How Missouri’s Deans Plotted to Get Rid of Their Chancellor

AP PHOTO / Jeff Roberson

When R. Bowen Loftin announced his intention to resign as chancellor of the University of Missouri at Columbia this month, the decision was widely regarded as a surrender to student-led protests over race relations on the flagship campus. But Mr. Loftin’s downfall was also, if not exclusively, the culmination of a well-orchestrated coup led by nine deans who had worked for weeks to secure the ouster of a chancellor in whom they had lost confidence.

Missouri’s deans describe Mr. Loftin’s tenure as a profile in autocratic leadership, where vindictiveness and ham-fisted decision-making were thinly masked by an affable and goofy public persona that won over students but never the university’s academic leaders.

The campus’s nine sitting deans agreed to talk in detail about their concerns with Mr. Loftin, but, as a condition of their participation in this article, they asked that questions be emailed to them together so that they could respond collectively. Their version of events, as described here, is drawn from those responses and an interview with the university’s longest-serving dean, who was designated as the group’s spokesman.

Turmoil at Mizzou

In 2015, student protests over race relations rocked the University of Missouri’s flagship campus, in Columbia, and spawned a wave of similar unrest at colleges across the country. Read more Chronicle coverage of the turmoil in Missouri and its aftermath.

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It was soon after Mr. Loftin’s appointment, in 2014, that Missouri’s deans say they felt the first pangs of buyers’ remorse.

At first, there were the little things, like the fact that the chancellor sometimes seemed more interested in his phone than in his colleagues.

There was Mr. Loftin’s habit of calling the deans “essential middle management,” a title that, while technically accurate, sounded like a disparaging dig.

The deans cringed when the chancellor told them, “I can fire you,” which he once said to the entire group and occasionally told the deans individually, according to their account.

“Those who worked with him on campus were told, in no uncertain terms, that they worked for him, not with him,” the deans said.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Loftin responded to the deans’ account, taking issue with many of their assertions. His comments about firing deans were all made in jest, he said, and he dropped the “middle management” talk the moment he heard it had offended anyone.

The deans’ concerns, however, were less about the chancellor’s words and more about his approach to governing, which they called secretive and scattershot. They were blindsided, for example, by a controversial proposal to cut health-care subsidies for graduate students.

That decision was later reversed, but not before considerable turmoil on the campus. On this point, Mr. Loftin said, the failure was one of communication. He said he did not realize that the decision would be announced before deans and others had been informed. “I was absolutely stunned by that,” he said.

‘Irrevocably Broken’

The tipping point for the deans came when one of their own seemed to have been forced out. In September, Mr. Loftin announced that Patrice (Patrick) Delafontaine, who had been dean of the School of Medicine for less than a year, would resign. The chancellor told faculty members that Dr. Delafontaine had decided to resign on his own, but the dean’s colleagues did not find that credible.

“All of the deans felt that Dean Patrick Delafontaine was doing a good job,” the deans said. “To see his efforts dismissed and undermined, when added to our other concerns, led us to conclude that our relationship with the chancellor was irrevocably broken.”

When the deans made their concerns known to the chancellor, he responded by arranging individual phone calls with them. The deans characterized the calls as “highly scripted” conversations that lasted about eight minutes each.

Again, this is a point at which the chancellor’s and the deans’ narratives diverge. What the deans perceived as an empty gesture of reconciliation, Mr. Loftin describes as a sincere effort to apologize for any transgressions and to forge a path for greater collaboration. The calls also lasted a lot longer than the deans have suggested, he said.

“The conversations ranged from 15 minutes to an hour,” Mr. Loftin said. “I wrote down the time the conversation started, when it ended. I made notes.”

Thomas L. Payne, the senior dean and spokesman for the group, said that during his phone call with the chancellor Mr. Loftin apologized for having publicly stated that he could have the dean fired.

Mr. Payne, who is vice chancellor and dean of the College of Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources, said that Mr. Loftin also had a habit of publicly saying, “CAFNR has all the money,” using an abbreviation for the college. For the dean, this was often awkward, undermining his efforts to raise money for the college, whose donors were left with the impression that it was exceedingly well-off. The chancellor apologized for this, too.

By that point, however, Mr. Payne and his colleagues had already decided that apologies were not enough. The chancellor had to go.

“Since we’re being candid,” Mr. Payne recalls saying, “I feel I must tell you that I don’t think your leadership of this university is appropriate. I don’t think your approach, in many cases of fear and intimidation, is the way we operate in the Midwest or anywhere. I think you should resign.”

Until a few days before those phone calls, Mr. Loftin said, he had no indication that the deans were so displeased with him. By the time the conversations began, there seemed little room for recovery.

“It was very surprising to me how strongly held their opinions were, and how much they kept it to themselves for a very long time,” Mr. Loftin said. “Why did they stew on it for so long? Why did it take so much time?”

The ‘Star Chamber’

Two weeks later, on October 9, the deans gathered in a boardroom at the university-system offices for a meeting with Timothy M. Wolfe, who was then president.

“We indicated to President Wolfe that we believed our relationship with the chancellor could not be repaired and that he should be dismissed,” the deans said.

