John Rudley gets credit for turnaround at TSU
It’s good to see Texas Southern University getting recognition for the sweeping changes that have taken place under President John Rudley, changes that have made the school more academically rigorous, improved the look of the campus and now are going a long way toward improving TSU’s national reputation.
Surveying the transformation that has taken place since Rudley became president in 2008, a front-page story in Sunday’s Houston Chronicle finds that the school is on solid ground after years of turmoil and scandal.
“It’s a completely different place than it was four or five years ago,” said Raymund Paredes, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board commissioner. Paredes acknowledged, though, that there still is work to be done to rehabilitate TSU’s image.
Rudley, then acting president at the University of Houston, was named president of TSU after a scandal that saw the former TSU president, Priscilla Slade, arrested for misappropriating funds. The graduation rate at the school was a dismal 11 percent. TSU owed $13 million in unpaid bills and had not produced a financial statement in five years, the newspaper reported. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools put TSU on probation in late 2007.
“If you make a list of all the problems, that’s a list most universities face over 20 years, one at a time,” Rudley told the Chronicle. “But here, these all occurred at the same time.”
Rudley cleaned house, hired new top staff and – against vocal community opposition – replaced the previous open enrollment policy with a requirement that new admissions have a 2.5 GPA and an SAT score of 820.
In a sign of the turnaround, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools took the school off of probation and just approved TSU’s accreditation for 10 years. Now credit-worthy, the university is spending money on dorms, parking garages and on projects to make the campus look more like a college campus.
You can read the complete story here.
