U. of Oklahoma Official Hired in Wake of Racist Fraternity Chant Says He Was Forced Out

A vice president at the University of Oklahoma who says he was forced to resign after being accused of improperly using a state vehicle for personal reasons denied the charge on Thursday. The real reason Jabar Shumate contends he was forced out involved his opposition to a fraternity whose racist chant three years ago plunged the university into turmoil and led to the creation of his position.

Shumate, a former state lawmaker and student leader at Oklahoma, was hired in 2015 to oversee diversity efforts after members of the campus chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon were videotaped singing about how they’d rather see a black person “hang from a tree” than joining SAE. The video went viral, two students were expelled, and the chapter was disbanded. Soon afterward, Shumate was hired as a vice president in the newly created Office of University Community.

It was the prospect that the SAE chapter might return to the campus, and Shumate’s vehement opposition to it, that he contends led to his being forced out.

On Wednesday, Shumate held a news conference with his lawyer, Lindsey Mulinix-Ewert, to say that the university was going to make false accusations against him to justify what he called his “high-tech lynching.” He had been given an ultimatum, he said: resign or be fired.

The university offered a different narrative on Wednesday, releasing a statement saying that Shumate had resigned after being confronted with the findings of an audit that “revealed a significant misuse of university assets,” later confirmed to be a 2016 Chevrolet Tahoe assigned to his office.

Shumate said his work involved traveling around the state, to the university’s three campuses, as well as helping recruit diverse students from across Oklahoma. Many of his meetings were in the early morning or evening, he said, and he was never told he had been using the vehicle improperly.

He also said he was never shown the audit’s results.

A report on the audit, released by the university in response to media inquiries on Thursday, found that Shumate had violated a state law that prohibits employees from making personal use of state vehicles, including parking overnight at their homes. The Tahoe was parked outside his home, in Norman, Okla., 124 times between July 2017 and March 2018, the audit found. He also used it for personal trips to Tulsa, where he formerly lived, and made false travel-expense claims, the report said.

Shumate should have been aware of the law, the audit found, because he served in the state Legislature and voted for it when it was enacted. The prohibition also appears in the university’s policy.

The university statement, released by the interim vice president for public affairs, Erin Yarbrough, said that the university “values and appreciates the position of the chief diversity officer and the office of university community” and that “because this was not a preplanned exit, the university has not yet named an interim chief diversity officer. We are seeking new leadership for that position immediately.”

‘Bad Optics’

The links between Shumate’s office and the expulsion of the fraternity deepened when a portion of his office was relocated to the chapter’s former house. Earlier this summer, Shumate said, the university’s general counsel, Anil V. Gollahalli, told him he’d have to move out of the fraternity house while students were away because the fraternity would probably be moving back in. The idea was to avoid the “bad optics” of the diversity office’s being moved out to make room for the return of a racist fraternity, Shumate said.

The general counsel denied on Thursday that any decision had been made to reinstate SAE, but he said the chapter might return. If it did, it would probably return to that house, Gollahalli said. He said he had simply advised Shumate to look at other locations and had never ordered him out.

Shumate said that after all the work the university had done to recover from the racist incident, reinstating the chapter “would not be in the university’s best interest.” In a written statement released on Thursday, he said he had been fired after objecting to the chapter’s potential return to the campus.

A spokesman for the fraternity’s national office told The Chronicle in a written statement on Friday that the Oklahoma chapter remains closed and “at this time there is no timeline for the chapter to return” to the campus. “Any reports to the contrary are inaccurate,” the statement says.

Shumate defended his work in helping the university recover from the videotape incident.

“I truly believe the university had put forward evidence of how you can heal and move forward from a very tragic incident involving race,” Shumate said. “We were on our way toward being a national model about how you become a more inclusive and diverse campus.”

Shumate is leaving just over three weeks after James L. Gallogly, a former oil executive and major university donor, took over as president. The day he arrived, six high-level administrators were terminated.

At the same time, Shumate said, he was demoted from reporting directly to the president to reporting to the provost.

Shumate was hired by the university’s previous president, David L. Boren, a former governor and U.S. senator who had known him when he was president of the student body. Boren said he had “tremendous confidence in his judgment and insights.”

Update (7/27/2018, 11:56 a.m.): This article has been updated with a statement from the national office of Sigma Alpha Epsilon that the chapter at the University of Oklahoma remains closed.

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.