Mississippi’s College Board is just full of surprises when it comes to hiring university presidents.
It pulled another one earlier this month when it announced that Marcus Thompson had been selected as the next president of Jackson State University.
Hopefully Thompson will work out better than the last three “permanent” hires at the state’s largest historically black university and only urban campus.
Over roughly a decade’s time, all three of them — Carolyn Meyers, William Bynum Jr. and Thomas Hudson — resigned under pressure. Meyers left due to the declining financial stability of the institution during her tenure. Bynum, who before going to Jackson had been the president of Mississippi Valley State University, got caught in an embarrassing prostitution sting. As for Hudson, the reason for his sudden departure has not been disclosed, but a recently filed lawsuit against the College Board claims he had years earlier sent inappropriate photos of himself to a JSU student.
The knock on Thompson’s elevation is twofold. It gives the appearance of yet another “inside job,” and he has little experience for the responsibility he is taking on.
Thompson has not worked on a college campus before. His 15 years in higher education have all been at the oversight level, serving as deputy commissioner for the state Institutions of Higher Learning, to which the university presidents report.
His surprise hiring has reminded many of the College Board’s decision in 2019 to send another IHL insider — Glenn Boyce — to be chancellor of the University of Mississippi.
In both cases, no one except those on the College Board and its selection committee had any idea that Thompson or Boyce were even in the running. Boyce had, in fact, been hired as a consultant to help find the next Ole Miss chancellor, and Thompson declined to tell Mississippi Today whether he had even applied for the job at Jackson State.
Since the College Board conducts these presidential searches as top-secret undertakings, there’s a great deal of distrust about the process. The public has no idea whether those selected were truly the best candidates on the table, or whether other factors — such as familiarity with the College Board — played into the decision.
Until the College Board restores some transparency to this process, it invites second-guessing. That second-guessing has, unfortunately, been borne out on too many occasions by the presidents’ performances in office — and sometimes outside of it.
