Right now, there’s only one thing people at Oregon State University think they know about F. King Alexander, and they don’t like it.
Just about nine months into his presidency at Oregon State, all anyone is talking about is whether Alexander mishandled sexual-misconduct cases at Louisiana State University, where he was previously president. With few discernible professional or political allies, Oregon State’s newish leader is in a career-defining fight to at least salvage his reputation — even if he loses his job.
Oregon State’s Board of Trustees, after grilling Alexander at a meeting last Wednesday, voted to place him on probation through June 1. In an ominous sign, the board plans to reconvene on Tuesday to “consider action regarding President Alexander’s leadership.”
Alexander has come under fire in the wake of recent reports about how LSU, during his tenure as president, handled allegations of sexual misconduct, including charges against Les Miles, the Tigers’ former head football coach. New revelations, which are described in a law firm’s investigative report from 2013 that was recently made public by USA Today, include allegations that Miles kissed a student and suggested they go to a hotel. (Miles, who has denied kissing the student, was fired from LSU in 2016).
Alexander, who led LSU from 2013 to 2019, has said he was told by the board from the start that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to fire Miles and that the decision had been made to retain the coach. In his defense, Alexander has described himself as being a strong advocate for Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, and having worked to improve LSU’s inadequate compliance infrastructure. Throughout his time at LSU, Alexander has said, he was stymied by an athletics-obsessed board.
Alexander declined to comment for this article. Rani Borkar, chairwoman of Oregon State’s board, did not respond to an interview request made through the university. Efforts to reach other board members were unsuccessful.
Because of Covid-19 protocols, Alexander has yet to meet in person with a lot of people at Oregon State, and the core alliances he would need to retain his position appear to be eroding swiftly. The Faculty Senate, on Thursday, voted 108 to 4 in favor of a motion of no confidence in Alexander, and called on him to resign. (By a smaller margin, the Senate also passed a vote of no confidence in the board.) On the same day, Kate Brown, Oregon’s Democratic governor, publicly urged the board to fire Alexander if its independent review finds that he failed in his legal and ethical responsibilities.
In this fast-unfolding crisis, Alexander, who is 57, has emerged as a physically and politically isolated leader, trying desperately — and without much apparent success — to convince Oregon State that he isn’t the type of guy who sweeps sexual misconduct under the rug for the sake of football. That is proving a tough case to make, as Alexander confronts a campus that is more eager to distance itself from the toxic story of his Louisiana days than to split hairs about the degrees of his potential culpability.
Selina S. Heppell, president of the Faculty Senate and head of the university’s department of fish and wildlife, says that it is now nearly impossible for Alexander to build a working relationship with the faculty and lead effectively. “The problem,” she says, “is a lack of trust based on past behavior that faculty see as part of a cover-up culture.”
Well known in higher-education circles, Alexander comes to Oregon State with the attributes of an outsider. A native of Kentucky, who spent his youth in Gainesville, Fla., and speaks at times with a slight twang, Alexander might be seen as more at home on the Bayou than in the wine country of the Willamette Valley. People who know him say he’s more liberal than Oregonians might realize, but in a few months of Zoom meetings he hasn’t had much of a chance to establish more than a pixelated identity.
To render judgment on Alexander’s time at Louisiana State is in part to render an assessment on the power and responsibility of a new college president.
To hear Alexander tell it, as he did during the board’s grueling meeting last week, he accepted the wisdom of LSU’s board and legal team regarding Miles. But after years of enduring what Alexander described as Miles’s poor performance as a “university citizen” and diminishing on-field performance, Alexander thought Miles should be cut loose. (In the wake of recent reports about his behavior, Miles and the University of Kansas, where he was coach, have agreed to “part ways” as well).
Not everyone, though, was telling Alexander to keep Miles. Critics at Oregon State have zeroed in on a crossroads moment for Alexander, who, as incoming president at LSU, received an email from Joe Alleva, who, as athletics director, had argued that Miles ought to be fired.
“I believe he is guilty of insubordination, inappropriate behavior, putting the university, athletic [department] and football program at great risk,” Alleva wrote. “I think we have cause.”
