Interim president focuses on pulling people together
T. Scott Boatright, Reporter
11-18-2009
GRAMBLING — Frank Pogue may be the new Grambling State University interim president, but he went into “medical mode” on his first day on the job as he began the process of trying to heal and pull together the troubled university.That meant a day of meeting with students, faculty and staff members and GSU supporters and immersing himself in the university’s culture.
Meeting with members of the area media in the process, the 71-year-old Pogue said his first priority is to pull everyone involved with the recently troubled school back together.
“I see my role to be really bringing people of good will together,” Pogue said.
“Bringing people together in the academic setting is something that I’ve been pretty successful at doing. I want to build on the strengths of Grambling, an old, historically black institution that’s done marvelous things for everybody.”
Stepping in on a temporary basis to help calm waters at a troubled school is nothing new for Pogue, who is coming off a one-year stint as interim presient at Chicago State University from July 2008 – July 2009.
“This is my third time as an interim president,” Pogue said. “And I was a longtime president at the University of Edinboro. I think I’ve held just about every job there is except for chancellor of a system.”
Pogue said that reaching out to the Grambling community of students, staff members and residents is an important step as he begins trying to turn the university in the right direction.
“It’s very important to learn the culture of the university, so starting today in very meaningful ways, I meet with all groups,” Pogue said. “Anyone that has anything to do with Grambling, I would like to be available to meet with them.”
Pogue said he’ll also reach out to different area churches, which he said have a significant relationship with historically black colleges and institutions because of the initial intermingling between church leadership and university leadership in many of those schools’ formative years.
“When you reach off the campus to alumni, to churches, to other community organizations, to elected officials and anyone else, you build community,” Pogue said.
“At Chicago, I was able to establish a ‘Chicago State University Day.’ At Edinboro, I went to a different church every Sunday for pretty much two years. The approach was to bring the university to the people. I have been greeted by rabbis, Catholics, Baptists, Presbyterians — you name it, it didn’t matter to me. The reality is that if you really want to tease out the pulse of a community, it’s often the church that will do that. That’s where you go find it. It’s the watering hole, so to speak.”
Pogue replaces Horace Judson, who resigned Oct. 31 after five years at the school and who was criticized by some faculty and students for allegedly being a poor communicator and not relating well to the broader university and area communities.
“I’ve never entered a position where I didn’t find problems and challenges,” Pogue said.
“That’s just the nature of the operation. Grambling has a few challenges. We have many unmet needs at Grambling. But again, I don’t know of an institution that I’ve been affiliated with where that’s not true. It may well be a little bit more severe here because we haven’t really focused on ways to use the resources that we have.
“We’re going to meet those challenges head on. There’s not a single problem GSU has that we can’t overcome as a community.”
In light of projected state budget cuts in upcoming years that will likely reduce higher education funding, Pogue said one thing he’ll emphasize is working with business and corporate leaders and alumni to try to boost private fundraising.
“It’s no longer the case that any state institution can rely only on public funding exclusively,” Pogue said. “States just don’t have the resources to increase the budget for campuses, so we have to really be aggressive in generating our own money. So the area of advancement and development, fundraising, is the role of the president.”
Pogue said it’s too early to say whether he is interested in becoming GSU’s permanent president, but he did not rule out eventually pursuing the job.
“What I think the board of supervisors made pretty clear was that in my relationship with Grambling, there was nothing preventing me from being an applicant for the position,” Pogue said. “But it’s much too early for me to have any response to that. It’s kind of an honor to have this opportunity and I’m looking forward to it.”
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