Troubled times at A&T
This week's column:
Two years ago, N.C. A&T's Board of Trustees giddily christened a new classroom building with the name of the university's then-sitting chancellor, James C. Renick.
Last week that same board abruptly unnamed the yet-to-be-completed structure, citing a violation of policy in its earlier decision.
Yeah, right.
At the time, the sign in front of the building's steel-girder framework off Benbow Road still called it the "James C. Renick School of Education Building." A day later, someone had neatly taped over that phrase, as if censoring a string of cuss words or graffiti.
It was a sad, nasty turn in the slow unraveling of Renick's legacy.
And it was neither productive nor necessary.
"This was about personal politics, in my opinion," Steve Watson, a trustee who opposed the removal of Renick's name, said in a telephone interview last week from his Washington office. "I started hearing rumblings a few months ago."
This was the second debate of the naming issue, Watson said. The topic was tabled after the trustees had deadlocked during a previous discussion. But it obviously didn't go away.
By nearly all accounts, Renick had been considered a local hero when he left for a new job as a senior vice president at the American Council on Education in Washington.
Enrollment was booming at A&T. So was construction, with new brick-and-glass buildings sprouting like weeds. Plans were moving forward for a joint research campus with UNCG.
Among Aggie undergraduates, Renick was almost universally admired. Some students openly wept at the news he was leaving.
But in hindsight, Renick, whose energy and personality were magnetic, wasn't very good at sweating the small stuff.
A&T's interim chancellor, Lloyd V. Hackley, hadn't been on the job very long before he began "smelling some smoke." Behind the shiny veneer of A&T's new buildings and new attitude were serious fissures in the school's academic and administrative infrastructure.
• A former A&T vice chancellor was charged with embezzlement and obtaining property by false pretense.
• The nursing program struggled with high failure rates.
• Roughly one in four A&T undergraduates was on academic probation or suspension during the spring semester of 2007.
• The school's books were in enough disarray that a team from the UNC General Administration came to Greensboro to help untangle them.
"Most of the problems at the campus center around lack of internal control, lack of proper systems, lack of IT functionality, financial irregularities and the lack of control at its foundation," UNC system President Erskine Bowles told the Board of Governors in January.
As for Hackley, he said he had no involvement in the building-name discussion.
"As strange as it may appear," he said, "I try to stay out of that."
Hackley did however, cite "a lack of leadership powerful enough to hold this institution together," as the root of A&T's current problems.
He wouldn't elaborate, but his meaning was clear. Renick's imperfections have become more glaring with time.
Still, the snitty do-over was mean-spirited and hardly the best use of the trustees' time and energy. And it laid bare dueling factions and raw emotions at A&T.
Those factions include some people who weren't especially fond of Renick in the first place. They include the trustees, whose personalities and visions for A&T often clash.
And they include some on the campus who resented Hackley's role as a troubleshooter.
Hackley, a career military man and an ethicist, was brought in precisely to do that. Bowles empowered Hackley to run the university— not house-sit — until the new chancellor, Stanley Battle, arrives in July.
Hackley took that charge seriously, asking hard questions, speaking harsh truths, making some tough calls, and probably bruising a few egos along the way.
In a PowerPoint presentation designed for A&T's faculty and staff, Hackley observed: "Devolution to the condition we see at A&T required the involvement of ‘leaders' at various levels committing, omitting, or tolerating ineffective, inefficient, immoral, and unethical activities."
Said another slide: "Panderers and Liars have violated and smutted this great university."
Such brutal directness has won Hackley his share of critics. "His impact during his short stay here has been very negative," said Watson, the trustee board member.
But the advantage of having someone like Hackley in place was that he could put some things in order before Battle's arrival.
The slides noted, chapter and verse, the diminishing quality of A&T's admissions standards and what Hackley saw as A&T's fixation on a bigger enrollment because it would mean a bigger budget. They also suggested the school seemed more preoccupied with new buildings than better instruction.
Hackley recounted success stories at other historically black universities that have increased enrollment while raising standards.
Small wonder he made folks uncomfortable.
"People were attacking the data and me," he said. "They were saying that I was making things up — that the university was in good shape.
"It was startling to me how few people knew what I could find out in a heartbeat about the university."
As Hackley sees it, A&T faces an important crossroads.
It still has its share of success stories, he said. "This institution has some very, very high-level programs that are doing high-level work," he said. But that's not enough.
Hackley also said he has seen the mood at A&T shift slowly from denial to recommitment. "This is doable," he said. "We can come out of this morass."
Given the crucial role A&T plays in the Triad economy, "we" should include me and you, too.
And it should include A&T's trustees, who have much more important things to do than bicker over the names of buildings.
Correction: I inadvertently omitted a zero last week in retyping former High Point Mayor Arnold Koonce's nomination of Randleman Lake as one of the Triad's biggest hits in regionalism. The lake covers 6,000 acres.
Comments (3)
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When it comes to scamming vendor contracts etc. it's apparent that the A&T folks are bush-league pikers. Here's a prime example of people not using local resources to their fullest potential, since there are plenty of pros at all levels of GC government who could have helped these people avoid this embarrassing mess.
Posted on May 28, 2007 3:16 PM
Well, this is disappointing, to say the least. And I wonder at the people who decided to dislike Hackley, when it seems he's just speaking the truth -- stop the fraud, waste and abuse or face the consequences.
Posted on May 29, 2007 6:08 PM
Hackley's candor is nothing short of remarkable. Now we know. A&T desperately needed his kind of no-nonsense approach at this point.
Good thing Erksine Bowles charged him with leading and not babysitting during the interim.
Posted on May 29, 2007 6:16 PM