MEMPHIS
Members of the board of trustees at LeMoyne-Owen College heeded the call to resign, allowing their institution to receive an anonymous $2.5 million donation to pay its operating costs that were due Friday.
An anonymous donor pledged to award the money to this historically black college in Memphis, Tenn., so long as its board of trustees step aside.
All but three of the college’s 30-plus trustees had submitted their letters of resignation by Thursday, says board chairman Robert Lipscomb in an article in the Commercial Appeal. Those who resigned will remain on the board until their positions are filled. Trustees who hold alumni slots or those designated for churches were not asked by the donor to leave.
“We have the opportunity to renew ourselves,” Lipscomb says in the article. “Our progress isn’t going to happen overnight, but it will happen.”
In the last two years, LeMoyne’s board of trustees experienced a lot of internal dissension, stymieing its effectiveness, a crisis that the anonymous donor was aware of, says Gayle S. Rose, who resigned from the board three weeks ago because of this conflict.
“The anonymous donor understood that the current board was full of strife as that was quite public knowledge,” says Rose who was chair of the board’s institutional advancement committee and vice chair of its finance committee. “Everybody recognized that we were pretty much in a stalemate and very ineffective as a board of trustees. We have an important legal responsibility that we were having a hard time meeting because of the fractiousness of the board.”
