The charitable foundation for South Carolina State University is accusing interim university president Alexander Conyers of launching a “retaliatory campaign” against the foundation for refusing to “blindly” supplement his six-figure salary with an extra $75,000, according to a lawsuit filed in Orangeburg County Monday.
The lawsuit says the university wrongly kicked the foundation out of its campus office under the guise of “space needs” and terminated its memorandum of understanding, or MOU, with the foundation under pretext of “transparency” and “accountability,” court records show. The foundation is asking a court to invalidate South Carolina State’s termination of its MOU. It is also seeking “damages and other appropriate remedies” for what it describes as the university’s “wrongful interference with the Foundation’s property and operations.”
“The Foundation is not President Conyers’ bank account. It is a separate and independent nonprofit corporation,” the foundation stated in its lawsuit, which accuses Conyers and his allies of trying to exert control over the foundation and wrongly using the foundation’s financial records to solicit donors for a competing fund-raising gala.
The bigger picture:
Few campuses have experienced as much turmoil as South Carolina State University as of late. The campus experienced two deadly shootings in the 2025-2026 school year, one in which two teens were killed during an alleged marijuana deal gone bad at a campus housing complex, and another in which a 19-year-old student Jaliyah Butler was fatally shot during homecoming festivities.
More recently, students protested over the selection of Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, a Republican, as commencement speaker. The university ultimately disinvited Evette, who dismissed her detractors as a “woke mob.” A few days later, a group of state lawmakers announced plans to cut funding for the university over the commencement fiasco, although one Republican lawmaker said the gesture was merely “symbolic” to express discontent with the decision to disinvite Evette.
The legal battle over the Foundation's independence arrives as South Carolina State — the state's only public HBCU — already teeters on a precarious financial edge. Despite a 2023 Biden administration assessment concluding the university had been systematically shortchanged by $500 million over the past 30 years, state leaders have recently weaponized public funding as a tool of political accountability. This internal civil war between the university’s administration and its primary fundraising arm risks alienating a donor base already wary of campus unrest, potentially further destabilizing an institution that remains caught in the crosshairs of both local violence and state-level political retaliation.
