The Never Ending Story of the Never Ending Dean Searches?

Our campus seems to be in the throes of heated, passionate and frankly, tiresome Dean search endless marathons.  Out of 6 schools at TSU, 5 currently have ongoing permanent Dean searches.  We regard most of these fruitless and sycophantic Dean searches as yet another despotic opportunity for King Lane to create and continue to cause chaos, disruption and to ramp up stress and aggravation among the faculty, thus dividing and conquering and maintaining control over the divided and factionalized faculty.  Let's recap this madcap year of Dean searches:

The College of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences (COLABS) are going through yet another Dean search. COLABS had a search conducted over a year ago and yet they are going through the same search process all over again.  It’s very doubtful that this second finalist candidate will be acceptable to the President.  

The School of Communications Dean Maruice Odine resigned after almost one year in office without notice.  While Dr. Odine continues to be tenured/tenure track on campus, we ask why his abrupt resignation was allowed.  Was he pushed out by the King? 
At our beloved law school, the news is worse. TMSL has had three law school deans in 3 years- Holley, Douglas and Bledsoe. The previous law school dean Douglas was allegedly pressured to resign by King Lane.  We are unsure if Dean Bledsoe without any academic work experience may be able to manage a law school successfully and also to fend off future possibilities of the law school being separated from our university (see our previous post).  It is also concerning that Dean Bledsoe was formerly a Board of Regents member (an unpaid position appointed by the Governor) and somehow became Acting Dean earning a $250,000 salary.  We should all consider that other more qualified and experienced people could have taken the job and possibly assisted TMSL more than Bledsoe. 

The School of Business (SOB) is currently undergoing yet another Dean search as their Dean resigned from the university after just a few weeks in office in the Fall of 2018 (please see our very first post of his disappearance).  No one has ever informed the university as to what happened for this individual to resign suddenly and physically leave the university.  Jones SOB must now again reconvene another lengthy, tedious and expensive Dean search.  Let’s hope bad luck doesn’t strike twice.    

And finally, the Mickey Leland and Barbara Jordan School of Public Affairs has had 3 Deans in 3 years - Deans Bullard, Adams and currently Herrington.  Acting Dean Herrington was supposed to step down in December 2018 but has remained on indefinitely. A new SOPA Dean search committee was set up this semester and the finalists have finished their interviews.   Yet SOPA already had chosen a finalist acceptable to both SOPA and former Provost Wilson who forwarded the name to King Lane in November 2017.  But King Lane disagreed with the faculty and former Provost Wilson's choice (why?) and insisted on jump-starting the search process all over again through the assistance of the new Provost, Kendall Harris.  

All of the rebooted and mostly unnecessary searches have been as a direct result of King Lane's micromanagement, incompetence, favourtism and appaling lack of any meaningful consideration from faculty, staff and students.  Deans are powerful and active in our community and need to be chosen with the active and shared governance of all stakeholders, not just King Lane's biased, prejudiced and subjective input. 

At Transparency State we want to propose a novel idea for this summer- If the President is so obsessed with making sure he is choosing the "right" Deans, while potentially neglecting his role as a prominent advocate for our students and the university's needs, perhaps we need to all work together for a new President search.  Perhaps King Lane needs to be reminded- we are all guests on our campus.  No one lasts forever.