How will UT’s leadership changes affect school?
Beverly Davenport, the University of Tennessee’s first female chancellor, was fired from that top job Wednesday, but that is only one of several leadership changes UT has endured in recent years.
UT President Joe DiPietro, who fired Davenport as chancellor but gave her the option of a faculty position in the College of Communication and Information, is planning to retire. He has not yet made public his retirement date.
Wayne Davis, dean of the Tickle College of Engineering, was appointed interim chancellor for six months to one year in a Thursday announcement lauded by legislators, the governor and others. Davis, 69, delayed retirement to accept the position, which means his dean’s role also will have to be filled.
TOP JOBS UP FOR GRABS
When DiPietro does retire, that means the university’s two top jobs will be up for grabs: president and chancellor.
Those holding other top UT positions, including provost and vice chancellor of communications, have changed over the last few years.
Could those change again under a new president and chancellor?
Perhaps most notably, the athletics department has experienced much turmoil. Davenport’s termination follows the firing of football coach Butch Jones in November and athletic director John Currie in December.
Former UT football coach Phillip Fulmer replaced Currie as athletic director Dec. 1 and Fulmer’s contract was extended to four years last month. Fulmer hired Alabama defensive coordinator Jeremy Pruitt to replace Jones on Dec. 7.
Currie was Davenport’s first hire, which she made two weeks after being hired away from a position as interim chancellor at the University of Cincinnati in February 2017. Currie came on board April 1 after spending the previous eight years as the athletic director at Kansas State. He was gone approximately eight months later.
UT’S IMAGE, NEXT STEPS
Some legislators, including state Rep. Rick Staples, D-Knoxville, and state Rep. Eddie Smith, R-Knoxville, have said all the movement is bad for the university’s image.
The turmoil at the top is particularly bad for recruitment of athletes and coaches, not to mention parents, scholars, future presidents and chancellors, Staples said.
“As they strive to be a top 25 national institute of learning, over the past year you would have to wonder if the issues [they’re dealing with] will dissuade some of the best minds and talents of joining what I consider a great university.”
In the wake of the recent turmoil, Smith said some parents in town and across the state who wanted their children to go to the University of Tennessee have second-guessed that choice. “That’s something we need to fix,” he said.
Gov. Bill Haslam said the concerns are legitimate, “but it’s also where we are. And we can say we wish we weren’t here, but it’s where we are. Having said all of that, the university itself is in great shape. We have record enrollment, record student outcomes at the university itself, the product it’s producing, it’s been great.
“If you went over to the campus right now you’d see more people getting a better education than ever before.”
When asked what’s next for UT, Haslam called it an “interesting and challenging time” because of DiPietro’s approaching retirement.
“So, there’s a lot of leadership challenges. We have a new board coming on that will start July 1 with every member being brand new … I think the first role is to get Wayne Davis in there. [He] will be a great addition to that spot and then I think the new board will begin the search for a new president sometime after they come aboard in July.”
Haslam was referring to the UT FOCUS Act, which reduced the size of the board of trustees by more than half. The legislature then changed the makeup of the entire board, which takes effect July 1.
“The reason we proposed the change was the old board had 27 members. It’s just too bulky and so I don’t think anybody had that sense of ownership that you’ll have on a board with 11 members,” said Haslam.
WHO WILL BE THE NEXT PRESIDENT ONCE DIPIETRO RETIRES?
Haslam’s name continues to be brought up for the role, but he said Friday he’s not interested and isn’t the right person.
“We’ll find the right person to be the next president of the University of Tennessee, but it won’t be me.”
PROVOST, COMMUNICATIONS POSITIONS
In other changes, Vice Chancellor of Communications Margie Nichols retired in 2016.
Her replacement, Ryan Robinson, was the second major hire Davenport made. Robinson was the senior associate athletic director for communications at UT and took over his new position May 17, 2017.
Also in 2016, Provost Susan Martin, UT Knoxville’s chief academic officer, left that position for a spot on the faculty. That was the last position Davenport filled before her termination as chancellor.
David Manderscheid was named UT’s new provost and senior vice chancellor, Davenport announced April 17. Manderscheid most recently served as executive dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and vice provost for arts and sciences at Ohio State University.
He will begin working July 1 on an at-will contract. He will make $408,000 per year, plus the university’s standard benefits package.
Gina Stafford, the director of communications for the UT System, is moving to a new post with University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Her position has not yet been filled.
Karen Simsen, who was director of media relations for UT Knoxville, left Jan. 5. She was replaced by Tyra Haag.
A BAD YEAR, A FRESH START
With a new board of trustees and top leadership at both the university and system level later this year, UT is poised for a “fresh start,” said former longtime Knoxville Mayor Victor Ashe, who backed DiPietro in his decision to terminate Davenport in light of the flaws cited in his letter to her.
The president is doing what he needs to do to ensure a smooth transition and make sure his successors don’t have to address the problems he dealt with when it came to the chancellor, Ashe said.
