H.3663 would remove the sitting president and board of trustees from South Carolina State University. In their place each member of the Budget and Control Board (BCB) would appoint a designee to serve as one of a five member interim board of trustees. The interim board of trustees will in turn remove SC State’s current president and appoint an interim president. Despite this and other powers the interim board of trustees will ultimately remain accountable to the BCB as each designee will serve at the pleasure of the appointing member of the BCB and can be removed by them at any time.
The BCB has never before been tasked with running a university and nothing in its past or makeup suggests it would be suited to the task. The BCB and other state agencies such as the Commission on Higher Education have been receiving warning signs of SC State’s financial mismanagement for years yet they have only recently been to express concerns once the problem has become impossible to ignore. The waste and mismanagement that has brought SC State to its current point may well be an argument for more coordinated governance of state funded higher education in the form of a state university board of regents. It is not an argument for expanding the powers of an unaccountable legislative/executive hybrid agency that has no business running a university.