I’ve asked this several times, but never gotten answers. What are some of the policies and decisions he made that people are critical of? Now, I don’t want to hear the “California” thing or the plagiarism. Give me some real examples.
To a great degree, l believe it is that other than his COVID policy, he had no vision for the university. He was playing serious catch up just trying to understand a research university until COVID hit.
Numerous times he said publicly and to staff I know, Something to effect “I never knew how much fundraising needed to be done and how much time it took.” One of the many large knocks on him was he came with basically zero fund raising, grant proposal, corporate sponsorship experience.
He did little to no outreach to faculty, admin, or students. Partly because that was military chain of command process and partly because he is very introverted.
This next item is related and is totally unfair, but it affected him. His wife never moved to Columbia. She visited but had little presence and no impact on campus. Mrs. Pastides was the best First Lady this school has ever had.
He really made very few friends and allies on campus. The relationships he nurtured were with the board and pols.
As to his Covid policy it was brilliantly conceived but implemented horribly and was corrupted by the political process. It relied on student buy in, they did not buy in at all and there were no consequences.
With no buy in, Caslen presented to the public, that their set aside COVID rooms were empty implying there was no COVID problem on campus. The truth was COVID was running rampant, students just didn’t care. It was disingenuous at best but it fit the political climate in this state.
There are several examples about planned policies that I would like to talk about but they were told in confidence and have no bearing now.