Following Mississippi State President Robert “Doc” Foglesong’s abrupt resignation March 7, members of the MSU community seem to be asking the same question: why?Before his announcement, Foglesong met privately with Institutions of Higher Learning Commissioner Thomas Meredith earlier that day, according to IHL public relations director Annie Mitchell. Immediately after the meeting, Meredith accepted Foglesong’s resignation letter. That letter offered no clues as to the cause of his sudden departure and contained only one sentence asking Meredith to consider the letter Foglesong’s request to resign by June 30.
A State-Gram posted moments after the announcement indicated Foglesong quit “with the express purpose of helping the university move forward.”
One week later, another State-Gram gave a reason of sorts. Foglesong said he had accomplished most of his goals in two years instead of four, and said it was “time for someone else to move us forward.”
“Personally I’m sad to see him go,” National MSU Alumni Association President David Jones said. “I assume there are underlying reasons [why he resigned] besides what he has said in the papers.”
Foglesong could not be reached for comment.
Despite his lack of interviews in Mississippi area newspapers, Foglesong did talk to the West Virginia-based Charleston Daily Mail. He subsequently drew criticism from one Mississippi newspaper because of a particular statement he made.
“This [presidency of Mississippi State] was ‘Plan 2,'” Foglesong said. “It’s back to ‘Plan 1.'”
“Plan 1” for the retired four-star general refers to the Appalachian Leadership and Education Foundation, which Foglesong started.
Editors of the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal fired back at the IHL and Foglesong, saying “whoever Mississippi State University’s next president is, the position needs to be that person’s ‘Plan A.'”
Still, the question remains: Why has a distinguished and retired four-star general with 33 years of military experience decided to suddenly throw in the towel, to bail out after less than two years on the job?
“I think we will probably never know,” Faculty Senate President Robert Wolverton said. “If I were a betting person, it could have been some division between him and the [IHL] board.”
Wolverton said he thought there had to be something the board wanted Foglesong to do or some action the board intended to take, and Foglesong refused to go along with it.
“He was very upset with the request Ole Miss had made two weeks ago [for additional funding],” Wolverton said. “Whether that could have been the trigger [or not], I don’t know.”
Other possible reasons for his exit point to the mounting criticism Foglesong had been facing in recent weeks, including questions of academic freedom from MSU architecture school students and faculty.
He also faced increasing pressure from student-organized Facebook groups created by horticulture students.
They protested the school’s apparent removal of a large quantity of donated daffodils, which had been a part of Mississippi State’s campus for decades.
In his most recent interview with a Charleston, W. Va.-based radio station, Foglesong talked about the changes that prompted those reactions.
“Anytime you make change, you create change,” Foglesong said Monday. “You’re going to build antibodies and there’s a certain institutional resistance then to further change.”
Wolverton said he didn’t believe those events caused Foglesong’s resignation, adding that the president met with architecture students and faculty members to resolve the issue days before he announced his departure.
“He healed the architecture rift very well,” Wolverton said. “In the end he felt he had made a mistake and said [the architecture department] should proceed as [it] had been doing.”
Area newspapers point the finger at growing discontent among big-money alumni as a reason.
Some of these major contributors, referred to as the “Cigar Boys,” weren’t happy with his decision to fire longtime athletic director Larry Templeton, according to the Journal.
Foglesong also allegedly made decisions that affected projects supported by influential alumni without consulting them.
In addition, two surveys conducted over the course of the last semester provide clues but little substance to the issue at hand. The Foglesong-commissioned “2008 How We See Ourselves” survey invited faculty, staff and students to respond to an online, anonymous series of questions ranging from salary satisfaction to leadership concerns.
The results indicated about 69 percent of faculty, staff and students expressed confidence in the university’s administration.
However, the results fail to indicate what percentage of faculty, staff or students participated.
More than 4,500 people responded, but the context of the results is difficult to view because of this lack of information.
Results from this year’s Faculty Senate survey also provided another indication that the Foglesong-commissioned survey could be flawed.
Of the faculty members surveyed in the “Faculty Confidence in Administrators Survey,” 41 percent expressed little or no confidence in Foglesong as president of the university.
Eight percent had the highest confidence in his job performance.
Wolverton cited another possible reason for the low approval numbers.
“It was a matter of timing that our survey happened to come out after that thing that erupted with the College of Architecture,” Wolverton said. “By the time the results were known, that rift had already been healed, but no public notice had been made of it.”
Regardless of what caused Foglesong’s departure, Wolverton said he hopes future presidents coming into the university will see the atmosphere as a welcoming one.
“When anyone comes to this campus as an administrator, faculty member or student, the faculty is always there to help that person become successful,” Wolverton said. “We want you to succeed because if you succeed, we succeed.”
Associate professor Mark Goodman, who served as Faculty Senate president during the 2006 IHL search, could not be reached for comment.
Editor in Chief Tyler Stewart contributed to this article.