Hired to Fix Finances, Oklahoma’s New President Now Faces a More Delicate Task

Bryan Terry, The Oklahoman via AP

In a scene that has become all too familiar at the University of Oklahoma, the campus is once again in upheaval over racism. On Tuesday its new president, James L. Gallogly, took the microphone to speak at a rally. But the angry crowd waited only a few minutes before it started shouting over him.

“Stop firing people!” said one person.

“What are you going to do about racism on this campus?” demanded another.

In the past year Gallogly left behind his successful career as a corporate chief executive to became the 14th president of his alma mater. But the Board of Regents’ secretive selection process left some students and faculty members grumbling that Gallogly had landed the job without their input. The new president’s early focus on cutting costs — including dozens of layoffs — only inflamed tensions further.

And his blistering criticism of university operations, revealed in emails obtained by The Chronicle, shows a leadership style imported from the private sector can backfire in academe.

Now after recent viral videos showed two people in blackface — at least one of them a University of Oklahoma student — the college is confronting the uncomfortable fact that racist-student incidents are a recurring problem. It’s a difficult topic to talk about, let alone solve. It will require Oklahoma’s president to demonstrate a delicate, human touch.

Is Gallogly up to that task?

Seven minutes into his speech on Tuesday, the frustrated president handed over the microphone to a supportive faculty member, who urged the crowd to give Gallogly a chance. Then the president regrouped, and spoke in more emotional terms. The first racist video, he said, his voice cracking, “hurt me to the very core of who I am.” (The second one was not disclosed until Wednesday.)

But Gallogly was also defensive. He described what it felt like to listen to people “with hatred” in their hearts blame him for systemic problems that he insisted he was trying to help fix. He singled out a poster that said, “Don’t Trust an Oil Baron With Racial Justice.”

“I know that my words do not fall well on all of you sitting here today,” the president said. “So many of you do not want me to be successful. So many of you have some hatred in your heart about what I stand for and who I am.”

The comment felt insulting to some minority students in the audience. They were there to protest the kind of hatred that prompted people to paint their faces black and utter racial slurs. No matter how much Gallogly said he had been hurt by the recent events, he couldn’t understand what it was like to be in their place, they said. The president acknowledged that he couldn’t experience racist slights in the same way as those who felt their frequent sting.

Tuesday’s rally, which prompted more than 1,000 students, faculty, and staff members to crowd into a ballroom to decry racism, was a turning point for the university, Gallogly told the crowd. It had the potential to be a turning point for him, as well.

Gallogly, a former chief executive of a Dutch chemical and refining company, realized that many in the audience had already written him off as a ruthless bean counter who cared only about the bottom line. He wanted them to know that, from his first day in office, he’d been seeking ways to make the campus more welcoming to minority students and employees, and that he didn’t deserve their scorn.

After the first blackface video became national news last week (two students involved later left the university), Gallogly said he was disgusted and discouraged. After meeting with angry students, he said, he had gone to church and prayed. “Just like you, I’m a human being with a soul and aspirations,” he said.

Connecting on a human level in the midst of a crisis can be hard for any university president. But for one who was sprung on the campus by the Board of Regents, gaining trust is much harder.

“A secretive search process led to a questionable appointment that is highly contentious among those who will be impacted by Gallogly’s administration,” the student newspaper wrote in an editorial when he was introduced last spring as the next president.

A Blunt Assessment

For all his financial acumen, his lack of experience in higher-education administration bothered many. Gallogly had previously been an executive vice president of ConocoPhillips and had been hired by the Dutch company after it went bankrupt. His successful plan to get it back on its feet reportedly involved firing 3,000 workers and closing several plants.

Faculty members, students, and others in the university community wrote a welcome letter to the new president, which The Chronicle obtained through an open-records request. They wrote that they were deeply concerned about the lack of transparency in the selection process. Among their questions for Gallogly was how he’d transfer his skills as a corporate executive to leading a public university, how important he thought the liberal arts were to the undergraduate experience, and how committed he was to shared governance and multiculturalism.

Faculty members were never told who the other candidates were, or given a chance to vet them. “We were told it was done to secure the best possible candidates, who need to be assured anonymity, but the process doesn’t build the kind of good will and trust he would need to deal with the kinds of issues we’re facing now,” said Karlos K. Hill, an associate professor of African-American studies and chair of the department.

“I think he’s a good man trying to do good things, but without a campus visit, he wasn’t able to communicate his vision” to the university, Hill said.

University leaders had spent the past few years trying to erase the stain of a 2015 racist incident that was also caught on video, and also went viral. In that video, Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members mentioned lynching — and used the N-word — while they laughed and sang about how they’d never allow a black student to join their chapter.

The fraternity was kicked off campus.

When Gallogly took office, in July, email records show he arrived with a laser-like focus on reducing spending. Coming from the private sector, Gallogly was also skeptical of how the university operated.

“I have been very unimpressed with our deal making that I have seen so far,” Gallogly wrote in a June 11 email, during discussions about hiring a private operator for a restaurant at the university’s golf course. “It seems predictions and results never match.”

When presented with poor ridership numbers for a shuttle bus operated by the business school (about five daily riders, at an annual cost of $108,000), Gallogly was even more scathing:

“I would expect more from our college of business,” he wrote. “Anything else silly going on that needs to be immediately corrected?”

That kind of blunt assessment comes naturally to a former oil-company executive, but it doesn’t play well to most academics, Hill noted. Gallogly’s professional experience probably didn’t prepare him for the vitriol he faced at Tuesday’s rally, where a fired dean used an expletive in demanding that he resign and students loudly berated him for failing to immediately label a blackface video racist.

