No-Confidence Vote Exposes Racial Tensions Among Faculty at Kentucky State U.

The Faculty Senate at Kentucky State University met last week to discuss the impending vote of confidence in the chair of the Board of Regents. The meeting began with a fruitful conversation about revising the curriculum. By the end, it had devolved into an intense debate about lingering racial divisions in the professoriate.

Faculty members ultimately voted no-confidence in the chair, Karen Bearden, and, in a separate vote, the board itself. But some black faculty members say that balloting split almost entirely along racial lines, with black faculty members voting to spare Ms. Bearden, who is black, of the judgment — but being overruled by their white colleagues.

The vote followed months of tension between several campus stakeholders: faculty railing against the administration, administrators pushing back against faculty assertions, and infighting within the faculty itself. And according to several professors, the tensions are undergirded by racial discrimination and marginalization of black faculty at the historically black university.

The no-confidence polling, which involved — to the dismay of black faculty — a campus police officer monitoring the ballot box, laid bare the strife at Kentucky State. The discord is so intense that the incoming president says he’s looking to the work of South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission for inspiration, a former president of the American Association of University Professors was called in to assess the damage, and an advocacy group for black faculty has arisen from the infighting.

Aaron Thompson, interim president of the university, said the no-confidence votes signaled that the campus community must come together. “We must stop personal attacks and character assassinations,” Mr. Thompson said. “We must embrace and implement a spirit of cooperation and mutual respect.”

In a statement, Ekumene Lysonge, a spokesperson for the Board of Regents, agreed. “Yesterday’s events represent a crossroad for our institution,” Mr. Lysonge said a day after the no-confidence vote. “Our board plans to use yesterday’s results as a catalyst for change.” The board hopes to begin the conversation for a path forward, he added, but that may prove to be a difficult task.

Faculty Fissures

The plan for the faculty voting had been circulating since February, a result of discontent among some faculty members who felt excluded from decisions about the presidential search. (A new president, M. Christopher Brown II, was announced earlier this month.)

Partly because of concerns over possible tampering, the vote took place in the registrar’s office over two days last week. But controversy came anyway. On the first day, the Faculty Senate president was accused of intimidating voters by standing near the ballot box. The second day saw the police officer’s presence.

The certified results — 50 to 30 in favor of expressing no confidence in Ms. Bearden, and 39 to 30 (with 11 abstaining) expressing no confidence in the full board — were consistent with the mood and membership of the newly formed Faculty Caucus of Color, which disagreed with the voting and its outcome, said Roosevelt Shelton, the caucus’s president.

The caucus’s purpose is to remain “committed to an aggressive advocacy of the institution’s faculty of color and like-minded individuals,” according to its charter. The group arose from frustration with the perceived mistreatment of black faculty members. Elgie McFayden, a member of the caucus and an associate professor in the College of Professional Studies, told The Chronicle that black faculty, who make up about 20 percent of Kentucky State’s professors, watched as several of their white colleagues were promoted or offered tenure with inadequate publication and service records; meanwhile, he said, black faculty with stronger cases tended to be passed over.

“We feel marginalized, alienated and disempowered,” Mr. Shelton said, “not only within the university but in the Faculty Senate shared-governance structures as well.”

Racially Atypical

The racial makeup of Kentucky State’s professoriate is atypical of HBCUs, according to a report compiled by Cary R. Nelson, a former president of the American Association of University Professors. Mr. Nelson was brought in to assess the situation at Kentucky State to smooth the way for a conversation among the administration, faculty, and others on the campus.

The dearth of black faculty members at the university, he wrote, is “apparently the result of an effort to increase faculty diversity” in the 1980s. That raised the proportion of white professors, according to Mr. Nelson. The notion that black faculty members were denied promotion where white candidates were successful “merits a case-by-case review by a special committee,” he continued, adding that the university also needs to work harder to hire more minority faculty.

Last week’s vote underscored the feelings of racial disparities on campus, said Mr. McFayden. He told The Chronicle he is confident that the vote split along racial lines, as members of the Faculty Caucus of Color had made clear how they planned to vote.

