Perhaps the only consistent behaviors shown by the majority of Mott Community College’s Board of Trustees throughout the last two years of unsteady leadership have been commitments to withholding information and/or outright dishonesty. To recap a few highlights:

• The board has been accused in the past of violating the Open Meetings Act;
• Board Chair Andy Everman denied telling the previous president of the college to call him ‘sir’ despite two other board members telling MLive they witnessed it;
• Everman, on video, gave conflicting statements during a meeting and in a TV interview immediately after (and he also became a meme);
• Board Trustee Jeffrey Swanson hasn’t explained how he wrote a multi-page motion during a meeting in which he was never shown writing while on camera or how the college apparently no longer has a copy of his document;
• An inflammatory campaign mailer that pretty directly threatens faculty went out, and specifically supports one incumbent board member (Swanson) and mentions another current board member who is not up for re-election (Wendy Wolcott) as well as the current interim president; the mailer likely violates election law by not including a line saying who paid for it; Swanson and Wolcott both deny knowing who sent it despite both being supported on it;
• Wolcott is running for County Commission in Davison as a Democrat even though she is not remotely a Democrat.

There’s honestly more examples, but I’m tired. Anyway, here’s the latest: a pastor at a church in Hartland wrote a letter encouraging members of his church to submit public comments and attend Mott’s next board meeting at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 28. Those things are certainly their right — Hartland isn’t in Genesee County, but it is included in Mott’s district. But the letter, like many other actions of this board majority, is full of distortions. Here are a few:

I want you to know that once the overwhelmingly progressive faculty, woke student groups, and liberal community members discovered Shaunda’s spiritual and ideological framework, she was immediately targeted for crucifixion-like abuse during the public comment portions of the subsequent Trustee meetings.

I don’t know anything about Richardson-Snell’s spiritual or religious framework. I do know that she has donated thousands of dollars to a presidential candidate who has consistently been hostile toward higher education. His current running mate, for example, called professors “the enemy.” As I’ve written before, a person’s political beliefs certainly aren’t disqualifying for a position like college president. But as a teacher at Mott, I think it is fair to ask someone now leading hundreds of faculty members if, as her donations suggest, she thinks professors are “the enemy.”

I would also point out that public commenters have certainly been upset about Richardson-Snell’s hiring. Her lack of experience in higher education has certainly been a theme of many comments. But the overwhelming majority of comments have been directed at the elected board itself for not involving or getting input from stakeholders on campus or the community that surrounds and depends on the college prior to her hiring. Their search process has not been transparent. It has not followed any sort of typical executive search process in higher ed or any other major industry. It did not share info about how candidates for the interim position were evaluated. It did not share info about their backgrounds with the public in a timely enough fashion for people to get a feel for who the candidates were and what their strengths were. No board member has publicly explained what stood out to them about Richardson-Snell’s background compared to other candidates (except Swanson saying he wanted someone to run the college “like more of a business”). No board member has publicly explained why the college took the highly unusual and costly step of conducting an external search for an interim president (“interims” are usually selected from within, to keep the college steady while a permanent search is conducted) prior to engaging in another search for a permanent president.

All of those things are valid and fair criticisms of elected officials who provide oversight of a public college.

This line isn’t a particularly big part of this person’s post, but it is instructive to how little this person likely knows about what is happening at Mott or the role it plays in Flint and Genesee County:

Even though I live in Genesee County, I am relatively uninvolved there. That’s changing.

So, it’s safe to say he knows very little about Mott, the people he labels as “overwhelmingly progressive faculty, woke student groups, and liberal community members,” the Flint community, etc.

He also argues that other colleges in Michigan have hired presidents who lack higher education experience. Here’s an excerpt:

As you can see from the information above, Shaunda’s credentials and skillset are by no means unique to higher education in Michigan. Even closer to home, the President of Oakland University, Ora Pescovitz, has no background in higher education. Russell Kavalhuna, the President of Henry Ford Community College, is a former pilot with a law degree.

First, a glance at Pescovitz’s bio shows his statement that she has no background in higher education is absurdly false. A quick read of Kavalhuna’s, and you get to this line: “Mr. Kavalhuna was the Executive Director of Flight Operations at Western Michigan University’s College of Aviation, the nation’s third largest collegiate aviation program. He also taught a course in the curriculum.” So those lines from the pastor are either misstatements or blatant omissions.

He also is glossing over the fact that Pescovitz and Kavalhuna were both hired, as is custom, with SIGNIFICANT input from university stakeholders. As an alumnus of Oakland University, we had the chance to get information about finalists for the position, submit questions, and even hear from candidates in forums if we chose to. Here’s a detailed recap of the process Henry Ford College followed in its search, and all of the steps they took to allow input from stakeholders. Members of their board also provided comments about why they chose the candidate who was eventually offered the position.

Mott Community College’s board has operated without any of this level of transparency. They’ve shut out input from faculty, staff, students (you know … those most impacted by their choice of president), and the community the college serves and they’ve been secretive about why they’ve made the choices they’ve made.

Mott’s board has regularly shut out the concerns of people it is elected to represent. It has regularly employed secretive and non-transparent processes, most notably during its search for an interim and/or permanent president. Every issue related to this board, including the unpopular choice it installed to lead the college, stems from this one underlying issue: this board has not fulfilled its obligations to the community it was elected to represent.