I was reading between the lines the other day when I drew some harsh conclusions about recently resigned William & Mary President Gene Nichol (see “The Nichol Resignation Narrative Is Looking Weaker and Weaker“). The charismatic but erratic college president had baldly misrepresented the circumstances of his resignation, I’d written, and in doing so had generated waves of negative headlines for the university he purported to love. He was not fired for ideological reasons, as he claimed, but for his failures as an administrator. I now feel totally vindicated in drawing those conclusions.
At last the W&M Board of Visitors has directly answered the falsehoods and misrepresentations that Nichol made in his resignation letter and has allowed his admirers to perpetuate. As Bill Geroux reports for the Times-Dispatch, “Board members insisted it was Nichol’s shortcomings as as a fundraiser and administrator, not his stands on the Wren Cross and other controversies, that made them decide not to renew his contract.”
Indeed, the very manner in which Nichol handled his resignation — misrepresenting the facts, going public in an impulsive and dramatic fashion, and allowing falsehoods to spread uncorrected — only confirms that the BoV was utterly correct in its appraisal of the man. Nichol was, and remains, a loose cannon. He has no business being a university president.
When eight of 17 board members gathered on campus yesterday to answer a barrage of questions from irate students and faculty, Rector Michael K. Powell added new details of the BoV’s concerns about Nichol’s performance. Nichol’s Gateway program to provide financial help for low-income students, he revealed, was on the verge of foundering for lack of money. The board also had suggested a year ago that the president hire a chief operating officer to help him with administrative matters, but he showed no interest. We’ll never know the full story, unfortunately, because Powell is restrained by his respect for Nichol’s privacy and dignity from delving into the ugly details.
Board member Kathy Hornsby also put the lie to charges that the board was swayed by the outcries of conservative alumni or meddling by members of the General Assembly. She descibed herself as a “liberal Democrat” who was not intimidated by the conservative critics. Likewise, board member Anita Poston said that, as “a child of the ’60s,” she found the controversial sex workers show to be “very, very tame.” Nichol’s I-was-fired-because-of-my-principles storyline is a red herring.
Bacon’s bottom lines: There are two bottom lines. First and most important, it is increasingly clear that Nichol misrepresented the circumstances of his resignation. Through his dramatic departure, he plunged the university into controversy and besmirched its good name. Frankly, I think he should be run off campus (he’s staying on as a law school professor): not because he’s a “liberal.” There are many other college professors as liberal as he, if not more so, but they contribute to the university rather than diminish it. Nichol should be evicted because he has demonstrated that he has no regard for the truth and he has inflicted great harm on a fine institution.
The second lesson is that the conservatives in the General Assembly who politicized Nichol’s handling of the sex workers show should have butted out. By hauling in BoV members for questioning, they made the board’s job more difficult by lending credence to the idea that Nichol was the victim of a witch hunt. I stand by my observations in January, “There’s a Right Way and a Wrong Way to Get Rid of Nichol,” that political grandstanding by politicians was unhelpful. The system worked as it was designed to work without any interference from the outside.
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