“Imagine the new president coming in and before all else having to handle a chancellor who was not meeting expectations,” Ashe said. “That’s not a good situation.”
Mike Cohen, owner of Cohen Communications Group, LLC, in Knoxville, agreed the right course of action was taken, given that the university will soon have a new leadership lineup.
Cohen believes both DiPietro and current trustees approached the decision to remove Davenport with the mindset of, “if we made a bad choice, we’ve got to clean it up on our watch.”
It wouldn’t have bode well for them to set out in search of a new president and tell the new chief one of the first things to take care of is firing the first female chancellor UT Knoxville has had, Cohen said.
And if the university system’s leadership determined she wasn’t the right person to preside over the campus, then “the sooner you make that change, the sooner you start the healing,” Cohen said.
And the sooner the university community will begin to put the negativity attached to a termination behind them, he added.
Cohen emphasized the firing of Davenport adds to “a string of horrible PR incidents,” which mar the university’s reputation.
“The school’s reputation has been damaged by the aggregate total of all of these problems, far more than by any one individual act,” he said.
But there is good news: Without the old regime in place, the university can capitalize on “a clean break,” he said.
The ability the university will have to say it’s run by different people is a better answer than any explanation it would have to give for any of its troubling circumstances, Cohen said.
Still, it will be up to the wave of new administrators and trustees to prove themselves, he said.
“It’s an opportunity for a clean start,” Cohen said, “but it’s up to them to seize the opportunity and do well. The university
cannot afford another misstep.”
WILL LEADERSHIP CHANGES HURT RECRUITING?
Whether the chancellor’s termination and all the changes in top leadership have any effect on UT’s future recruiting and hiring remains to be seen.
Doug Lederman, founder and editor of Inside Higher Ed, said it depends — mainly upon whether DiPietro told the truth about Davenport.
“If this is pretext and he actually got rid of her for other reasons, candidates will probably sniff that out and it will make it difficult for Tennessee to find somebody good. Because who would want to work for somebody who operated like that? If his description of the situation is accurate, I imagine there will be plenty of people who think, ‘He was direct and a straight shooter and I could work for somebody like that,” said Lederman.
The magnitude of change that UT is about to face with its leadership doesn’t necessarily constitute “an unusual event,” said Hans-Joerg Tiede, associate secretary of the Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance at the American Association of University Professors.
But what Tiede did find “fairly unusual” is the letter DiPietro sent Davenport detailing the reasons for her dismissal, particularly with “how detailed it is in its assessment.”
Tiede couldn’t speak to whether the termination of Davenport will put a blemish on UT’s reputation, but he did note that the way her exit was handled with the letter “has the potential of making it more difficult to recruit somebody for the position.”
“Other people who may apply for the position may be concerned about being subjected to such a public dismissal and how that might impact their chances for other employment in the future,” he said.
WHY NO POLITE PARTING OF WAYS?
Lederman also said he found DiPietro’s termination letter unusual in that it was made public.
In higher education, a polite parting of the ways is more typical.
“Most organizations don’t like to draw attention to conflict. They prefer to make it look like everybody’s growing in the same direction,” Lederman said.
He said it’s not uncommon for public university presidents or chancellors to lose their jobs, but it is unusual for the individual to be immediately removed from the position, as Davenport was.
“I don’t have a real good sense of why President DiPietro felt the need … to make this so conflictual, openly conflictual. Without her side of the story, it’s kind of hard to tell whether that’s accurate or not, but that’s all we have to go on,” he said.
Davenport emailed Lederman, he said, and told him “she’ll talk sometime.”
Usually, the reasons people are fired immediately is because they’ve done something illegal or corrupt. But in those cases it is still often done behind closed doors, he said.
“Despite the disputed reasons why this is happening, it’s pretty clear that this isn’t like somebody just discovered something. This was unfolding for a fairly long time.”
THE COSTS OF TOP LEADERSHIP CHANGES
Davenport was the highest-paid chancellor in UT”s history, at a base salary of $585,000.
Despite her firing from the top job, she is eligible to be paid approximately $1.75 million over four years if she accepts the faculty job, and would go on to earn an “average” professor’s salary from the fifth year forward.
Currie was in the process of completing a deal to hire Ohio State defensive coordinator Greg Schiano to replace Jones when the move met with backlash from some fans, donors and politicians. The deal unraveled. He scrambled to track down other options, then was let go.
Currie and the university ultimately reached a settlement that awarded him $2.5 million, which was much less than the buyout he was owed. The settlement includes $2.22 million on top of the salary Currie received while on paid suspension since Dec. 1.
Jones’ firing also cost Tennessee. UT owed Jones an $8.26 million buyout when it fired him on Nov. 12. The buyout is due in monthly installments throughout the duration of his contract, which was set to expire Feb. 28, 2021.
His Tennessee contract required him to try to find a new job to mitigate the buyout. Jones’ $35,000 annual salary as an analyst at Alabama will be a drop in the bucket, but it fulfills his contractual duty.