fulfill the vision of the board of regents, however, then that should be part of the discussion. Absent that, it just looks like more parochial bickering at TSU, which is exactly what the university does not need.
Tresaugue’s second story from last week offers no more enlightenment as to why (some) regents want to push Boddie out:
[Regents chair Glenn] Lewis has praised the performance of Boddie, a retired Air Force brigadier general who has led the chronically troubled university for nine months. But Lewis said a different set of skills may be needed to move the university forward now that Boddie has addressed the immediate problems exposed by the spending scandal that led to the ouster and indictment of former President Priscilla Slade.
Boddie came to campus “in an emergency situation, when the university needed stability,” Lewis said. “Now we want to take a few more steps toward a permanent presidency.”
How is appointing another interim president (with the learning curve that entails) a step toward a permanent presidency? Wouldn’t it be more of a step for the regents to lay out a vision for TSU and its next president, and to put their search for a new leader in high gear, instead of simply booting an interim president they praise and replacing him with one of their own?
From the outside, it looks more of the parochial politicking and bickering that has hurt TSU over the years, as Rev. Lawson suggested in the first story.
Unsurprisingly, the Chronicle‘s Editorial LiveJournalists found all of the vague, unsubstantiated assertions about booting General Boddie entirely convincing. From their Saturday editorial on the topic:
Actually, there are several sound reasons for new leadership at this time. The most important is that a change in management could place Texas Southern University on a path toward solutions to its chronic mismanagement and low graduation rate. With its house in order, it could build a reputation that would attract top students and faculty.
People familiar with TSU’s problems are careful to point out that no failure on Boddie’s part initiated discussion of replacing him. “He did an excellent job in a tough situation,” said state Rep. Garnet Coleman, whose district includes the university. “Now it’s time to clear the decks and get TSU ready for someone else (to fill the seat permanently).”
[snip]
A search committee developed a list of 12 candidates for the post. Of those, sources say, at least a handful are well-qualified people who might make a good fit for the university’s top job. Had TSU not been operating under its cloud of scandal, that pool of qualified candidates undoubtedly would have been larger. Apparently, enough stakeholders believe the candidate pool is too shallow and that it would be better to take time to attract more applicants.
And that’s where a new and impressive interim president could make the crucial difference. An effective interim would be a person who, as Coleman put it, could “clear the decks” — of the taint of scandal and the perception that many faculty members and administrators long ago should have been shown the door.
An “effective interim?” It looks as if this one wasn’t proofed very carefully. Nor does it seem that the matter at hand was considered very carefully. If General Boddie has done an excellent job on an interim basis, then why does he need to be replaced with another “interim” (as the Editorial LiveJournalists put it), an “interim” who would serve the university best by focusing on his current job as chair of the regents (i.e. crafting the regents’ vision for TSU and finding the right permanent president to execute that vision).
If someone can point to any solid reasons that General Boddie shouldn’t continue to serve as interim president while a search is conducted for his permanent replacement, it would be great if those became part of the conversation about TSU’s future. But the vague assertions from people who want to dump him — which apparently include the Editorial Board of the area’s newspaper of record — thus far haven’t been convincing.
