President Niara Sudarkasa is embroiled in a controversy that is affecting state appropriations for Lincoln University
Lincoln University, Pa.
Summer break is normally a time of
respite, a pause in the scholastic action to allow administrators,
faculty, and students a little timeout and a chance to get the
batteries charged. But it seems the only things being charged at
Lincoln University in rural southeastern Pennsylvania this summer are
highly publicized allegations of fiscal mismanagement and misconduct.
Tensions have reached such a high level on the leafy campus, about
fifty miles west of Philadelphia, that during a hastily called meeting
of the board of trustees in July, a handful of board members broached
the topic of calling on the university’s president, Dr. Niara
Sudarkasa, to resign.
For now, Sudarkasa, who has been at the helm at Lincoln since 1987,
is staying put. She says she will see the school through its current
crisis, which she says has been orchestrated by a handful of
adversaries.
“There is no truth whatsoever to any of the allegations you may have heard or read,” she told those at the meeting.
The turmoil has been especially troubling for Lincoln, a
historically Black institution founded in 1854 that currently has
approximately 1,500 students and lays claim to a long list of
distinguished graduates, such as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood
Marshall; poet Langston Hughes; Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first president of
Nigeria; and Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana.
To understand the genesis of the current problems facing Lincoln
requires a quick course in art history — specifically, a priceless
collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings known as
the Barnes Foundation, which Lincoln controls.
