University of South Carolina Trustees Vote for Governor’s Pick for President

Despite heated opposition and accusations of an abandoned process, the University of South Carolina’s Board of Trustees voted on Friday to appoint Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr. as the institution’s next president.

The vote divided the board and the state. South Carolina’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, called trustees over the July 4th weekend to urge them to vote for Caslen, a former superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point. In response, students protested, the Faculty Senate held a vote of no confidence in Caslen, Democratic state lawmakers voiced opposition to the process, and some high-profile donors called for the search to be reopened, according to The State, a South Carolina newspaper.

After all that, the trustees voted 11 to 8 to appoint Caslen to succeed Harris Pastides, the current president, who will step down at the end of the month, a university spokesman confirmed. Even though it’s the middle of the summer, students and faculty members showed up at the trustees’ meeting with signs and chanted “shame” after they heard the result, according to local reporters who tweeted about the event.

Protesters chanting “shame, shame” after Robert Caslen named #UofSC president pic.twitter.com/XnNEm21dyi

— Lucas Daprile (@LucasDaprile) July 19, 2019

The controversy over the presidential search started this past spring, when the search committee announced 11 finalists, all men. When that group was narrowed to four, Caslen was the clear front-runner. But a campus visit earned him some detractors. Students objected to his comments about increasing diversity at West Point without lowering standards, and his suggestion that alcohol consumption was a cause of sexual assault.

In April the trustees voted to continue the search and appointed the chancellor of the University of South Carolina-Upstate, Brendan Kelly, as interim president. But about two weeks ago, one trustee, Charles H. Williams, told The Chronicle, the trustees started getting calls from the governor, who urged them to vote only on Caslen. A vote was scheduled for Friday, July 12, but it was postponed when a judge ruled that the trustees had not received enough notice.

In the meantime, the university’s accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, wrote a letter to Pastides asking about Governor McMaster’s involvement in the search process, The State reported. And in the week leading up to the first scheduled vote, the Faculty Senate voted no confidence in Caslen.

“Mostly we’re upset about the process,” said Christian Anderson, an associate professor of higher education and the president of the university’s American Association of University Professors chapter. “The fact that the governor got involved, the fact that they tried to squeeze this meeting in in the middle of summer.”

On Thursday night a major university donor, Darla Moore, wrote to the trustees urging them to start the search process over, The State reported. “The university is an institution of higher learning, and the surest way to extinguish its integrity is to politicize it,” she wrote, according to the newspaper.

Anderson said he was impressed by the number of people who showed up on Friday to protest the vote.

“This woke up the faculty,” he said. “There was a lot of discussion about it. People did not take it lightly.”

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.