Four members of Bethune-Cookman University’s (B-CU) Board of Trustees resigned last week after a letter from the president of the university’s alumni association circulated calling for the ouster of several board members due to the university’s “current financial and academic crisis.”
The four board members – former board chair Joe Petrock, Rafael A. Ramirez Jr., Michael D. Walsh and Nancy Lohman – resigned following the August 14 letter from B-CU National Alumni Association president Robert Delancy accusing the board of not acting in the best interest of the university. Observers believe additional board resignations may soon follow. 
Along with current board chair Michele Carter-Scott, Kent Sharples and Jacob F. Bryan, Petrock is among the names explicitly listed in Delancy’s letter. He explained that his resignation was due to frustration after “being unfairly blamed for B-CU’s financial problems,” according to the Daytona Beach News-Journal.
The former board chair instead blamed former B-CU president Dr. Edison O. Jackson for moving forward with a dormitory deal that will cost the university roughly $306 million over a span of 40 years despite the private, historically Black university’s modest endowment. B-CU has since filed a lawsuit claiming corruption and fraud against Jackson and other former senior administrators involved with the dormitory deal.
“I wasn’t the chairman when the housing project was presented and I wasn’t on the executive committee,” Petrock said. “I was just a member of the board. We weren’t given all the information.”
Delancy, a former Internal Revenue Service agent, was recently elected to serve as president of B-CU’s National Alumni Association at the end of June. He said that even before his election, he and other alumni raised an alarm in 2015 about the financial implications of the dormitory deal, among other issues.
“We’re just trying to save Bethune-Cookman University,” Delancy told Diverse. “That’s all I want.”
