BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) _ The Southern University Board of Supervisors has voted 9-to-4 against extending President Ronald Mason’s contract. It expires June 30.
Several faculty members and at least one board member have called for his immediate resignation.
Mason came to Southern in 2010. He’d been Jackson State’s president for 10 years, after 20 years at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Before voting on Mason’s contract, the board rejected his call for power to hire whoever he found necessary to make Southern’s Baton Rouge campus a top five historically black university and a top 200 public university nationally within seven years.
Mason then told the board he would not accept an extension.
He says he’ll return to being a teacher in Southern’s law center.