By that time, racial unrest was starting to bubble up on the flagship campus, where the student-body president, who is black, reported that a group of young white men in a pickup truck had screamed racial epithets at him. Mr. Loftin had called the incident and others like it “totally unacceptable,” but students criticized him as being insufficiently responsive.

The chancellor said that he worked tirelessly on race-related issues, but that he was also realistic about how challenging it would be to change things. “This is where I got criticism,” Mr. Loftin said. “I said, ‘Look guys, this requires changing hearts. We can fix a lot of things here, but we can’t change hearts overnight.’”

In the deans’ view, the chancellor’s response was anemic, and it gave students and the public a glimpse of Mr. Loftin’s ineffectiveness. Racism is indeed a problem at Mizzou, the deans said, but the chancellor’s decisions on graduate-student benefits, including health-care coverage and reduced tuition stipends, had fomented the very resentment and distrust on which the protest movement fed.

The day after the deans’ meeting with Mr. Wolfe, student protests started to ratchet up. A group called ConcernedStudent1950, which took its name from the year Missouri admitted its first black student, organized a demonstration at a homecoming parade, where protesters surrounded Mr. Wolfe’s car. The president did not engage with the students but moved along the parade route, making himself a potent symbol of administrative apathy.

As the student-protest movement gathered steam and attracted national attention, the deans’ parallel effort to oust the chancellor continued quietly in the background.

On October 13, three days after the parade, Mr. Wolfe summoned the deans, Mr. Loftin, and Garnett S. Stokes, the provost, to the system office. What followed was a re-airing of grievances by six deans who were in the room, along with three more who joined the meeting by teleconference.

Mr. Loftin, hearing calls for his resignation, scribbled notes and remained silent.

The chancellor described the meeting as a “star chamber” where he was dressed down for more than two hours. “With a raised voice, one dean said right to me, ‘I don’t want you in my house,’” Mr. Loftin recalls.

The deans interpreted the chancellor’s silence as another sign of his disengagement. Mr. Loftin, conversely, saw no opening to do anything other than to take his licks. “How do you respond to that?” he said. “That was the wrong place to engage.”

Mr. Loftin said he followed up with the president days later, hashing out a plan to deal with the deans individually. But all the deans heard was silence. There was no follow-up, and the campus was growing ever more consumed with the crisis over race.

Beginning of the End

In the fervor of the protest movement, scrutiny of Mr. Wolfe began to eclipse any student misgivings about Mr. Loftin. It was the president, protesters said, who had to go.

Jonathan Butler, a graduate student, began a hunger strike, saying he was prepared to die if Mr. Wolfe did not resign. Members of the football team, showing solidarity with their classmate, said that they would boycott all athletics-related activities if the president did not step down.

Any target that had been on Mr. Loftin’s back seemed to disappear. The chancellor befriended the student protesters, bringing food to their demonstrations and holding court with them on the quad. What few people knew at the time was that the wheels were already in motion for Mr. Loftin’s resignation.

The first system-level conversation about his departure occurred on October 23, before the hunger strike or the football boycott. Mr. Loftin met that day with the president and two members of the Board of Curators. The only specific criticisms the chancellor says he heard were those put forward by the deans. There was no “proximate cause,” he said, between racial discord in Columbia and his precarious leadership position.

“It became pretty clear to me,” he said, “I didn’t have the support from the president and others that I needed to be here.”

On the eve of his resignation, on November 8, Mr. Loftin met again with Mr. Wolfe at University Hall, the system’s administrative building. The two were focused on the circumstances of the chancellor’s resignation, and Mr. Loftin said he hadn’t an inkling that the president himself would resign the following day. In retrospect, however, the signs were there. “He seemed distracted,” Mr. Loftin said. “He left the room several times.”

Mr. Loftin may not have seen Mr. Wolfe’s resignation coming, but that prospect concerned the deans greatly. The group, unaware that the die had already been cast for Mr. Loftin, feared that a new president might not carry out their will. They had one last chance, as they saw it, to overthrow the chancellor.

In what amounted to a Hail Mary pass, the deans fired off a letter to the president and the board, calling for Mr. Loftin’s immediate dismissal. In short order, the letter was leaked to the news media, and the deans’ weeks-long private efforts were made public.

They were all in.

The deans’ high-risk strategy could easily have backfired, and it is hard to see how many or any of them could have remained in positions of leadership at Missouri if Mr. Loftin had not resigned.

“All of the deans perceived risks to their careers,” they said, “and the risk was felt most acutely by those who have long careers in higher education ahead of them. In the face of this risk, the boldness and conviction of the deans to persist with our calls for the chancellor’s removal are testaments to our level of dissatisfaction with the chancellor’s leadership as well as our commitment to put the institution’s interests ahead of our own.”

Mr. Loftin is slated to officially step down as chancellor on January 1, when he will move to a position as director for research-facility development. But the chancellor, who is 66, expects that his journey will ultimately take him back to Texas, where his family has owned a small ranch since 1858. Maybe then, the chancellor says, a fuller picture of what happened at Mizzou will come to light.

“I will someday write this story,” Mr. Loftin assures. “I have a lot to say about this.”