‘Here we go again:’ Lawmakers react after SC State University president fired
South Carolina state Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter said she was not surprised to learn the board over the state’s only publicly funded four-year, historically Black university had fired its president Tuesday, an action she saw comings months ago.
“Here we go again. The revolving door of presidents at South Carolina State continues,” said Democrat Cobb-Hunter, of Orangeburg County where the university is located. “It seems that every seven or eight years whatever board is in place at the time feels it necessary to change presidents. I don’t agree with their move. I think it was short-sighted, and I hope for the sake of the university and more importantly the students that it all works out like they think it will.”
The university board voted 10-3 Tuesday morning to fire President James Clark, who had both been praised during his tenure for trying to overhaul the college and its programs but also heavily criticized for, particularly, declining enrollment.
The Legislature, which doles out money to the state’s public universities and colleges, has played a role in South Carolina State’s slow reemergence after the college saw its board wiped clean and after a legislative panel debated closing the school over its financial problems in 2015.
Cobb-Hunter, who sits on the House’s budget-writing committee and its panel tasked with higher education spending, said Clark had given the Ways and Means Committee some stability over the years.
“I think our subcommittee through the appropriations showed we had confidence in the direction that he was taking the school,” she said. “I understand about low enrollment, I just don’t know when we will get a board at South Carolina State that doesn’t try to micromanage.
In the past decade enrollment at S.C. State decreased from just over 4,300 to 1,960 in the spring 2021 semester, according to data from the S.C. Commission on Higher Education.
House Majority Leader Gary Simrill, who chairs Ways and Means’ higher education subcommittee, said he personally liked Clark.
In the state budget that took effect July 1, Simrill, R-York, said the General Assembly spent an added $861,000 to keep the university’s tuition frozen in the upcoming school year and covered $3 million worth of maintenance and renovation projects on campus.
“What I had wanted to see from S.C. State, and still hope to see, is continued progress and certainly we have worked with them in many facets,” Simrill said. “While I don’t know all of the internal details of President Clark’s departure, from the perspective I have in Columbia in working with S.C. State in improving their campus, infrastructure (and) programs, those were all progressing.”
With Clark gone, Simrill said he’s hopeful change can still happen.
“When you have a leadership change, there is a time of vacuum moving forward,” he said. “I hope the progress we have made with President Clark and his administration are not lost (in) that absence of leadership.”
State Rep. Kirkman Finlay, R-Richland, who also sits on the subcommittee with Cobb-Hunter and Simrill, said he was not privy to the decision-making process on Clark’s termination but called the move to fire Clark “a horrible decision.”
“He was doing as good a job getting the cart out of the ditch as possible, and I think this affirms S.C. State’s board in many regards,” Finlay said. “This is sort of the merry-go-round they get on, every four or five years, there’s an argument or a fight with somebody and they fire them.”
Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, did not respond to phone and text inquiries by press deadline.
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, who is an alum of SC State, said it doesn’t make sense to him how the school could be losing enrollment and hopes to see even more support for the school from the state.
“It seems to me people feel that it may be time for a new direction in leadership,” Clyburn said of the 10-3 vote.
“I just hope we stop some of this foolishness and just think about what that school means to this community and what it means to this state,” Clyburn said of funding issues and making sure the school has the necessary resources to obtain federal matching funds for projects.
Clyburn said he does know the chairman of the board well, and other board members and school faculty.
“I’m going to do everything I can in Washington to support the school,” Clyburn said.
Gov. Henry McMaster said he had a good relationship with Clark, but expressing he had confidence in the university and its board.
“South Carolina State I think is a great institution, it has a terrific history behind it, and we want it to be operating in full capacity,” said McMaster, also referring to the dropping enrollment at the school. “I know they’ve had their ups and downs, but I’ve had a great working relationship with President Clark, I think the world of him, but those decisions are the ones that the boards make. That’s what they’re there for.”
McMaster added SC State needs to think about what is necessary to get its enrollment back up.
“Those are the kind of questions that boards wrestle with, but I have confidence in the school,” McMaster said. “The history is really quite an illustrious one, and I would like to see them doing extremely well.”
This story was originally published July 13, 2021 at 2:05 PM.
