With its lack of diversity and its appointment of Sam Olens in 2016, the Board of Regents has proven itself to be inherently problematic.
After facing pressure to leave Kennesaw State, President Sam Olens will step down on Feb. 15, 2018. Dr. Ken Harmon, provost and vice president of academic affairs, was named interim president during the transition.
The Georgia Board of Regents (BOR) said it will conduct a national search for Olens’ replacement in a statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. A national search should be a given when selecting the president of a major university, yet it was a step somehow not taken in the original appointment of Olens.
In November 2016, Olens was appointed as president of KSU with no other candidates having been considered. Olens was moved from his position as state attorney general to serve KSU, receiving a huge pay raise by starting out with a $430,000 salary, according to the AJC.
The decision seemed to directly reward Olens by giving him a position which he was unqualified for, having no professional experience in the field of education, according to the AJC.
To appoint a harshly unqualified man, without considering other candidates, to a position that would make him over a million dollars in just three years is inexcusable.
Faculty and students issued restraining orders against Olens in protest.
Among them was Leonard Witt, a professor of communication, who expressed his concerns about Olens to The Sentinel in November 2016.
Less than a year-and-a-half later, Olens is out, and Witt believes that the BOR’s decision to conduct a national search is a step in the right direction, saying that the board members “learned more to what happens in a dictatorship than what transpires in a free and open democracy,” and that “this would never have happened in the first place if the BOR was not 85 percent male and 90 percent white as it is now.”
The current BOR leaves no space for marginalized students to be adequately represented in their own government or university. This good-ole-boys style elitism does not represent the diversity and values of students at KSU or any other university.
Hopefully, the Board of Regents will grow to become more diverse and listen primarily to the students and faculty when considering a university’s president. For now, students can hope for the best and be prepared to protest the worst.
