Members of the National Alumni Association are now challenging the Board of Trustees to oust Fred Gainous from his current presidential tenure. And they have taken their open protest against President Gainous to arguably the most visible venue in the world.
That’s right people, the Internet.
On their Web site, www.petitiononline.com/famu1887, the organization pegs Gainous as an unfit leader through a series of charges. Many of the accusations they are bringing before the BOT amount to his failure of demonstrating a competent leadership role, corrupting the University’s standing in the education arena, as well as placing the University in a position for public humiliation.
However, what may truly be found laughable by the BOT is the alumni petition. Because it is within reach to just about anybody, everybody has taken advantage of the signature process.
To date, the NAA has racked up 1,734 electronic signatures.
But after a casual browse through their pages, it becomes clear that this number is also misleading.
There are many instances where advocates for new leadership have signed their names more than once and the usual tomfoolery that occurs on Internet forums has also been notated (i.e. gibberish appearing in the name and comment fields).
Along with being riddled with spelling errors, the document has been erroneously penned by university officials who have and are currently supporting President Gainous openly. Love Collins III, possibly the biggest surprise on the electronic list, informed a Famuan reporter that his name had been falsely endorsed on the document.
If that weren’t enough, actual supporters of Gainous have also taken the opportunity to muddy the petition with their John Hancock and anti-protest remarks.
So exactly how legitimate is this document?
In their race to initiate a public protest of FAMU’s current leadership, somehow alumni members neglected the likelihood that signatures on an unsupervised petition could raise issues of credibility.
If an organization is serious about accumulating names on its petition, then a more trustworthy route of getting those endorsements should be employed.
How did they loose grasp of the old-fashioned concept of a moderator, a clipboard, a pen and a few lines on a stack of pages?
Albeit the webmasters at Petition Online guarantee that signature lines using phony names “and/or unacceptable language are voided promptly, whenever they are discarded,” members of the NAA have an enormous clean-up job on their hands before bringing their petition to the BOT.
John Kerry struggles to keep up
With close to 50 days remaining until voters cast ballots for their favored presidential candidate, the scuffle for the polls is heating up.
Recently conducted Gallup/CNN/USATODAY Polls show that President Bush is gaining a slight edge over Kerry in some key battlefield states.
The status of this neck-in-neck race has led to a barrage of political ads by each candidate’s supporters.
These advertisements slam the opposing candidate and attempt to appeal to the lowest sensibilities of swing voters. However, most notably is the influence that these ads have had on the content of Bush and Kerry’s speeches.
Bush has commenced to taking jabs at Kerry’s flip-flopping position on the War on Iraq and Kerry is retaliating by bashing Bush’s economic policies.
In the meantime, grassroots organizations have launched a series of even more advertisement surrounding the questionable events of each candidate’s military service.
Could everyone please get back to the issues?
Searching for the truth on issues that took place over 30 years ago has no relative bearing on Bush or Kerry’s plans once they’re elected.
Nov. 2 is too close for swing voters to be inundated with pseudo whistle blowing claims.
More airtime needs to be allotted to the discussion of rising college tuition, lack of job opportunity for recent graduates and epidemic levels of AIDS/HIV among black women.
How does debate over anyone’s attendance or Medal of Honor during service begin to compare with these urgent issues?
Contact the editorial board at www.famuanopininons.com