Dive Brief:
- Florida A&M University's president will resign, just two months after the historically Black institution publicly reversed course over a failed donation originally billed as worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Neither the university nor President Larry Robinson gave a reason Friday for his pending departure, and his last day has not yet been set. Robinson will return to the institution as an environmental studies professor, a position he held prior to taking the presidency following a yearlong sabbatical.
- Florida A&M's trustees will now begin the process of finding a new president, the university said. The next board meeting has not yet been scheduled.
Dive Insight:
Robinson's almost seven-year tenure as president came with a number of glowing achievements, Florida A&M Board Chair Kristin Harper noted Friday. U.S. News & World Report included Florida A&M in its Top 100 Universities lists and ranked the university as the best public HBCU for five years in a row.
But that legacy became clouded following a botched donation that appears to have circumvented Florida A&M's traditional chain of command.
The university announced on May 4 it had received $237.8 million from Gregory Gerami, an industrial hemp businessman, through his trust, the Issac Batterson 7th Family Trust. In a since-deleted news release, the institution called the gift one of the biggest single personal donations ever to an historically Black college or university.
FAMU leaders, including Robinson, lauded Gerami and his trust at the time.
"Their names are now etched into the annals of Florida A&M University in perpetuity,” Robinson said in a statement.
But there were discrepancies surrounding Gerami's gift, made in stocks, from the start. For example, the donation agreement listed a different valuation than Florida A&M had announced, according to records obtained by the Tallahassee Democrat.
Florida A&M's administration also accepted the donation without informing the board of trustees or the university's foundation members, according to sources quoted by Politico.
The lack of discussion appears to have led to oversights in the donation vetting process.
In a portent of Florida A&M's situation, Coastal Carolina University, in South Carolina, announced and then terminated a $95 million donation from Gerami in 2020. But Florida A&M did not reach out to the university during the vetting process, according to Politico.
Scrutiny over the dubious value and nature of the deal caused Florida A&M to withdraw from the donation deal just days after it was announced, and Shawnta Friday-Stroud resigned as Florida A&M's vice president for university advancement and executive director of the FAMU Foundation. Friday-Stroud kept her position as dean of the university's business school.
Now, Robinson is also stepping down.
"These past few years have only strengthened my core belief in the unique power of HBCUs to shape lives and nurture critical talent that serve our families and communities," Robinson said in his resignation letter. "To play even a small part in this is the privilege of a lifetime.”
