On a warm weekend in September 2022, Obi Nwogwugwu sat high above the turf in a luxury box at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia as the Temple Owls football team battled the Rutgers Scarlet Knights.
The Temple University senior snacked on hors d’oeuvres and mingled with executives from Lincoln Financial and members of the National Association of Black Accountants. The event was a way to connect Black executives with Black student leaders at Temple.
The timing couldn’t have been better. It was Temple University’s homecoming and inauguration weekend for the university’s first Black president, Jason Wingard. Nwogwugwu, who is vice president of Temple’s Black Student Union, was excited to meet the new president. Soon, he got his chance. As Nwogwugwu made his way out of the stadium, he spotted Wingard and his wife, Gingi. The student leader introduced himself and asked if they could take a picture together. Wingard obliged. The picture eventually made its way onto Wingard’s social media.
The president’s inaugural weekend had been a glitzy affair. The kickoff event, two nights before the game, was a talk between Wingard and the Philadelphia-bred filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan. The two talked about film, media, and Wingard’s favorite topic: the future of work.
The next night, Tamron Hall, a Temple alum and television celebrity, hosted the investiture ceremony. The guest speaker was U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, Wingard’s former classmate at Stanford University, who said his presidential appointment was a watershed moment.
“I don’t know if I have seen any moment in American history where you have this kind of alignment,” said Booker, the New Jersey Democrat. “You have the right university, having the right president, at the right time.”
Now, less than two years later, Wingard is out of office, having resigned at the end of March.
No single factor undid his presidency, but, according to student leaders and faculty members, the combination of staunch disagreements over the academic direction of the university, two labor disputes, and rising concerns about safety imperiled his position. Wingard, who spent much of his first year trying to rebrand Temple, found himself in the middle of a maelstrom with few allies.
Wingard declined to respond to The Chronicle’s requests for comment. He had ascended to the job in July 2021, tasked with turning around the university’s fortunes. Temple’s undergraduate enrollment had declined more than 12 percent since 2017, a trend only sped up by the pandemic. Wingard had arrived from Columbia University, where he had overseen growing enrollment at the School of Professional Studies, which offers career-focused programs. He vowed to marry Temple’s curriculum with the demands of the job market. “Temple will lead the education revolution,” Wingard said during his inaugural address. “The future of work is disruption. The future of learning is change.”
Temple’s 12th president cast himself as a higher-education reformer, someone committed to making college a place less focused on pure scholarship and more concerned with training students for a new and often uncertain labor market. Comments like those drew the ire of faculty, many of whom still believed college should not merely be a place for job training.
“We need to prepare our students not just to succeed at work but also to succeed at life,” said Jeffrey Doshna, an associate professor of urban planning and president of the faculty union, the Temple Association of University Professionals.
Temple and Wingard faced yet another challenge in building back enrollment and strengthening the reputation of the university. The state-related research university sits in the heart of a low-income neighborhood plagued by violence. The year he took over Temple, the city recorded 562 homicides, the most in its history. The violence had begun to reach campus and in November 2021 claimed the life of Samuel Collington, a Temple student.
What really undid Wingard’s presidency, said one student leader, were the kinds of insurmountable political and social challenges that tend to sink university executives: “There is this idea they can snap their fingers and all this would be resolved.”
Black students like Nwogwugwu hoped Wingard would be a partner in reaching beyond Temple into the broader North Philadelphia community to confront the violence.
After taking selfies together on Wingard’s inaugural weekend, Nwogwugwu walked away believing he had an ally. “The pillar we stand on in opposing gun violence is something he also stood on,” Nwogwugwu said.
But as the violence that had besieged the area persisted, the Black Student Union and other groups organized peace rallies. Wingard, they said, ignored several requests to attend. He also failed to meet with the campus police and to satisfy their demands for additional staff to ensure public safety.
“He was not engaged with the day-to-day running of the university,” Doshna said. “It’s a lot of selfies and a lot of curated Instagram.”
Wingard’s supporters believe the criticism of him as overly brand-conscious is unfair. “He was hired to be a president who was public facing and concerned about branding,” Gianni Quattrocchi, Temple’s student-body president, told The Chronicle. “That’s why he was hired.” What really undid Wingard’s presidency, Quattrocchi said, were the kinds of insurmountable political and social challenges that tend to sink university executives: “There is this idea they can snap their fingers and all this would be resolved.”
Before he came to Temple, Wingard served as dean of the School of Professional Studies at Columbia University, which included a mix of graduate, certificate, and summer programs. During his leadership of the school, enrollment grew and the program became a cash machine. But there were questions about rigor and about the downsides of such speedy growth.
In 2017, when the professional-studies school created a wealth-management degree, Wingard drew the ire of the business and engineering schools, which had already established programs that included coursework in this area. The same year, and again in 2019, Wingard’s school was scrutinized by the Columbia University Senate, which raised concerns about the quality of its degree programs, specifically whether the coursework was sufficiently rigorous and whether its rapid expansion was damaging Columbia’s reputation.
