Sometimes silence speaks a whole lot more than words.
Such is the case with USF St. Petersburg’s chancellor selection process. The Tampa Bay Times reported on Thursday that Ronald Brown, the provost for Wayne University and one of three final candidates for USFSP’s open regional chancellor position, had accepted an offer to be president at the University of North Texas at Dallas.
He said that he had come to this decision after weeks of radio silence from USFSP. Evidently nobody had so much as sent him an email explaining the process was still ongoing, or that he hadn’t been selected for the position.
“I hadn’t heard from them so I thought they were no longer interested,” he told the Times.
How unprofessional.
You’d think USF President Judy Genshaft could spare five minutes of her day — somewhere between posing with Bull statues, deciding to let USF Tampa’s communications program function without accreditation, and hiding from marching students — to do due diligence with the search process and let the guy know what’s going on.
Brown was right to give up on us. Who would want to work under an unresponsive boss?
Silence means a whole lot more when you consider Sophia Wisniewska’s response to the Times’ inquiries.
The Times reported that Wisniewska, another final-three candidate, had initially agreed to an interview but backed out two days later.
“I cannot grant you a request for an interview now,” the Penn State Brandywine chancellor told the paper in an email. “I do look forward to speaking with you in the near future.”
The third candidate, Ralph Rogers, the vice chancellor for academic affairs and a at Purdue University Calumet, said he hadn’t heard anything.
In the meantime, the Student Government election for president has been anything but silent. Mark Lombardi-Nelson and Christa Hegedus were disqualified and requalified before the SG Supreme Court decided to suspend the elections pending a trial.
Vincent de Cosmo, the chair of the Election Rules Commission, is to blame for many of the problems. De Cosmo seems to have taken a cue from Genshaft — instead of notifying candidates that they had violated rules during the elections, as the rules state, he waited until after they were over. Lombardi-Nelson and Hegedus had earned enough points from breaking the rules to disqualify them from being elected, but the points were thrown out due to de Cosmo’s self-described “malpractice.”
Without a president selected for next year, USFSP cannot vie for the role as USF’s representative in Tallahassee, which was the entire point of moving the election date to an earlier time. In the past, USFSP student body presidents have not been able to apply for the role because they were elected after the deciding date.
USF St. Petersburg students are without a chancellor, without a student body president and, presumably, have no idea when to expect to know these things.
Silence is the word at USFSP.
