Call to Action: Preserving the Rich History and Legacy of Tougaloo College!

Tougaloo College Alumni Coalition for Change: A Petition to the College

Board of Trustees, President of the College and TCNAA Executive Board.

Background and Overview:

Tougaloo College is a private, coeducational, historically black four-year liberal arts institution that was founded in 1869. Tougaloo has gained national respect for its high academic standards and level of social responsibility. Aside from its social commitment, Tougaloo College has traditionally been an oasis of academic excellence and a campus of
engaged learners that have produced a congressman, state supreme court justices, state legislators, mayors, scientists, attorneys, physicians, chief executive officers, school superintendents, and higher education administrators.

After repeated failures by the administration that was installed in 2019, faculty, staff, and students have voiced concerns directly to the administration, Board of Trustees, and the Alumni Executive Board through e-mails, petitions, social media, and news outlets. There is discontentment among our ranks directly related to low student enrollment, a decrease in campus morale, horrid student living conditions, and questionable financial practices that have negatively impacted the college.

We, the alumni of Tougaloo College, are drafting this communication to protest the recent state of our alma mater. This document is being submitted at a crucial time in the institution’s one-hundred-and-fifty-three-year history in advance of our fifth-year SACS review in 2025. In response to these revelations, a list of grievances is outlined by the undersigned alumni, students, and stakeholders of Tougaloo College.

Alumni Grievances

• Tougaloo College Board of Trustees has abdicated its fiduciary duty to preserve and protect the institution’s reputation by helping define, support, and protect its mission. It is the responsibility of the board to select, critique, support, and replace the president when necessary.  Communication between the Alumni and the Board of Trustees is non-existent. The current communication process is not effective due to an unformal structure for providing feedback from alumni and other stakeholders.
• Declining enrollment- for the sixth consecutive semester, student enrollment has decreased to a record 40-year low. In the current term (Spring Semester 2023), Tougaloo College experienced a high rate of attrition among full-time equivalent students, according to preliminary data collected by the Office of Enrollment Management. Reportedly, there is a school record of 108 full-time equivalent students, who did not return for the spring 2023 semester.
• Transparency in Releasing Critical Information to Stakeholders- It is very apparent that Tougaloo College’s leadership team has withheld critical information including, but not limited to: Budgets/Expenditures, Grants Funding, Presidential credit card spending accounts, student enrollment reports, retention, graduation, and attrition rates, updates on maintenance and renovation improvements.
• Inability to Recruit, Hire, and Retain Qualified Personnel- Over a three-year period under the current administration there have been three (3) Vice- Presidents of Student Affairs, (2) Chief Financial Officers, (2) Provost/Academic Deans, and (1) Vice- President Office of Institution Advancement (Recent resignation, position currently vacant).
• Vacant Full-Time Registrar Position- From December 2019 through January 2023, the college was not operating with a full-time Registrar. This position is critical to the mission of the College.
• Provost Resigned Last Semester and is presently teaching classes, leaving no Assistant or Associate Provost/Academic Dean to run the office. Currently, the office is staffed by two non-professional academicians with graduation nearing and an approaching fifth-year review by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACS) in 2025.
• Budget Deficit-Total enrollment in the current spring semester (2023) dropped by 108 students, roughly 30% of last semester’s totals. Based on this number, it is estimated that Tougaloo will experience a projected $2,000,000 shortage associated with low student enrollment.
• Full-time Faculty versus Adjunct Faculty-The College is potentially non-compliant with the minimum requirements of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission (SACSCOC) guidelines for principles of accreditation in regard to full-time faculty versus adjunct faculty, which is a potential area of non-compliance for the SACS review scheduled in 2025.
• Faculty/Staff Discontentment- There has been a mass exodus of faculty and staff since 2019, due to poor communication and inconsistent leadership. Per the college’s website, there are approximately 40 open positions (several teaching positions). This is a record turnover rate among this group, which negatively impacts the stability of the institution.
• Student Unrest and Low Morale- As reported by the official Tougaloo website, student satisfaction was at 75% in 2019. We are disheartened by the student despair under the current President and her administration. In 2022, much of the student body rendered a No-Confidence vote through a signed petition to remove the current executive leadership team. As a result, a substantial number of students did not enroll in classes for the following semester.
• Alumni Membership and Support -Alumni participation in graduation has declined and will continue to decline. This decline can be partly attributed to the President breaking the tradition of holding graduation exercises on the campus green to alternate locations without input from alumni and other stakeholders.

Alumni Body At-Large Demands:

• Remove the Current Tougaloo College President and Executive Leadership Team- At the conclusion of the Spring 2023 Semester end all contractual agreements with the current administration.
• The Board of Trustees should respond in writing to the grievances outlined in this petition within 10 business days.
• The Board of Trustees should participate in a Town-Hall Meeting (time and date to be determined) convened by a professional mediator or neutral party with all Tougaloo College Alumni, and members of the Board of Trustees.
• The Board of Trustees shall hold an open meeting once a semester to address alumni concerns and produce and make accessible to the alumni an online publication each quarter providing highlights of each quarterly meeting. We want to be made aware of openings on the Board and have a way to make recommendations for those vacancies.
• Conduct an Independent Audit of the College's spending since the Fall of 2019.
• Conduct an Independent Audit of enrollment, retention, and attrition from Fall 2014 to Spring 2023.

Thank you for your prompt response regarding this urgent matter. Please direct all future correspondence to the Tougaloo College Alumni Coalition for Change. We can be reached at the following e-mail address: TCAlumniCoalitionforChange@yahoo.com.