Dr. Jianping Wang, who has been president of MCCC for the past six years, will be leaving the college at the end of the academic year in August 2022. While the official word is that she is retiring, her exit is not without controversy.
In April 2019 the Faculty Association made a vote of no confidence in Dr. Wang with 85 professors voting, 82 in favor and three abstaining. The faculty then went to the Board of Trustees to voice their concerns and submitted a document listing more than thirty specific points of contention.
One point in the document reads, “Whereas, President Jianping Wang has grievously mismanaged the College’s human capital, undermining shared governance, marginalizing employees, endangering the health of students, faculty, and staff, and instigating high employee turnover which creates an unstable workforce and corrodes morale.”
Following the vote of no confidence Professor of Communication Alvyn Haywood, who is also President of the Faculty Association, told The VOICE that one part of the justification for the vote was, “Five Vice Presidents of Academic Affairs have come and gone since [Dr. Wang ] became president, and I think that’s the most glowing example of a hostile work environment. They did not leave because they wanted to leave.”
According to a 2019 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Katherine Mangan, “James Brandon Shaw, a former vice president for academic affairs, sued both Wang and the college, saying she had racially discriminated against him in ending his employment. Shaw, who is African-American, was hired in March 2018 and said he had been given no indication his performance was problematic.”
The article went on to say, “The lawsuit accused Wang of publicly making derogatory remarks and expressing negative stereotypes about African-Americans. It also accused her of favoring white candidates; at the time of his termination, the lawsuit stated, all of the academic deans were white.”
Following the vote of no confidence and despite the faculty pressure, Board of Trustees Chair Mark Matzen continued to express strong support for Dr. Wang.
Matzen told The VOICE at the time, “We have, as a board, confidence in the president. She has done some amazing things, moved us in a strong direction, financially and academically, both on the budget side and on the Foundation side. Having said that, anytime you hear of things that are issues, and especially when you hear from this many…it might make you look at different things…It brings some things to the board that we will definitely discuss.”
Matzen could not be reached for comment, but his current view was most recently conveyed in an email to faculty at the beginning of August announcing Dr. Wang’s retirement, saying, “Throughout her tenure, Dr. Wang’s number one priority has been what is best for our students. The college, because of her work, is on sound fiscal footing and well positioned for the future. Her steady leadership throughout the pandemic was exceptional.”
Dr. Wang agrees with this assessment of her tenure saying, “We are one of the very few colleges, if not organizations that went through this pandemic without a significant change of the workforce; such as furloughs, layoffs, and services and program cuts, campus closing, and all of that because of the changes we made a number of years ago.”
With the faculty at odds with the Board of Trustees about the presidency of Dr. Wang, it was decided that a third party company would be hired to handle the review of Dr. Wang’s contract negotiation.
On July 30, 2021 an article written by Isaac Avilucea in The Trentonian stated that Matzen initiated his own review of Dr. Wang. The article cited internal strife between Dr. Wang and Matzen as the reason Dr. Wang walked out of the contract negotiation process with the Board.
As reported by Avilucea, “Wang was upset with Matzen for conducting a separate performance review on her after he was unsatisfied with results of an independent review from a company tapped by the board to evaluate her, the sources said.”
It was reported that in Matzen’s secondary performance review, a question was asked of the college’s upper administrators about what animal they would describe Dr. Wang as. Some of the responses were lion, tiger, and dragon. This brought up possible cultural insensitivity problems as Dr. Wang is from China.
When asked how she felt about these questions, Dr. Wang said “after the article came out, [the administrators] spoke with me, every one of them, and said that they were very upset about that, and at the time when Chairman Mark Matzen was asking those questions they were not happy about the questions themselves.”
Dr. Wang says, “The [Trentonian] article claimed that [Matzen] apologized to me, which is also not true, because I didn’t even know about it. How could anybody apologize to me about something I don’t even know? So we never talked about it.”
Professor Haywood, like many others, found out the news of Wang’s retirement and of the secondary performance review through the Trentonian article. Although he did not participate in the Matzen review and did not see the potentially inappropriate questions asked, he does have an opinion on the matter.
“I’m not shocked, but I am surprised that Mark would use such language or that he would use such imagery,” Professor Haywood says.
One faculty member who spoke to The VOICE on the condition of anonymity said, “I think [Dr. Wang’s departure] is a good thing. I don’t think that she is a competent leader with some of the decisions that she’s made for the college.”
Professor Haywood says, “Clearly we’ve had our problems, but we never, the Association especially has never behaved in such a way that would be unseemly, or that we were just attacking for the sake of attacking.”
Dr. Wang says that after forty years in higher education, “It is the last phase of my professional career, and I am proud of what I have been able to do here in the last six plus years.”
She adds, “I just wish we would focus on the next phase of the college. That is to find the next leader that cares about students, that is committed to the mission of the college, and is able to give himself or herself all to this institution as I did and I’m continuing to do until my last day here.”
