More than a 100 students at Lemoyne-Owen College (LOC) staged a protest following the dismissal of Dr. Terrell L. Strayhorn, a popular vice president of student and academic affairs at the historically Black college located in Memphis.
Strayhorn’s job was eliminated alongside six other positions at the small, urban college in the wake of a reported $1 million budget deficit, according to interim President Dr. Carol Johnson-Dean, who has been on the job since August.
“Sometimes you have to eliminate a lot of people to get to a certain amount of money, and I think what we were trying to do is not have a significant impact on every area of the college,” Johnson-Dean told The Commercial Appeal. 
The college currently has 836 students, a sharp decline from the 1000 students enrolled in 2012.
Johnson-Dean’s rationale did not sit well with the students who staged a sit-in in Brownlee Hall on Thursday to protest all of the firings, most notably Strayhorn’s ouster. The students chanted “We want Strayhorn,” as Johnson-Dean urged calm and explained her rationale for eliminating his job.
“The Lemoyne-Owen College has claimed, for a number of years, to be student-centered. The College, however, has never actively worked to prove this. This changed when Dr. Terrell Strayhorn was hired as interim vice president for Academic and Student Affairs,” Sainna Christian, president of the Student Government Association at LOC wrote in a public letter to Johnson-Dean. “Dr. Strayhorn has been an avid advocate for the students and has been one of the only persons on this campus who has genuinely expressed and shown interest in the lives of and well-being of the students. To this end, it is an understatement to say that we, the students, are livid at the news that our own genuine support has been let go.”
Strayhorn was hired in July 2018 as interim vice president of student and academic affairs by the school’s former president, Dr. Andrea Lewis Miller. He eventually was named to the permanent position and was considered by some, including members of the alumni association, to be a leading candidate for the presidency once the board of trustees announced in June that Miller’s contract would not be renewed.
