Those interested can weigh in on what they’d like to see in Cal Poly Humboldt’s next president during a two-hour forum Thursday with the selection committee.
Embattled President Tom Jackson Jr. stepped down in August, retreating to a tenured professor position with the university after five tumultuous years helming the institution. Michael Spagna is currently serving as CHP’s interim president and is contractually prohibited from applying for the permanent position.
The California State University Trustees’ Committee for the Selection of the President will hold the open forum from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday in the Van Duzer Theatre, though it will also be live-streamed and archived on the university’s Presidential Search webpage. Those attending the event in person do not need to register in order to provide comment to the committee, though those planning to speak virtually are asked to register to do so by 5 p.m. today through the search webpage.
The committee comprises CSU Trustees Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, Larry Adamson, Lillian Kimbell, Anna Ortiz Morfit and Jack Clarke, as well as CSU Chancellor Mildred Garcia. An advisory committee, which will offer input to the selection committee, includes Wildlife Department Chair Daniel Barton, Anthropology professor Marissa Ramsier, Vice President of Academic Programs Carmen Bustos-Works, student representatives Mara Kravitz and Wysdem Singleton, Cal Poly Pomona President Soraya Coley; local community members Betty Chinn and Virgil Moorehead; College of Professional Studies community engagement specialist Bella Gray; alum Daniel Sealy, President’s Advisory Board Member Miles Slattery and University Senate Chair James Woglom.
The process is scheduled to put forward a candidate recommendation to the CSU Board of Trustees for approval in March.
Appointed to the position in the summer of 2019 to succeed Lisa Rossbacher, Jackson came to Humboldt by way of Black Hills State University in South Dakota, where he’d served as president for about five years, become Humboldt’s eighth — and first Black — president. His tenure leading Humboldt has been extraordinary.
Under Jackson’s tenure, what was Humboldt State University became Cal Poly Humboldt, the state’s third polytechnic institute, a transformation accompanied by an investment of more than $450 million in state funds and lofty goals of doubling the school’s enrollment in the coming years.
But Jackson has also repeatedly been roiled by criticism and controversy on campus. Most notably, there was his administration’s calling police to arrest pro-Palestinian demonstrators on campus last spring, which led to an eight-day occupation of Siemens Hall and Jackson’s decision to close campus, transition courses online for final weeks and hold disbursed commencement ceremonies off campus. Jackson’s handling of the protest spurred a no-confidence vote from the University Senate, which charged his “unfamiliarity” with the student body led him to mishandle the response, as well as a letter calling for his resignation and that of his chief of staff, Mark Johnson, signed by hundreds of faculty and staff members.
Jackson has also faced controversy over his handling of COVID-19 protocols, the university reviving a controversial student housing project, its outbidding of a senior living community to purchase a 9.5-acre property near campus, his making comments that many saw as an attempt to silence survivors of sexual assault and harassment during a fall welcome event and his decision to force students living in their cars off campus.
On campus, however, one of the most pervasive criticism of Jackson’s tenure was his relative invisibility, with students and staff alike saying he rarely attended events and meetings, and was seldom sighted on campus. The perception was so pervasive that one student publication included Jackson’s office in a tongue-in-cheek list of the best places to have sex on campus because, in the writer’s view, no one was ever there.
Controversy aside, Garcia lauded Jackson’s tenure after announcing his resignation, which she and Jackson both said had been in the works for months and was not a response to the former president’s handing of the April protests. In a statement, Garcia praised Jackson’s leadership as “visionary, principled and forward-focused,” crediting him with leading the university’s “bold transformation” into a polytechnic institution.
In stepping down, Jackson exercised a provision in his contract allowing him to take a tenured faculty position with the university’s College of Professional Studies and the College of Extended Education and Global Engagement, though Journal efforts to clarify exactly what that assignment will entail have been unsuccessful.
This article appears in ‘The Shit Show’.