Kimberly Sipes, president of the Faculty Senate, disagreed. Accusations that the no-confidence vote was racially motivated, she said, “couldn’t be further from the truth.”

“The fact that we’re unhappy with a person in leadership, and that person just happens to be black, doesn’t mean you’re opposed to them because they are black,” Ms. Sipes said.

Nevertheless, the racial tensions are just one of the issues festering at the university.

‘This Moment of Crisis’

Mary Pat Wohlford of the Registry for College and University Presidents, a higher-education consulting firm, has been at Kentucky State for roughly a year assessing university documents and goals. Many of the faculty who voted for no confidence, she says, may have done so under false pretenses.

The Faculty Senate, in outlining its reasoning for conducting the vote, compiled six detailed complaints into a document that was circulated in February. The complaints, referred to on campus as “the Issues document,” drew a pointed refutation from Ms. Wohlford.

“It is troubling to note that individual faculty cast their votes in part due to the content of the Issues document,” Ms. Wohlford wrote. “Also troubling is the fact that information that was less than factual may have been shared with the press and others. Of course, sharing information that is not correct has numerous collateral consequences, some perhaps unintended.”

Ms. Wohlford said in an interview that the anger faculty members were directing at Ms. Bearden was misguided, as the issues they claimed to have had with her were not her immediate responsibility. The vote of no confidence, Ms. Wohlford added, was probably not a result of this one event, but an eruption of anxiety, frustration, and fear — with the prospect of a new president and the state’s move to a performance-based funding model adding to people’s concerns.

The vote of no confidence makes the faculty vulnerable, said Mr. Nelson, and shouldn’t be seen as a victory. “You’ve created this moment of crisis, now how do you want to use it?” he asked. “This fantasy that by going after the board, they can get a savior from the governor’s office to drop in and fix things, there’s more risk than good there.”

In a position statement obtained by The Chronicle, the Faculty Caucus of Color said that it “has offered continued caution regarding the integrity of the no-confidence proceedings,” and that it will continue to do so “with the belief that the faculty has failed to exercise the available options prescribed by our policies, procedures and governance structure.”

But according to Ms. Sipes, the no-confidence vote is already paying dividends, and the evidence is in the board’s statement to the campus on Friday.

“We respect the role of academic freedom, and the shared-governance model in higher education. Shared governance requires that just as the voices of KSU express concern or disagreement about University policy, strategic direction, and/or fiscal management, that same collective body must work to improve and repair things for the better,” said the statement from Mr. Lysonge, the board’s spokesman. “We look forward to beginning the conversation on our path forward.”

‘We’ll Start Fresh’

Mr. Brown, the incoming president who is executive vice president for academic affairs and provost at Southern University and A&M College, in Louisiana, spoke to The Chronicle about how he hopes to begin the healing process at Kentucky State.

During visits to campus and in interactions during the search process, Mr. Brown said, he became acutely aware of disagreements over race and about faculty and administrative hiring decisions over the last several years. “There were a number of tensions that emerged from what I call long-ignored, smoldering fires,” he said.

“I’m intending to begin a series of strategic conversations about the future and direction of the campus, as well as unresolved issues,” he continued. “By talking through them together, the relationship and trust builds.”

Disputes often begin because people lack information about why a certain decision was made, Mr. Brown said, vowing to open up lines of communication at Kentucky State.

He is also exploring the possibility of a reconciliation process that would follow the model of South Africa at the end of apartheid. “Some of these tensions seem personal, some seem racial, and some situational, and there is a need for everyone to enter a period of forgiving people for wrongs that they may have done,” he said.

“It may not have felt good,” he said, speaking of the issues that have plagued the campus, “but from this day forward we’ll start fresh.”

Adam Harris is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @AdamHSays or email him at adam.harris@chronicle.com.

Correction (3/28/2017, 11:50 a.m.): This article originally misattributed a statement about black faculty members’ being passed over for tenure to Roosevelt Shelton, president of Kentucky State’s Faculty Caucus of Color. That statement was made by Elgie McFayden, an associate professor in the College of Professional Studies. The text has been corrected.