Their crime? The white trustees supported the black president of a historically black university (FAMU).

http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/talla...ey/9742888.htm

FAMU: a mishmash of loyalties

By Mary Ann Lindley

EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR


When Florida decided to govern its 11 public universities not with one big board of regents - which didn't have too much time to meddle in daily campus operations - but with a board of trustees for each, Florida A&M University was a sitting duck for change.

The university has operated with an exclusive mission and degree of privacy that no other public university in the state has ever enjoyed.

That private-school climate, with public funding, sounds pretty nice on the surface, but it allowed for a lot of unhappiness and created its own problems.

On campus, if things were wrong with anything from admissions to class registration to student loans, it was taboo to talk about them except among mutually annoyed friends and colleagues.

So things didn't get fixed - sometimes for years - and the rap on FAMU just grew, that it could be an utterly frustrating, impossible place to do business, to teach, to go to school.

One longtime employee there told me that FAMU was so cautious and insiderish that it didn't even want to let the good news get off campus. That secret.

Under the trustees system, however, FAMU is getting downright sunburned, so much light is now shining on the hill. Nor is any other university undergoing so much trauma by having its own board of trustees.

Just as this presidential election seems to be a time to relive and reckon with the 30-year-old wounds of Vietnam, the trustees board at FAMU - which has white members, meaning a white voice in leadership for the first time in its history - has become a venue for reliving old civil-rights grievances. A lot of the problem is generational.

I was disappointed and stunned that the publisher of the Capitol Outlook, a newspaper that speaks primarily to the minority community, recently stooped to inflammatory name-calling when he declared trustee Barney Bishop a "white missionary" because Bishop has been supportive of President Fred Gainous.

Support may be too strong. Bishop's just not been actively opposing the president, which several other board members lead by Chairman James Corbin are doing in a flurry of alumni-driven activity leading up to this Tuesday's board meeting. Bishop champions an orderly, timely and professional way of evaluating Gainous, and a board that is less hands-on. It meets about four times more often than any other board of trustees in the state.

Publisher Roosevelt Wilson is a good man, and was a warm-hearted teacher at A&M's journalism school by all accounts, but he's definitely stuck in the dark ages of civil rights. Younger alums and graduates who, to their good fortune, haven't suffered the professional, legal and even personal injustices that their grandparents did, tell me that they want FAMU to get past its patriarchal culture and out into the larger world where many are working in professional settings and raising families in progressive, middle- to upper-class neighborhoods.

Wilson, probably because of his own experiences, encourages suspicion of board members just because they're white. He's also down on them because they've won the appreciation of Gainous - who has said publicly that he's gotten more support from the white trustees than from black trustees.

I don't know whether Gainous can survive much longer as president, or if he should. Gainous hasn't been the hard-charging leader that FAMU probably needed to correct administrative problems and change attitudes.

But he deserves a methodical and orderly evaluation, which is due in December, rather than being run out of town on a rail without administrative due process.

I wonder if Wilson and others who want to see FAMU operate without the advice, interest or even the affection of whites have ever considered that the real racists out there, here, have been quite perversely happy to let FAMU sink or swim on its own. They didn't give a darn if the place was run ineffectively.

On the other hand, to invest hours, weeks and months of your life serving on the most unconventional, cantankerous and divisive leadership board imaginable sounds like cockeyed optimism to me. Or madness. But not racism, which is Wilson's unmistakable implication.

The way things are going at FAMU, you have to wonder what the ultimate goal of the board is. If it's to get rid of Gainous and that succeeds, what person in his or her right mind would want to become the next president?

FAMU is going through a lot of growing pains, and they affect different generations differently. The younger alums seem to want to benefit from getting problems out on the table, dealing with them and moving on. It's the old-timers who apparently think its safer to keep things hush-hush, with problems festering, and to play the race card as the last resort.

It's driving off, and driving crazy, people of good will who honestly would like to see FAMU move ahead for the good of the current and future generations.

Like the boomer bra burners I grew up with, these civil-rights warriors from the '60s need to lose some of the cynicism. FAMU is a public institution. It's time for it to act like one.

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Job 13:5 (New International Version)
If only you would be altogether silent! For you, that would be wisdom.