Gee Ogletree is the president of the IHL Board of Trustees. He says the board has begun searching for a new JSU president.
“As has been said on several occasions, the work of selecting the university president is not easy,” he said. “Just as I ask our pastor to pray for us, I ask all y'all to do the same thing.”
Ogletree says the board is dedicated to transparency and a collaborative process.
Still, the fact that Mississippi’s largest historically black university is in need of a new president has been met with controversy over the past several months. Governor Tate Reeves addressed the issue during a state event in May.
“Jackson State needs consistency,” he said. “They need quality leadership, and I think that the IHL board and the IHL commissioner owe the taxpayers an explanation as to why they have gotten it so wrong at Jackson State.”
JSU’s last president, Marcus Thompson, resigned from his post in May under unclear circumstances. He was the third president to leave the university in the past five years.
Mark Dawson is chairman of the 1877 project, an activist group of alumni calling for transparency in the presidential search.
“We want accountability for the past three failed presidential searches,” he said. “Accountability is not just sort of saying, I'm sorry, or we messed it up, but it's really about doing quantitative and qualitative understanding of what was the cost of those failures.”
Dawson says he worries about what the costs of lawsuits, another executive search and how the university currently ranks academically could mean for its future.
“When the Board of Trustees says they're announcing that the search process is beginning, I don't know how you start a process without saying ‘hey here's where we messed up in the past, and here's how we're going to get better in the future,’” he said. “They also didn't talk about how they're going to be transparent and inclusive. So there are just so many more questions there and our core questions haven't been answered at this point.”
Some members of JSU’s community seem optimistic about the process, including Mya Grimes, a senior at the university.
“I am trusting the process of what is to come with the search,” she said.
Former JSU provost Denise Jones Gregory is the current interim JSU president. IHL trustee Dr. Steven Cunningham, an alumni of JSU, will lead the search committee.
