I have mixed feelings about interim President Charles Lee’s being named permanent president.
First, the reasons to be happy: Every time I’ve talked with Lee, he’s impressed me with his honesty, lack of pretensions and clarity of vision. He turned what could have been a lame-duck job into an interim presidency with a record of accomplishment.
He hired permanent deans for the College of Education, College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Architecture, which is no small feat considering that all of the new deans took their positions thinking that their boss would soon change and that they may not like that new boss. Getting permanent replacements for those important positions offered stability to Mississippi State while it was experiencing some of the worst budget cuts in its history.
Lee also faced the challenge of replacing the provost, vice president of Student Affairs, vice president of Research and his former position of vice president of Agriculture, Forestry and Veterinary Medicine. All of those positions are occupied by interims, and most of them might become permanent.
Lee also dealt with MSU losing a record amount of staff over the summer of 2002 through a retirement-incentive plan and much of the SimCenter staff leaving for University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.
The bottom line is that he made the difficult and often unpopular decisions during tough times. A willingness to make hard choices is a mark of a good leader.
My reservations about Lee’s hiring have a lot to do with the method by which he was hired. Former President Malcom Portera left over a year ago. During that time, the Board of Trustees of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning conducted a search lasting until the summer, failed to find a president and began another search, only to find that the man they quickly hired as an interim is the person they were looking for all along. In short, it took approximately a year and over $100,000 in search costs for them to realize that they should have followed their initial instinct for whom should lead MSU.
During that time, Lee took his name out of the pool of possible candidates, despite endorsements from many members of the state Legislature. When I interviewed him early last semester, he indicated that he would retire after the new president took office this year.
While I don’t have a problem with him changing his mind and deciding to stay on indefinitely, the possible length of his tenure as president raises questions. Lee is 65. I doubt that he will stay as long as former President Donald Zacharias, who stayed in office for 12 years.
So, I wonder how soon it will be before the whole messy search process begins again. It’s not like the IHL Board gave us any hope that it can conduct a search in an efficient and timely manner.
Are we left with a trade-off: Competent leadership for an estimated three to five years (Sources say Lee’s initial contract is for three years) versus long-term leadership by an unknown quantity?
It might be a false choice. Nationally, the average tenure of a college president is four years and four months. However, that statistic accounts for all universities and colleges. MSU is a high-profile appointment. I suspect that presidential candidates view the MSU presidency as more of a career-capping job than as a stepping stone.
Questions about length of tenure aside, the real unknown is the direction Lee will take MSU. The most important thing a president does is set the overall goals. Portera focused on statewide economic development and increasing research dollars. Zacharias improved alumni donations and campus buildings.
One clue can be ascertained by the strong support Lee had from members of the state Legislature. Many of those same legislators are proposing legislation that will make MSU a backbone of Mississippi’s economic development plans through increasing research funding in engineering, agriculture and veterinary medicine.
Will the aim of MSU now be nurturing entreprenurship in order to bring high-tech, high-skill jobs to Mississippi to replace the low-skill manufacturing jobs that went to Mexico? It’s an idea that’s worth considering.
Wilson Boyd is a senior economics major.