For weeks now, a campaign has been underway in some white mainstream media to place total blame for the fiscal crisis at Tennessee State University on the former honorable president Dr. Glenda Glover. The mainstream media suddenly has amnesia because it has written for years that Tennessee State University (TSU) has been chronically underfunded and has faced a number of challenges. TSU was underfunded because it was a university with predominantly Black students, and now Tennessee schools that didn’t want Black students all these years now want them because of Federal Funding. Black and white students still want the TSU experience, and so admitting an influx of new students of all races played a major role which exacerbated the problem.
The easy solution seems to be it’s all the fault of Dr. Glenda Glover and her administration, and if she were a white female TSU President, this would never be an issue. The primary reason is the state now wants to get out of a legal obligation it made to President Glover when she announced her resignation, and they should honor their obligation as if she were a white TSU president. Dr. Glover has acknowledged that she has two agreements with Tennessee State University. One was a buyout of her five-year contract with the school if she agreed to retire early. The other is to continue working for the university as a president emeritus helping raise money and recruit new students, and who could better recruit than an internationally known Black female? The two contracts total $1.7 million, and my advice to the officials is: “Just close your eyes and pretend it is for a white woman and honor this contract.”
“There’s no guilt feelings. I have a retirement package,” Glover has publicly said. “It’s like someone asked you, would you give up your retirement package? No. You don’t ask someone to give up their retirement package. That goes beyond the bounds of decency to ask me to give up a retirement package, especially if I’m still doing a lot of work for the university. It’s not only fair what they paid me, it’s owed.”
Governor Bill Lee’s handpicked new board wants to invalidate that agreement. They maintain it was signed by the old Board of Trustees and should not be honored, though there’s nothing illegal about it. Local white media continues to point out how bad the situation has gotten, and no one would argue that it isn’t a dire one. No institution wants to lay off 114 employees. TSU is being further pressured to cut degree programs and tenured professors. It’s already eliminated all its advertising at the airport, eliminated the sparse advertising in the Black press, and cut band trips to away sports games, eliminated the football team staying in hotels before home games, and eliminated 117 contracts that duplicated services.
But the Tribune, Tennessee State University graduates, and the Black community in Memphis, Knoxville, Jackson, Chattanooga, and Nashville have been waiting for months to see and/or hear the state’s plan for repayment of all the money (TSU is still owed over $2 billion in funding). It’s interesting that whenever you see or read these stories about the school’s fiscal woes, there’s seldom any mention of how much money is still owed ($2 billion) to TSU dating back years, nor any plans on the part of the state to make good on past obligations. During 2023, the legislature provided TSU with a lump sum of $250 million for infrastructure projects. This came after years of unpaid land grant matches by the state, a joint committee of the legislature decided. However, TSU is still owed more than half a billion dollars. Racism is the cause, and those rednecks should stop focusing and blaming everything on former president Glover and her administration.
One mainstream outlet even ran an editorial saying that while it’s true the state did withhold millions of dollars from the university for decades, it’s still mainly Glover’s fault that all this has happened. It’s a shame that a complex situation with historical implications has essentially been reduced to a witch hunt. The really sickening thing is even if TSU doesn’t honor its agreement with Glover, that’s just a drop in the bucket in terms of the overall fiscal crisis. Of course, the state could solve it if they desired—just pretend TSU is the University of Tennessee and pay the $2.1 billion it still owes the school, which was underpaid over a 30-year period. That’s the figure the federal government said was owed back in 2023 when they sent a letter to Governor Lee outlining that fact.
Any school whose attendance dips from 8,198 in fall of 2023 to only 3,542 in the spring of 2024 is going to encounter fiscal problems. But instead of focusing on blaming one person for everything, the state’s legislators, including those who supposedly care about the long-term welfare of the university, need to start being advocates for the state truly addressing its long-term fiscal neglect of the school. The notion that they are somehow now correcting things with emergency assistance doesn’t begin to really answer the long-term financial damage done by many prior years of fiscal imbalance.
No one is perfect, and if the state wants to cite individual instances of financial errors, that’s their prerogative. But do it fairly, and also own up to their own inequities and unfairness. If it’s true that state lawmakers have known all along about the retirement package, then it’s even more apparent this campaign isn’t about getting TSU out of fiscal danger, but just more smears and personal attacks. “They sent a posse to me,” Glover said during a recent television interview. “To ask me to retire immediately. I didn’t do that at the time. But I did know at some point we would come to a point where I would retire. This was key legislators telling me to retire. They were cowards. They sent others to me—people I trusted to talk to me about retiring. It was a very carefully constructed decision and agreement. What is this hypocrisy that’s going on?”
The Tribune also agrees with her that these constant questions about her retirement package represent another example of the state trying to distract from the fact it has unfunded TSU for decades. Even as recently as 2021, the Office of Legislative Budget Analysis found the state failed to provide TSU with required matching funds for grants from the Department of Agriculture for research and extension services. The shortfall was between $151 and $544 million. That time, the state responded by providing TSU with a one-time $250 million allocation for infrastructure. But the gap in spending between what has been provided for the University of Tennessee and what was given to TSU was still the largest shortfall of any state.
The Tennessee Comptroller has been on a crusade for months to reduce the issue solely to mismanagement at TSU. At no time has he ever mentioned or cited the impact of the disparity in funding. “TSU is the only state university that has demonstrated less than competent management, whether it’s in student enrollment or financial management. And so, unfortunately, that’s where our work has been required,” he said. It would be instructive to see how well the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Middle Tennessee State University, or any other state institution would operate shorted $2.1 billion over 30 years.
It’s a waste of time at this juncture to expect fairness from this state legislature or their cronies in the mainstream media. The Tribune simply asks its readers to understand that the fiscal problems of Tennessee State University are far too complex for the blame to be laid at the foot of any one person or one person’s staff.
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