At Columbia, he got to experiment with his vision in one school. At Temple, he could try it at scale.
He also made a name for himself at Columbia as an academic who was interested in how the classroom prepared students for the labor market. Higher education, he said, had to align itself with the skills needed in the workplace. It was an argument he would later lay out in his book The College Devaluation Crisis: Market Disruption, Diminishing ROI, and an Alternative Future of Learning.
Wingard believed that employers would begin to look beyond college degrees as the main signal of labor readiness and seek out workers who had a series of certifications and credentials. Colleges, he believed, needed to adapt or face decreasing relevance.
At Columbia, he got to experiment with his vision in one school. At Temple, he could try it at scale.
In July 2020, Temple president Richard M. Englert announced his intention to retire at the end of the next academic year. His announcement came less than two months after George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer. As protests ensued and smoke blotted out the sun and choked the air over several American cities, Philadelphia was not spared. Protesters set a fire under the statue of Frank Rizzo, the controversial former Philadelphia police commissioner and mayor who was seen as the embodiment of white supremacy in the city. In this context, the city’s largest university, nested in the largely Black and Latino neighborhoods of North Philadelphia, wanted a diverse pool of candidates in its search for a new president.
After some false starts, which faculty members attributed to the lack of diversity on the search committee, the process of replacing Englert began in earnest. The search was led by Mitchell Morgan, a Temple grad turned billionaire real-estate investor who became board chair in 2019. Mitchell had grown up in Philadelphia as the son of a small business owner. He earned a law degree but skipped a legal career in favor of building his own real-estate empire. According to faculty members, he wanted the university to run more like a business.
The university’s enrollment was already dipping. If Temple was going to turn that trend around, it needed, in Morgan’s estimation, someone who could help Temple deliver a product that students, about a third of whom came from lower-income backgrounds, could exchange for lucrative careers.
“Morgan said we are in the education business and the students are our customers,” Doshna told The Chronicle. “And if that’s your attitude, Jason Wingard is your choice.”
Despite Wingard’s emphasis on training students for the labor market, he initially had the support of many professors. “Part of what the faculty was excited about was we wanted the university’s first Black president to succeed,” Doshna said.
The goodwill didn’t last long. Wingard arrived at Temple in the summer of 2021. In an interview with student media shortly after he started the job, he laid out his priorities. A chief one was what he called the “career readiness agenda.”
“We want all of our students, including yourself, to be able to get the best job, whatever job you want and be a leader in industry and be a leader in whatever function you want to be in,” Wingard said. “And we have to make sure our curriculum matches that.”
That led to another goal: He wanted faculty members to re-evaluate their curriculum on an annual basis, which Doshna said ruffled professors.
During that 15-minute interview Wingard laid out other priorities for Temple. The institution was still recovering from the disruption of Covid-19, so he talked about masking policies and getting students back to campus, and about corporate partnerships and building the university’s athletic program.
What he didn’t mention was public safety.
Concerns around safety have long been on the minds of students, parents, and faculty and staff members at Temple. The campus sits at the epicenter of violent crime in Philadelphia. The university is on the eastern edge of the 22nd policing district in North Philadelphia, which accounted for nearly one out of every 10 of all the violent felonies in the city from 2020 to 2022. And as students move farther from campus, the question of how the university can help keep them safe has become more complicated.
The area has long been one that’s seen a lot of crime, said Jason Gravel, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Temple. “What happened in 2020 and 2021,” he said, “the levels of violence were rivaling numbers from the 1990s.”
Sam Collington brought home how salient the issue of violence and public safety really is.
The reality of how bad the violence had become in North Philadelphia didn’t really hit home for many at Temple until just after Thanksgiving 2021. That’s when Samuel Collington, a senior at Temple was shot and killed in an attempted robbery and carjacking. The fatal attack happened a few blocks north of campus, and it pierced the bubble students and faculty members often imagined they lived in.
“That’s when people realized something — they weren’t immune from the violence around us,” Quattrocchi, the student leader, said. “Sam Collington brought home how salient the issue of violence and public safety really is.”
In the wake of the shooting, Wingard formed a task force on gun violence, which brought together faculty members from the university and public-health experts to consider what Temple had already done about the problem and evaluate new strategies to combat it.
That message wasn’t well received in Philadelphia — especially by its police officers.
While Temple and North Philadelphia were facing their own issues with public safety, these struggles were playing out as part of a larger crisis involving the city’s leaders and the police. The surge in violence across the city started a war between Philadelphia’s district attorney, Larry Krasner, and the Philadelphia police union, the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 5. Krasner has advocated for lighter sentences for nonviolent crimes, including gun possession. The police union blamed Krasner for the increase in violence on the streets and went as far as paying for billboards on the freeway that read, “Help Wanted: New Philadelphia District Attorney. Please Contact FOP Lodge #5.”
