Robin C. Capehart, the embattled president of West Virginia’s Bluefield State University who fought publicly with faculty members amid desperate efforts to restore its finances and redeem its HBCU identity, will retire at the end of the calendar year.
Capehart, who did not respond to a request for comment, announced his retirement at the university’s Board of Governors meeting on Thursday afternoon.
“The board is extremely grateful to Robin Capehart for his dedicated service to this institution,” Charlie Cole, its chairman, said in a statement issued by the university.
Capehart was hired as interim president in January 2019, when the university’s enrollment was in steep decline and its finances a wreck. Named to the permanent post a few months later, Capehart sought to tackle those problems, but he clashed early and often with faculty members, who charged that the president had not involved them in major academic shifts, such as overhauling the university’s curriculum and designing a new process for post-tenure review.
Instead of engaging his critics privately or at Faculty Senate meetings, Capehart began a public Substack newsletter. In a half-dozen posts from November 2022 to February 2023, he labeled them, among other things, “lost souls” and “a small oligarchy” … “who are chronically miserable — and aren’t happy unless they’re unhappy.”
After complaints about leadership elections, the university’s board dissolved the Faculty Senate. When several faculty members complained to the university’s accreditor that Capehart had trampled on shared governance and academic freedom, he named them in a universitywide email and took once again to Substack, questioning whether they had committed what he described as “academic dishonesty.”
Capehart also suspended a professor from teaching for several months after he heard a recording of that instructor’s use of profanity to portray the difference between the Athenians and the Spartans during a lecture about the Peloponnesian War. The suspension defied the advice of the provost and two faculty members who had investigated the incident.
Unfinished Business
Meanwhile, Capehart struggled to get a dormitory project off the ground that he had envisioned as a way to improve campus life and restore the university’s legacy as a historically Black institution. All dorms were closed after a bomb exploded in the gymnasium, in 1968, resulting in a mass exodus of Black students. Shortly after he was appointed president, Capehart promised that he would build new on-campus housing.
While the dorm was being built, the university renovated a hospital almost a mile from campus to provide nearly 200 rooms for students and a cafeteria. That solved the demand for housing, but the construction site on campus has remained an eyesore for more than two years as work ceased. Capehart and other university officials cited soaring costs and problems with underground utilities as reasons they had halted construction. The board has now pledged to beautify the construction site, but without any plans to finish the project.
While the board members expressed support for Capehart during his tenure, the university’s accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, eventually took notice and made a campus visit in September to investigate complaints and consider whether Bluefield State was meeting standards of governance.
This week, faculty members who felt targeted by Capehart expressed some relief at the news of his departure, but said the board needs to show its own commitment to improving relations with faculty and staff members.
Capehart’s departure “can be a turning point” for the university, said Amanda Matoushek, a professor of psychology, “if the board will support bringing back an environment of shared governance and open communication.”
Matoushek, an outspoken critic of Capehart, was called out by the president in an email after she filed a complaint with the accreditor.
Cole credited Capehart with improving the university’s financial condition and enrollment, along with the addition of several athletic teams and a graduate-degree program.
Capehart told the board he was ready to spend more time with his wife, a former faculty member at Bluefield State who is now a clinical instructor at East Tennessee State University.
“I’m newly married,” Capehart was quoted as saying in the university statement, “and want to spend time with my wife, who has taken advantage of an opportunity in Tennessee, and frankly, I miss her.”
