As Georgia’s attorney general, Sam Olens has incurred the wrath of gay-rights advocates for opposing same-sex marriage and resisting a federal requirement that transgender students at public schools have access to bathrooms that match their identity. When he becomes president of Kennesaw State University next week, he will be leaving his old job, but not the controversy that came with it.
Mr. Olens can expect a chilly reception from many on the campus, stemming from his political background, his lack of academic experience, and how the University System of Georgia named him to his new post. The system appointed him with little advance notice, no significant faculty input, and no formal search.
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As Georgia’s attorney general, Sam Olens has incurred the wrath of gay-rights advocates for opposing same-sex marriage and resisting a federal requirement that transgender students at public schools have access to bathrooms that match their identity. When he becomes president of Kennesaw State University next week, he will be leaving his old job, but not the controversy that came with it.
Mr. Olens can expect a chilly reception from many on the campus, stemming from his political background, his lack of academic experience, and how the University System of Georgia named him to his new post. The system appointed him with little advance notice, no significant faculty input, and no formal search.
Faculty members and students already have expressed opposition to his appointment through protests, angry letters, and petitions. On Monday three Kennesaw State faculty members who don’t want him there unveiled a novel tactic: federal complaints of employment discrimination tied to the university system’s failure to consider anyone but a white man for the job.
The three women who filed the complaints, with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, had sought to become Kennesaw’s new president when Mr. Olens’s appointment loomed as imminent, and they said in a statement issued on Monday that their applications had never drawn a response.
It would not be a huge leap to conclude that the position required one to be male, white, and closely connected to Georgia’s political elite.
The system filled the position without advertising the job and its minimum qualifications, the statement said. One of the three women, Valerie A. Dibble, a professor of art, said, “It would not be a huge leap to conclude that the position required one to be male, white, and closely connected to Georgia’s political elite.”
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Some faculty advocates at other colleges around the state are seeking to make the fight against Mr. Olens’s appointment a national cause, to combat what they see as the widespread erosion of college faculties’ role in presidential searches and other aspects of shared governance.
“We are drawing a line in the sand,” said Robert M. Scott, a lecturer in mathematics at Augusta University and president of the Georgia conference of the American Association of University Professors. His conference is preparing to ask the national AAUP to investigate whether Kennesaw State deserves to be sanctioned for alleged violations of principles of shared governance in the selection of Mr. Olens.
University-system officials have defended their decisions in statements that note Mr. Olens’s past experience on the Board of Commissioners for Cobb County, where Kennesaw State is located. In a statement issued on October 12, immediately after the system’s Board of Regents overwhelmingly approved Mr. Olens’s appointment, Kessel Stelling Jr., the board’s chairman, said Mr. Olens’s background in public service and leadership “make him the right person to lead Kennesaw State University at the right time.” Henry M. (Hank) Huckaby, the system’s chancellor, praised Mr. Olens as “a proven consensus builder.”
For his part, Mr. Olens has sought to reassure those who objected to his appointment based on his past stands on social issues. In an email sent to Kennesaw State’s faculty, students, and staff the day after the regents voted on him, he said, “As president, I strongly believe in mutual respect, open communication, and tolerance.”
Unusual Experience
Mr. Olens, Chancellor Huckaby, and members of its governing board this month declined Chronicle requests for interviews about Mr. Olens’s appointment, which the system carried out with almost no public discussion.
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The Georgia university system’s policies require that any search for a university president involve faculty members and other key university constituencies, but the policies also leave the system the option of filling a presidency without any search at all.
“We need to fix that,” argued Mr. Scott of the Georgia AAUP conference, who said his group hopes, at the very least, to pressure the Georgia board to change its policies to preclude searchless presidential appointments in the future.
Although the Georgia board has skipped searches in naming the presidents of several other institutions in its 29-college system, those decisions have not been nearly as controversial as the one involving Kennesaw State. In those other cases, the presidents named without a search generally either had been serving in that position in an interim capacity or already held other high-level titles, such as provost, in the institution’s administration.
They appeared to be thumbing their nose at the normal process.
Nationally, it is “exceedingly rare to have a presidential appointment without a search of any kind,” said Hans-Joerg Tiede, a senior program officer in the AAUP’s department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance. Although the AAUP had discouraged the Georgia system’s regents from picking Mr. Olens without a search, it has not yet declared any intent to respond now that the board has approved him.
Mr. Tiede said his organization remains concerned that the Georgia system almost completely excluded faculty input from the selection process and appeared to ignore the AAUP’s advice “that university presidents should have significant experience in educational matters.”
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Mr. Scott, of the state AAUP, said that “they appeared to be thumbing their nose at the normal process.”
Community Concerns
Kennesaw State, based in Kennesaw, in Atlanta’s northwestern suburbs, ranks as the third-largest institution in the Georgia system, with more than 33,000 students. It has grown rapidly in recent years, especially after gaining a second campus, in Marietta, through its consolidation last year with Southern Polytechnic State University. It also has recently suffered leadership trouble.
Just weeks after its previous president, Daniel S. Papp, announced he intended to retire, at the end of June, a university-system audit found that he had violated system policies dealing with deferred compensation, annual leave payments, and automobile allowances.
Rumors began circulating last summer that Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican, planned to urge the gubernatorially appointed regents to name Mr. Olens as Kennesaw State’s new leader, thus giving himself the opportunity to appoint a new attorney general, who could be in office for two years before standing for election.
Such a job switch was expected to give a major pay bump to Mr. Olens, who had been earning nearly $140,000 as attorney general. Mr. Papp’s annual compensation as Kennesaw State’s president had exceeded $300,000. Kennesaw State’s Faculty Senate called for the presidency to be filled through a national search with faculty involvement.
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Mr. Olens, who is 59, declared his interest in Kennesaw State’s presidency in a letter to Chancellor Huckaby in late September. He pledged to bring to the job “strategic relationships, deep community ties, and a deep understanding of the broader context in which KSU exists.”
In an October 3 message to Kennesaw’s faculty, staff, and students, Chancellor Huckaby said he initially planned to conduct a national search to find Kennesaw State’s next president, but, “through sincere and earnest conversations with Mr. Olens,” now believed “he should be considered at this time.”
A student-organized petition protested that the selection of Mr. Olens would be “one huge step backwards” for a university that “has become increasingly accepting of LGBTQ students.”
Just before its vote on Mr. Olens, the Board of Regents heard from a single faculty member, Humayun Zafar, an associate professor of information security and assurance at Kennesaw State and the Faculty Senate’s president. In urging the board to delay its vote, he said Kennesaw’s faculty “believes its voice has been ignored,” and he warned that perceptions of political interference related to the appointment could endanger Kennesaw State’s accreditation and hinder its efforts to recruit faculty members and future presidents.
In an interview conducted last week via email, Mr. Zafar said he had met with Mr. Olens and received assurances from him that his stands on gay-rights issues had reflected his obligation to represent the state as attorney general, and not his personal views. “It will just take time for him to understand and work through some of the concerns individual constituencies may have, and vice versa,” Mr. Zafar said.
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Such optimism was not shared by Elizabeth M. Boyd, an assistant professor of management at Kennesaw State who responded to Mr. Olens’s appointment by announcing her resignation from a presidentially appointed university commission on gender and work-life issues. “I don’t trust him,” she said.
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
Peter Schmidt was a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He covered affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. He is a co-author of The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America (The New Press, 2020).