UPDATED: Jan. 19, 2018 at 3:44 p.m.

SUNY-ESF administrators, in a town hall with students Thursday night, said they had to remove department chairs who didn’t work to implement decisions agreed upon by college leaders.

The discussion, which included President Quentin Wheeler and Provost and Executive Vice President Nosa Egiebor, came just over a week after SUNY-ESF forced three department chairs to step down in an abrupt policy change limiting chairships to two three-year terms.

Wheeler said in an email to students Sunday that the chair rotation policy “has a number of advantages such as routine infusion of new ideas and development of leadership skills among faculty.”

The chairs will remain SUNY-ESF faculty and “have the opportunity to contribute to College leadership in other ways,” according to a draft of a new major academic plan released by the university last Thursday.

But Wheeler, at the town hall in Gateway Center, detailed leadership’s additional reasoning behind the decision to rotate chairs, saying that chairs and other members of college leadership needed to “pull in the same direction” on initiatives to increase out-of-state applications and attract donors, among other things.

Wheeler said once leadership — including the chairs — comes to a consensus on future initiatives, it is the chairs’ responsibility to help support and implement those initiatives and communicate those decisions to faculty.

“That has not been a strong tradition at ESF in the past,” Wheeler said.

In an interview with The Daily Orange after the town hall, Wheeler said that, as a group, chairs “have not been fully engaged with that deliberative, collaborative process as part of senior college leadership.”

Egiebor, using language similar to Wheeler, said the administration has the responsibility to make changes to chairs or directors who weren’t “pulling in the same direction” as everybody else.

“In some cases, if you don’t do what your supervisor wants, you may not be in your position too long,” Egiebor said.

Wheeler said he assumed department chairs knew they were a part of senior college leadership. The system is set up so that chairs serve “at the pleasure of the provost, and ultimately, the president, because they are an essential part of (the college leadership) team,” he said.  

“Department chairs don’t work to protect faculty from senior administration,” he added. “They exist as part of senior administration to make sure we most efficiently meet the needs of faculty and the needs of students.”

The president said that, in retrospect, he would have spent more time explaining to the chairs their roles. If that conversation had happened, there would have been a smoother transition from the role chairs had previously played at SUNY-ESF to what administrators now expected of chairs as part of college leadership, the president added.

Multiple SUNY-ESF faculties said they were concerned about how quickly the chairs were removed, just days before the start of the spring semester.

David Newman, chair of the forest and natural resources management department; Gary Scott, chair of the paper and bioprocess engineering department; and Donald Leopold, chair of the environmental and forest biology department, were told to step down from their positions in a meeting with Wheeler and Egiebor last Wednesday.

Leopold, in an interview, and Newman, in an email obtained by The D.O., said they originally believed they would step down in August.

The abrupt removal of the department chairs was an “exception, and will remain so,” Wheeler said.

“There were extenuating circumstances, and under different circumstances this would’ve been done on a different timetable and in a different way,” he added.

All department chairs will eventually be removed as part of the new university policy, Wheeler said in the interview after the town hall. The three removed last week had been the longest serving in their positions, he said.

The president said earlier in the town hall that it would be difficult to phase out all chairs at the same time.

Leopold, one of the chairs removed, said earlier this week he believed the rotation plan was a “nonsense” idea that was a cover to remove chairs from leadership. Leopold added that Wheeler, in last Wednesday’s meeting, “made it crystal clear that he blamed us for his failures.”

In a campus-wide email on Thursday, Wheeler and Egiebor announced the appointment of the three chairs’ interim replacements, who included:

• Robert Malmsheimer, department of forest and natural resources management
• Bandaru Ramarao, department of paper and bioprocess engineering
• Neil Ringler, department of environmental and forest biology

The search for permanent department chairs will begin in the spring semester and follow the normal selection process, which includes consultation with faculty and national and internal searches, Wheeler said.

Accusation of nepotism

During the town hall, a student asked administrators if they considered the hiring of Egiebor’s wife as a part-time SUNY-ESF employee nepotism.

“She was not hired into a position without a search,” Egiebor said. “She was asked to come and help on a part-time basis … to help develop the English as a second language program that we’ve never had here.”

The provost said his wife was a “spousal hire,” and it was a condition of his employment that his wife get hired by the university when a position became available.  

Egiebor said his wife has a doctorate in social sciences and was hired for the benefit of international students. SUNY-ESF is hoping to attract higher numbers of international students, who will need the language services in order to integrate into society, he said.

“There’s nothing to do with nepotism, but that might just be the rumor on campus,” Egiebor said.

Wheeler said that while he was the chair of a department at Cornell University, one of the first hires he recruited was married to another academic. There were not many positions available annually for specialized academics in upstate New York, he added.

He faced an ethical dilemma, he said, because he could only get the top candidate to come to the school by creating a position for the spouse.

“The spouse was not of the caliber I would normally accept into my department at Cornell,” he said. The president added that he went to the school’s dean, who Wheeler said told him to “get over it.”

The spousal hire situation is common in the higher education industry, the provost and Wheeler said.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, SUNY-ESF President Quentin Wheeler was misquoted. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on January 19, 2018 at 2:09 am

Contact Jordan: jmulle01@syr.edu | @jordanmuller18