MU president Floyd remains mired in Clemons saga

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Elson Floyd debuted last January as University of Missouri president, setting high expectations with a blend of charm, confidence and competence.

Floyd's year ends with little holiday joy.

Last week, Floyd publicly apologized for candid comments his wife, Carmento, made during taped telephone chats with troubled former basketball player Ricky Clemons. Floyd said he didn't know the extent of his wife's conversations and that he had advised her not to talk to Clemons.

"It's been a nightmare for me," he said.

In addition to stress at home, Floyd is still gauging how the Clemons mess affects his credibility in leading the university, a $1.9 billion enterprise that educates 62,000 students and employs more people than Boeing, Hallmark Cards or Anheuser-Busch.

Floyd acknowledged last week that he considered resigning in frustration, before word of that consideration rallied sympathy and support.

So Floyd said he would stay on. His second year as university president starts Jan. 6 -- a year that will bring more reminders of Clemons, perhaps including results of an NCAA investigation of Missouri basketball.

Since arriving from the presidency of Western Michigan University, Floyd has confronted state budget cuts while proposing big initiatives -- from trying to add a fifth campus to restructuring a medical teaching hospital to streamlining the four-campus university's administration.

Bill Funk, a Dallas-based expert in recruiting college presidents whose company led the University of Missouri to Floyd, said that despite the embarrassments over Clemons, "Elson is indeed an attractive university president who, when he was at Western Michigan, was approached literally dozens of times about other presidencies around the country.

"I haven't seen anything to diminish Elson's attractiveness as a university leader, and I hope the leadership and the university rally around him to stay the course," Funk said Friday. "There are just too many challenges to be confronted to let him get away because of this."

Fast starter

From the start, Floyd impressed Missouri audiences with his smooth style.

Minority students expressed particular pride in Floyd's distinction as the 164-year-old university's first black president.

Lawmakers called him a quick study on budgets and other issues. Reporters and editors were delighted about Floyd's moves to puncture the university administration's traditions of secrecy.

Faculty members and students liked the 47-year-old Floyd's approachability -- which ultimately figured in what Floyd calls his unrelenting Clemons "nightmare."

After Clemons pleaded guilty in a domestic abuse case involving his ex-girlfriend and was suspended from the basketball team for a year, coach Quin Snyder asked Floyd to befriend the athlete and serve as a role model.

Floyd agreed. He and his supporters say it was nothing new for Floyd to take a personal interest in a young person with problems.

Clemons visited the president's residence July 4. While there, Clemons wrecked Mrs. Floyd's all-terrain vehicle and wound up in the hospital. Later, the Floyds learned Clemons didn't have permission to be out of his halfway house. A judge ordered Clemons to jail, where he dialed scores of collect calls -- each call beginning with a disclaimer that the conversation might be recorded.

Carmento Floyd and others accepted the calls. So, on a couple of occasions, did Elson Floyd, still hoping to salvage Clemons. After brief greetings, Floyd handed the phone to his wife.

"Although my husband was aware that Ricky would call, because he would sometimes answer the telephone, he was not aware of my contacts since I generally spoke to Ricky when my husband was not at home," Carmento Floyd said in a statement. "Was it wrong to try to set him on a better path and hope he could salvage the rest of his life?"

The Floyds' critics say it was wrong to keep giving chances to Clemons after he admitted wrongdoing in court -- changing his story about the assault on ex-girlfriend Jessica Bunge -- and then misled the Floyds about when he was supposed to return to the halfway house.

Bunge and her father have said the young woman, who no longer attends the university, didn't receive similar support from its officials.

On the tapes, Carmento Floyd says of Bunge: "I just want her to shut up."

Compared to Kennedy

But goodwill built up by Elson Floyd seems to be blunting criticism of him.

This week, Floyd sat down for a call-in show on Columbia radio station KFRU, a public relations risk in the company town of the University of Missouri.

A male caller compared Floyd's arrival at Missouri to President John F. Kennedy following Dwight D. Eisenhower into the presidency, because both inherited problems: "His was the Bay of Pigs and yours was Ricky Clemons." But the man concluded: "The people of this community want to believe in you."

While media coverage of the Clemons tapes has been aggressive, newspaper editorials in Columbia have distinguished between the actions of Carmento Floyd and Elson Floyd.

The Maneater, a student newspaper, editorialized that Floyd "can't be held accountable for his wife's overtly racist comments or the disastrous judgment she employed in keeping contact with Clemons."

Columbia Daily Tribune publisher Hank Waters wrote: "Of all the revelations in the Clemons jailhouse phone tapes, nothing besmirches Floyd except perhaps news of his inability to control his wife, a weakness well known to most husbands."

Support has come from other quarters. Jakob Waterborg, a biology teacher from Kansas City who chairs the system-wide faculty council, said his organization sent a letter to Floyd "to express our confidence in his leadership."

"He inadvertently got trapped into doing what lots of us on campuses do -- trying to get students back on track," Waterborg said Friday. "My own personal opinion is that his wife should have kept her mouth shut, but I know he cannot tell her what to do. I cannot tell my wife of 25 years what to do."