The University of the District of Columbia’s problems are so deep and longstanding that some people thought it would take a rocket scientist to fi gure them out. So a year ago, its board of trustees appointed as president Dr. Allen Sessoms, the former Delaware State University president and Yale University-trained physicist who spent years sniffi ng out secret nukes as a weapons inspector for the U.S. Department of State.
Now Sessoms is widely seen by his supporters and detractors as a man intent on blasting UDC far out of its orbit. When classes resume this month UDC will be part of a “university system” consisting of a new community college and the university operating as the system’s selective “fl agship.” Sessoms’ plans to end open admissions at the historically Black institution, raise tuition almost 100 percent and eliminate the undergraduate education major have generated a storm of controversy.
As a result, students, faculty, trustees and city offi cials are trying to understand his agenda for UDC’s future, some by looking at his previous presidencies, which include heading Queens College in New York.
“Thank God for Google,” says Dale Lyons, a student and one of three members of the UDC board who voted to oppose Sessoms’ plans. “It has let us learn that Dr. Sessoms was fi red from Queens College after misleading the trustees about what happened to millions of dollars he was supposed to have raised and … that he got up in front of a group of lawyers and referred to remedial students as being pieces of sh-t. Is anyone surprised that he’s only been here a year and The Committee to Save UDC is mobilizing the city council to fi re him, and that the faculty has already given him a vote of no confi dence?”
While some UDC students and faculty members see in Sessoms a hard-charging, controversial fi gure who wants to remake their university, others see someone with high standards, grand ideas and a proven track record needed to turn the struggling school around.
Sessoms seems to have big plans — and intense opposition — Everywhere he goes. He tried but failed to establish a $30 million AIDS center at Queens College and was forced to resign when donations he said he secured never materialized. He caused a furor with a proposal to create a “university at Queens” with the merger of Queens College and Queensborough Community College, and for unsavory comments about remedial students. At Delaware State, he instituted changes some said diluted the university’s legacy as an HBCU.
His past fl ops, notorious statements and the UDC faculty’s no-confidence vote seem unremarkable to Katherine “Shelley” Broderick, dean of UDC’s David A. Clarke School of Law.