After Collington’s killing, the labor union representing Temple’s campus police officers adopted a posture with Wingard that had shades of the battle between the police union and Krasner. The Temple University Police Association didn’t buy ad space on a billboard, but it took to Twitter. It demanded more cops and tried to bait Wingard into social-media fights. And those provocations worsened over Wingard’s tenure.
“Dr. Wingard,” the police association tweeted. “If Campus Safety is truly Temples [sic] #1 priority, we would again request you reconsider your decision not to meet with us. A genuine conversation, without cameras and reporters, would be a great step in the right direction!”
And then, later in the same thread, the association continued:
“We had to quote tweet this because Dr. Wingard is hiding reply’s [sic] on this public platform so people can’t see what’s actually going on. Not very transparent or professional.”
Students and faculty pressed for more police officers, too. In response, Wingard promised a 50-percent increase in the number of officers at Temple, and vowed to hire them in “days and weeks” after Collington’s death. A year later, the Temple police force had decreased from 169 to 155, according to the university.
On the evening of the homecoming game, Nwogwugwu may have been excited to meet the new president in person, but Wingard was already fighting enemies on multiple fronts. Temple’s campus police department wanted more staff, the faculty was rattled by his demands to alter their curriculum, and Collington’s death stoked the fears of students and parents, who were worried that the neighborhood around Temple was unsafe. The weekend after homecoming, two men fired nearly 50 rounds at a moving vehicle, injuring a child and a young man. One of the bullets struck the window of a dormitory where Nwogwugwu is a resident adviser.
The demands for Wingard to be more vocal about public safety grew. The Black Student Union, the Progressive NAACP (Temple University’s student chapter of the civil-rights organization), and the Philadelphia Police Department held a rally against gun violence two weeks after the shooting. When Wingard didn’t attend, Nwogwugwu felt let down.
“I don’t know how much students expect from their presidents. But he was not seen,” Nwogwugwu said. “It’s disheartening to see a Black president not engaging with his Black student organization.”
The following weekend, the Temple University Police Association participated in another peace march. Again, Wingard wasn’t there, according to the union. Eventually, said members of the campus police and others interviewed by The Chronicle , Wingard stopped engaging with the police entirely.
It’s disheartening to see a Black president not engaging with his Black student organization.
In early 2023, Wingard faced yet another challenge. Temple’s graduate students went on strike on January 31, as contract talks broke down. In a widely criticized move, Wingard and the administration responded by cutting off health benefits and tuition assistance to graduate students.
A few weeks later, on the night of February 18, Christopher Fitzgerald, a Temple police officer, was in his patrol car when he saw three teenagers in dark clothes and masks. There had been a series of robberies in the area, so Fitzgerald decided to investigate. He got out of his car and the teenagers fled. Fitzgerald called for backup as he chased one of the teens on foot. When Fitzgerald caught up with an 18-year-old from the nearby suburb of Buckingham Township, a struggle ensued, and the young man shot and killed the officer, prosecutors say. Fitzgerald, who four months prior had marched alongside students and community leaders calling for an end to gun violence, was killed not far from campus. The calls for more cops turned into calls for Wingard to resign.
“Temple was reeling from that shooting and the spotlight was on them, and they are not used to this kind of press,” said Gravel, the criminal-justice professor. The confluence of crises proved too much for Wingard’s presidency. “It was clear that when he came to Temple, he was dealt a pretty bad set of cards.”
In March, the faculty was preparing a no-confidence vote. “The public-safety challenges in Philadelphia are substantial, but they are part of a national problem. No one should assume that a university president can solve the public-safety issues himself,” Doshna said. “However, the reason we moved forward on the no confidence had little to do with the public-safety issues.”
Wingard resigned on March 31. In a statement at the time, Morgan, the board chair, thanked Wingard for “developing and executing a strategy to enhance the value proposition, reputation, and external profile of the university.” He also looked ahead, adding that “the university will benefit from the strategies and initiatives launched by Dr. Wingard, in the years to come.”
High among the urgent matters that the university would tackle? Public safety, Morgan said.
Wingard was replaced by an acting president, JoAnn A. Epps, a Black woman, on April 11.
Morgan declined to comment to The Chronicle on Wingard’s tenure at Temple. His office said it is not standard practice to comment on personnel matters. In an emailed statement, the board chair said Temple was “grateful that JoAnne Epps has taken the helm and is leading Temple University during this time of hope and transformation.”
“Together we are focused on developing and identifying opportunities to solve key challenges,” Morgan added.
On April 25, the faculty union delivered a vote of no-confidence against Morgan and Provost Gregory Mandel.
Ultimately, most of Wingard’s critics agree that his tenure was cut short because he appeared uninterested in the day-to-day management of the university, like attending to labor disputes and public safety. He was preoccupied with Temple’s brand.
“It wasn’t a surprise especially after what happened with the strike. You had parents complaining, you had the bureaucracy complaining, you had graduate students complaining,” Nwogwugwu said. “That could have happened in every presidency, but the fact that all those things happened in his presidency didn’t help.”
