‘This is nothing new’: Leadership woes imperil NC HBCU | Opinion

Here’s one way to know you’re getting old: When one of your college classmates becomes president of the college.

That revelation came unto me a decade ago when John Wilson, who was in Professor Lutton’s English class at Morehouse College at the same time as I, was named president of the school.

Prior to that, Wilson had served as President Obama’s HBCU czar, tasked with finding ways to ensure the continued existence of historically Black colleges and universities. At the time I spoke with him, I was working on a story about the problems facing one of our local HBCUs.

As the czar, he summed up the situation thusly: “Some of our HBCUs have issues.”

None, it seems, has had as many issues in recent years as St. Augustine’s University in Raleigh.

The school seemingly goes through presidents as frequently as the Carolina Panthers football team goes through head coaches.

Unlike the Panthers, St. Aug’s has no billion-dollar TV contract or deep-pocketed leader willing to fund it indefinitely.

That’s one reason St. Aug’s has lost its accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Without accreditation and the federal monies that would make it eligible for, the school’s very survival is imperiled.

But SACS didn’t sack St. Augustine’s merely for its precarious financial situation. On its website, SACS also cited “failure to comply with Core Requirement 4.1 (Governing board characteristics).”

From the outside looking in, it appears the only governing board characteristic is the board of trustees’ quick trigger finger when it comes to shooting down yet another leader.

Here’s a tip to St. Aug’s board of trustees: if all of the leaders you hire fail, you’re the problem.

It’s small consolation, but some HBCUs are not the only schools facing dire circumstances right now.

“It’s not just HBCUs” whose survival is in doubt, Dr. Belle Wheelan, president of SACS assured me when we spoke by phone recently, “but all small, private institutions that don’t have large endowments.”

Voluntarily giving up the ghost is not something that’ll happen at St. Augustine’s, Gilbert Knowles said.

“We’ve been here since 1867, and we’ll be here” through this latest crisis, Knowles said recently.

Knowles was president of the Student Government Association during my cameo appearance as a student on campus.

“After the shock” of finding out the school might be stripped of it accreditation, he said, “I went into survival mode… I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that we’ll survive this, and that St. Aug’s will flourish.”

Dr. Wheelan didn’t sound so sure when asked if St. Aug’s would survive this current predicament.

“That’s a good question,” she said. “I’m not sure… This is nothing new for them.” She noted that the school in recent years has received warnings from SACS and been placed on probation “for good cause… We haven’t had an audit from them in four years.”

Asked if the constant changing of leadership is a sign of instability, she replied “We would say so.”

When I spoke with John Wilson a decade ago, Shaw University’s board of trustees had just fired its president. Wilson said “I do not know enough about the situation at Shaw to comment, but I do feel comfortable saying… It’s never a good sign when a president stays one year. Never.”

St. Augustine’s University recently appointed Dr. Marcus Burgess, from Claflin College in South Carolina, as its interim president. Psst, Dr. B: Don’t buy any green bananas: you might not be around long enough for them to ripen.

Let’s hope the school is still around, too.

Editorial Board member Barry Saunders is founder of TheSaundersReport.com.