The email appears in a newly released report from Husch Blackwell, a law firm that investigated LSU’s mishandling of sexual-misconduct claims.
Practically speaking, the email presented Alexander with a classic leadership dilemma: Fire Miles, overriding the board that had just hired him; resign in protest; or work within the system to change it. Alexander says he chose the latter of the three.
With his job on the line, Alexander has unloaded on LSU, describing himself as an honest man who was trying to navigate a university and state with skewed priorities. But that was baked into the job description for anyone who cared to notice, says Robert T. Mann Jr., a mass-communication professor at LSU, who has worked in state and national politics.
King is a “a smart dude. He knows what the SEC is all about,” says Mann, describing the Southeastern Conference. “He wasn’t Meghan Markle, who didn’t Google the royal family. To pretend he didn’t know what he was getting into would be disingenuous. He knew what he was getting into.”
That said, Alexander sometimes positioned himself as a challenger of the old way of doing things in the Deep South, Mann says. His efforts to diversify the student body, for example, were met with pushback in some parts of the state, where critics argued that doing so required lowering academic standards.
“He wasn’t disdainful of the culture, but nobody said, ‘King Alexander and Louisiana go hand in hand,’” Mann says. “Most people thought this was a way station for him.”
In a rare cross communication between boards on a personnel matter, Robert S. Dampf, chairman of Louisiana State’s Board of Supervisors, sent a letter on Monday to Borkar, his counterpart at Oregon State, suggesting that Alexander had been less than fully cooperative in the Husch Blackwell investigation of LSU’s handling of sexual misconduct. Specifically, Dampf noted that Alexander had declined two invitations to be interviewed by the firm, agreeing only to answer questions in writing. Had he consented to the interview, Dampf suggested, “perhaps he wouldn’t be in the position he currently faces.”
“We are all participating in a reckoning that demonstrates administrators can not [sic] leave their universities as a means to avoid responsibility,” Dampf wrote.
Further, Dampf took issue with Alexander’s decision, in defending his tenure at LSU, to criticize his former employer.
“I feel confident that I can speak not only on behalf of my university, but also for my state,” he wrote, “in saying that I am beyond offended by Dr. Alexander’s arrogant and condescending comments about Louisiana’s culture, our state, and our university.”
Alexander’s first presidency was at Murray State University, in Kentucky, where he succeeded his father, Kern Alexander. From there, he went to California State at Long Beach. In terms of complexity and national profile, LSU was a tremendous professional leap for Alexander. But the nuances of Oregon State, where he is an unknown quantity, may be just as challenging for a new president to grasp.
For one, the university’s recent cultural history includes a traumatic reckoning around sexual assault, which may account in part for the swift condemnation of Alexander. In 1998, a 24-year-old woman named Brenda Tracy reported to police that she had been gang-raped by four men, two of them Oregon State football players. Tracy’s personal disclosure about the case, years later, in 2014, brought forth a painful conversation about Oregon State’s mishandling of such cases and prompted a personal apology from Edward J. Ray, who led the university for 17 years before Alexander was named president.
The revelations about Alexander’s time at LSU have opened old wounds about the Tracy case, inviting comparisons between Ray’s full-throated contrition for an administrative failure and Alexander’s more defensive posture.
“The difference between Ed Ray, the way he handled my case, and President Alexander is such a stark contrast,” says Tracy, now a nurse and an advocate for rape survivors. “Ed Ray was willing to hold himself accountable, to listen to the student body and the public and take action.”
Responding to reports about LSU, Alexander issued a statement to Oregon State “with a heavy heart and sense of self acknowledgment.” “I am deeply saddened,” he said, “by the experiences of survivors of sexual misconduct.”
Kathleen Stanley, president of the faculty union, says Alexander had a chance to prove himself on issues of sexual misconduct and showed he wasn’t up to the task.
“He was the president of the university,” Stanley says, “and he dropped the ball. The fury from the entire campus shows that we’re not interested in someone who is going to ignore this issue any longer.”
