By admin 
The new academic year is off to a rocky start at South Carolina State University, where the school’s faculty senate recently passed a resolution of no confidence in the leadership of President Alexander Conyers.
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The resolution, adopted Aug. 25 by a 15-1 vote with one abstention, takes issue with Conyers’ financial stewardship, resource allocation, personnel decisions and alleged failure to incorporate faculty input into academic decision-making.
It calls on the Board of Trustees to “conduct a meaningful, comprehensive, independent and transparent review” of faculty concerns and “take such action as is necessary to restore confidence in academic leadership.”
The resolution’s passage compounds a tumultuous stretch for S.C. State, which in the past year has endured two fatal campus shootings, a bitter separation from its charitable foundation and intense pushback from students over the selection of Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette as its May 2026 commencement speaker.
Those incidents, as well as the Board of Trustees’ controversial decision to eliminate all non-voting board seats, had already prompted the faculty senate to cast votes of no confidence earlier this year in the campus police chief, the university’s vice president of finance and operations and the S.C. State board.
Alexander Thierry, president of the S.C. State Faculty Senate, said the lack of urgency addressing, or even acknowledging, deteriorating conditions at the state’s only public historically Black university had prompted the faculty senate to formally express its displeasure again.
“It had been long enough,” said Thierry, an associate professor in the university’s Visual Arts department. “We started a new academic year with the same problems, so we’re just setting up faculty and students for a lot of difficulties.”
When contacted for comment about the faculty senate resolution, an S.C. State spokesman directed all questions to Board Chairman Douglass Gantt, who did not respond to a request for a comment.
Among the points of contention for faculty are the university’s failure to hire more full-time instructional staff despite a 124% growth in freshman enrollment; an expectation that academic programs operate under “substantially flat budgets,” in spite of the increase in students; and a widening salary gap between university administrators and instructional faculty.
There are also signs of significant cash flow problems at the university, according to the faculty senate resolution, which alleges that students who have been promised scholarships have had them withheld, delayed or reduced; that faculty members and vendors aren’t always paid on time; and that checks issued by the university have sometimes bounced due to insufficient funds.
“We have multiple faculty members that were teaching overloads last academic year and did not receive compensation for those overloads until the very end of the fiscal year,” Thierry said.
The faculty senate’s resolution also highlights S.C. State’s growing dropout rate — first-year student retention has reportedly sunk 13 percentage points since Conyers assumed the presidency — and attributes the issue to deteriorating physical learning environments and inadequate institutional resources, academic support and instructional staffing.
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The resolution also accuses Conyers of obstructing the established tenure process; making consequential decisions about academic programs without meaningful faculty consultation; and destabilizing academic leadership by removing or reassigning experienced administrators who exercised independent judgment or expressed disagreement with his administration.
One situation cited specifically involved the recent appointment of Louis Whitesides as interim provost and vice president of academic affairs.
Conyers’ appointment of Whitesides, the university’s vice president for public service and agriculture, disturbed faculty due to his “documented and admitted lack of academic background,” the resolution states.
“That lack of experience and lack of familiarity with processes and procedures and nuances of academic affairs is concerning to faculty,” Thierry said in an interview Wednesday. “And faculty were not included in decisions related to the appointment of the interim provost.”
Whitesides was thrust into the chief academic officer role July 17, following the abrupt resignation of Frederick Evans, who had served as the university’s provost since 2021.
Evans, who was well regarded by the faculty, notified colleagues July 16 that he was resigning “effective immediately,” according to an email obtained by The State Media Co. His message does not offer any explanation for his departure.
Resolving faculty members’ concerns is “particularly urgent,” according to the faculty senate resolution, because of the university’s approaching fifth-year accreditation review by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.
The resolution warns that if university leadership continues to make decisions that violate institutional processes and are devoid of adequate faculty participation it could “expose South Carolina State University to avoidable scrutiny regarding its compliance with SACSCOC standards and place the University’s accreditation standing and institutional reputation at unnecessary risk.”
As of Wednesday, Thierry said the faculty senate had not received a response to its resolution of no confidence in Conyers, a retired U.S. Army colonel and S.C. State alum who was appointed on an interim basis in July 2021, and inaugurated as the university’s 13th president the following April.
The elected governing body, which is composed of full-time faculty members chosen by their respective departments, is working on follow-up communication to elicit the board’s feedback, he said.
“If we’re not hearing from the board, then that means the board doesn’t want to work with the faculty and the faculty senate,” Thierry said. “And that’s concerning to us.”
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