“I don’t think he ever encountered a situation like that in his career, where he was publicly, on live television, being criticized — even vilified — when he feels he’s part of the solution,” Hill said. “There was a lot of unvarnished truth telling. There was no deference in that room.”

At times Gallogly seemed hurt and defensive, other times he appeared frustrated and angry, as he described what he was trying to accomplish.

“I’ve been here since July, actively trying to help the university get its financial footing, but the very first thing I asked as I talked to executives is ‘Where is the diversity in my executive team?’” He said he had started making changes the same day.

“I have been asked to come here and solve a problem, and I am doing my very best,” Gallogly added. “Maybe I don’t deserve your respect, but I’m trying very hard to make this university a better place.”

Gallogly has pushed for cuts on many fronts — reduced spending on campus landscaping, layoffs, even suggesting that employees switch to no-frills computers.

“Most users are not power users, and most of our faculty do not need all the gaming, video, and other high-end options that are often ordered for no good reason,” he wrote in a May 29 email. “The phrase I am familiar with is ‘ruthless standardization.’ It sounds a little mean-spirited but actually not when you think about us being a state institution. We are supposed to be wise with taxpayers money — and will be.”

That email about computer spending was sent a full month before Gallogly became president. His began delivering the message that the university was in financial crisis — and that big changes were needed — even before his predecessor, David L. Boren, the former governor and U.S. senator, was out the door.

Threats and Name Calling

In June, at his first meeting with the regents after being named president, Gallogly harshly criticized Boren’s financial management of the university. He said students shouldn’t have to bear the brunt of the “inefficiencies and overspending,” which he promised to end. He said the university’s debt had more than doubled over the prior decade, to nearly $1 billion.

But internal emails show that the budget picture Gallogly received from university staff members wasn’t quite so dire. Four days before the board meeting, the university’s then chief financial officer told Gallogly, “I’m cautiously optimistic that we will be close to breakeven this year on a cash basis.”

At The Chronicle’s request, Kent John Chabotar, a former president of Guilford College who now works as a consultant helping financially troubled colleges, reviewed several of the University of Oklahoma’s key financial indicators. Chabotar said the university should avoid the budget deficits of years past and should set aside extra money to pay down debt.

But the budget shortfalls at the university were relatively small, and its debt level is in the same “ballpark” as its peers, Chabotar said. There is no financial crisis, he said, and no need for the president to scrutinize small items like computer contracts.

“A president should not be dealing with the kind of computer you get,” Chabotar said. “That’s called micromanagement. I would never do that.”

Boren argued that the spending — much of it on aging and badly needed new buildings — was justified and that private gifts would cover much of the cost. State spending on higher education had dropped significantly during his time as president.

Behind the scenes, the relationship between the two men was reportedly deteriorating to the point of threats and name calling.

According to The Norman Transcript, Gallogly, who was a major donor to the university during Boren’s tenure, told a senior administrator to deliver this message to Boren: “You tell him that I am the meanest son of a bitch he has ever seen, and if he ever crosses me again, I will destroy him.”

The newspaper said that account had been confirmed by sources who spoke anonymously, fearing reprisal. A campus spokeswoman called it inaccurate, saying that Gallogly and Boren were longstanding friends and that while they had different leadership styles, Gallogly appreciated Boren’s contributions. Boren could not be reached for comment. Gallogly did not respond to an interview request but answered some questions through a spokeswoman.

Suzette R. Grillot, the former dean of the College of International Studies who demanded Gallogly’s immediate resignation at Tuesday’s rally, told The Chronicle that the president had spoken to her unprofessionally early in his tenure. Gallogly had targeted her college for possible spending cuts, and Grillot had asked its board members for advice, she said. The president was upset about that, Grillot recalled.

“He pointed in my face,” Grillot said. “He said things to me like, ‘You’re just an academic, you just study the world, I have worked and lived around the world. My passport is twice as thick as yours. I know what I’m doing, I know about financials. You wouldn’t know how to read the financial spreadsheets if I even showed them to you. I’m a pretty important person, I’ve done some pretty important things. You can Google me.’”

The spokeswoman said: “President Gallogly remembers a heated exchange with Suzette Grillot, but he does not remember specifics.”

While some welcomed Gallogly’s get-tough message about setting Oklahoma’s finances in order, others were put off by his antagonistic tone with his predecessor.

Boren pushed back, in statements to the news media, on the idea that the University of Oklahoma was in financial disarray. Then, in a June 20 email — a week and a half before his first day on the job — Gallogly attempted to regain control of the public narrative.

Gallogly told the university’s public-affairs department that “I want to be clear to you that you are not to send anything to the press on any financial metrics etc. without my express permission or that of [the Board of Regents member] Clay Bennett’s. That means you are not to follow President Boren’s request to do so without permission from Mr. Bennett as well.”

In other ways, Gallogly made clear that a new leader was in charge. A couple of days into the job, he was told that the university published a monthly report on research achievements, dubbed the “President’s R&D Highlights.”

Gallogly axed it.

“There needs to be more to report to justify a report,” he wrote. “Also, silly to call it a president’s report. That is so last president, and this one doesn’t like that type of hype.”

In an email on Thursday, leaders of the Faculty Senate said that they hope the president will take the same swift and decisive action he’s taken on fiscal matters to improve the campus climate, and that he’ll consider how cuts in academic programs could impede efforts at diversity and inclusion.

On Thursday hundreds of students, faculty members, and other protesters, most wearing black, marched through the campus in a scheduled protest of the latest acts of racism. When they arrived at the president’s office, it was his staff who greeted them. The president, the marchers were told, had previously scheduled meetings.

Michael Vasquez is a senior investigative reporter. Follow him on Twitter @MrMikeVasquez, or email him at michael.vasquez@chronicle.com. Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.