Alcorn State President: All Academic Deans Must Reapply For Their Jobs
Written by HBCU Digest, Posted in Alcorn State University, Faculty, Leadership, Mississippi
First, Alcorn State University president M. Christopher Brown brings the long-departed Jackson State-Alcorn State football match-up back to Lorman for the resurrection of the Soul Bowl. Now he’s telling the university’s academic deans, all of them, to reapply for their jobs.
Brown told the Vicksburg Post that Alcorn has not reposted and reevaluated the positions in many years.
“We were concerned that we did not have the right people in those jobs,” Brown said.
He said the school faced two critical issues with regard to administrative and leadership positions, one being “a history of lifetime appointments” and the other contracts that did not differentiate the salary earned from faculty duties and that for administrative duties.
Dr. Brown is quickly broadening the Alcorn brand with a leadership style that was coined in HBCU culture by the G.O.A.T., Hampton President William Harvey. Make sense, make money, make history. Brown, Tennessee State President Portia Holmes Shields and Paul Quinn President Michael Sorrell have taken this style and have made national headlines with it, and not surprisingly, two out of the three have won the last two HBCU of the Year awards from the Center for HBCU Media Advocacy.
How many HBCU leaders are bold enough to lookout over their campuses and make people uncomfortable about what they see? How many leaders are willing to treat black college academia as a valuable product with eager and picky buyers? How many are willing to look at their faculty and staff and hunger for more, regardless of how well they may already be performing?
The approach may not win you many friends with faculty, but it will earn attention and respect from students and supporters who want to finance this kind of vision.
