Pictured Above: Martin Tadlock, shown here in 2018, received a national award the same week he announced that he will step down on Dec. 31 and return to teaching.
Jonah Hinebaugh | The Crow’s Nest
By Nancy McCann and Sophie Ojdanic
For Regional Chancellor Martin Tadlock, it was a week for accolades.
When he announced on Jan. 11 that he will step down Dec. 31 and return to teaching, people on campus and in the community praised his steady hand and upbeat personality.
Then a national association of student affairs administrators announced that Tadlock will receive its 2021 President’s Award for his work to enhance the quality of student life.
Isaiah Castle, the lieutenant governor of St. Petersburg’s Student Government, was one of many who sang Tadlock’s praises.
“My favorite memory of him is always going to be during convocation (for first-year students) when he shared his phone number with … my entire class,” Castle told the St. Petersburg Campus Advisory Board on Jan. 14. “I just knew right then that this was the right guy – he’s for real.”
“Dr. Tadlock has been an incredible asset to the USF St. Petersburg community,” state Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, said. “He’s led the campus through some very difficult challenges, and his guidance has been core to reshaping the mission of USF St. Petersburg.”
“Martin, you are a mensch!” wrote longtime campus benefactor Debbie Nye Sembler during the advisory board meeting.
When he leaves the chancellor’s office on Dec. 31, Tadlock said, he will take a one-semester professional development leave to prepare for his return to teaching in the College of Education in the summer or fall of 2022.
Tadlock said he timed his departure to give the administration a full year to search for a new chancellor and to ensure an orderly transition.
He stressed that his departure is “really not the same situation as previous changes” in campus leadership.
Since 1968, 14 people have led the St. Petersburg campus – with titles like campus dean, chief executive, interim chancellor and chancellor. Seven of them served during the 19-year presidency of Judy Genshaft.
Genshaft abruptly ousted Chancellor Sophia Wisniewska in September 2017, then installed Tadlock as interim chancellor – a job that became permanent 11 months later.
At the time, some campus veterans complained that the top job in St. Petersburg job had become a revolving door.
The tumult at the top had slowed the campus’ momentum and hurt everything from fundraising to community relations, they said.
Tadlock, the sixth leader of the campus since Bill Heller was pushed out by Genshaft in 2002, said that the decision to step down was his alone.
His contract, which runs from year to year, is due to end in July, he said, and President Steve Currall offered him another one-year extension. Instead, Tadlock said, he requested and got a six-month extension to give the administration a full year to find his successor and ensure that the transition will be orderly.
Currall praised Tadlock for his role in “increasing student success” and planning for the academic clusters that will be developed in St. Petersburg over the next five years.
He also said the search for Tadlock’s replacement will begin this spring.
Susan Churuti, a lawyer who serves on the Campus Advisory Board, called for a national search for Tadlock’s replacement and “clarity about what the role of the regional chancellor is.”
Tadlock has been “a wonderful regional chancellor” whose hallmark has been “brutal honesty and sticking to the facts,” she said.
Tadlock was “sort of thrust into the role and he’s exceeded what anyone’s reasonable expectation was, but we can’t expect lightning to strike twice,” Churuti said. That’s why a national search is important.
The award that Tadlock received last week came from the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators.
Each year the organization honors a college or university president or chancellor “who has, over a sustained period, advanced the quality of student life on campus by supporting the institution’s student affairs staff or initiatives.”
The national association, which was founded in 1919, says it has more than 13,000 members at 1,400 campuses and 25 countries.
Many of the people who praised Tadlock last week cited his work on behalf of students.
Tadlock “helped make USF St. Petersburg special for everyone here,” said Veronica Jimenez, a senator in Student Government who works in Tadlock’s office. “My experience with him was great. He was such a nice person to work with; he made it a point whenever I was in the office to say hello and ask how I was doing.”
As campus dean of the Nelson Poynter Memorial Library and regional associate vice chancellor of academic affairs, Catherine Cardwell knows Tadlock well.
She said he “has worked tirelessly on behalf of students, faculty and staff … I have found him to be an ethical, genuine and proactive leader who cares deeply. Like others, I wait to hear more from President Currall on next steps for the campus.”
Tadlock is “compassionate, forthright, honest and really cares about students,” said Dean of Students Jacob Diaz.
In his announcement and in an interview with The Crow’s Nest, Tadlock said that this is a good time for St. Petersburg to transition to its next leader.
The campus will have settled into consolidation, begun building five new academic clusters and gotten through the COVID-19 pandemic by the time he steps down, he said. And that will allow him more time with his family, “which is spread from Wisconsin to Idaho to Texas.”
“I think it’s a great opportunity for someone to come in and pick that up at a time when everything’s going to change,” he said. “We’re going to experience the Roaring ‘20s a hundred years later. I really feel that’s going to happen.”
He was an administrator at Bemidji University in Minnesota when USF St. Petersburg hired him to be regional vice chancellor of academic affairs in August 2016.
Just 13 months later, Tadlock became interim regional chancellor when Wisniewska was ousted, and in August 2018 he got the permanent job with an annual contract paying $315,000 a year.
During his stint as regional chancellor, the campus has seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis, from the rocky aftermath of Wisniewska’s abrupt departure to the end of St. Petersburg’s independent accreditation and now a pandemic that has left the campus in a virtual lockdown.
Outwardly at least, Tadlock has maintained a happy face. He routinely gets to work by dawn, mingles with students, conducts frequent campus forums and sends emails to the campus community that are full of cheer and exclamation marks.
Behind the scenes, however, Tadlock has found himself in the awkward position of defending St. Petersburg’s distinctive identity against Tampa-based administrators who have sometimes appeared bent on making it a satellite campus.
