Tennessee Fans Should Pay Attention To Change In Presidents

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This isn’t the best time in the world for a school like Tennessee to be bringing in a new university president.

Dr. John Peterson announced, surprisingly, yesterday that he will be stepping down as the school’s president this summer. 

Jam Simek, who has recently served as the interim chancellor at UT, will be recommended to the board of trustees to fill Tennessee’s president post for up to two years.

Simek (at left) has come up as a professor of science in UT’s anthropology department, he has served as that department’s head, and he has also been the interim director of the school of art, and the interim dean of the college of architecture and design.

Simek is the Gerald Ford of Tennessee career advancement.

But why should a Tennessee sports fan care about all of this?  Several reasons:

1)  Athletic director Mike Hamilton will report to Simek in the short-term and possibly for as long as up to two years.

2)  It’s doubtful that Simek will make any personnel changes while serving in an interim role, but a new full-time president just might.  Peterson, who’s resigning, came from UConn and was a big supporter of athletics.  Will the next president be as strong a supporter of athletics? 

And will he, like most new bosses, want to put his own people around him?  Remember, Mike Hamilton inherited Phillip Fulmer, Buzz Peterson and Rod Delmonico as his main coaches just a few short years ago.  He now has Lane Kiffin, Bruce Pearl and Todd Raleigh at his command.  New bosses like to hire their own people.

3)  If I’m Mike Hamilton, I might be sleeping a bit more restlessly at night until I know who my next boss is going to be.

4)  Moving down the food chain, the aforementioned coaches are Hamilton’s guys.  They’ll want to make sure that Hamilton works well with the next president.  If he doesn’t, there could be a new athletic director in a few years.  If that’s the case, the new guy might want to bring in his own coaches.

5)  The economy makes this all an even bigger change-over.  Already, some UT academicians are calling for the UT athletic department to give bigger financial gifts to the university.  Some are even calling for smaller sports to be junked. 

Simek’s background is from the academic side.  Would an interim president have the authority to make sweeping changes to UT’s athletic department set-up?  Tennessee is one of the few schools in the country that has a completely separate athletic department.  In an economic emergency, would an interim president be given the power to push the UTAD under the UT umbrella?  Would he want to?

6)  Tennessee is also one of the very few schools in America to have separate men’s and women’s athletic departments.  In the current economny, would an interim president be given the power to try to merge those departments into one organization… which would eliminate a number of parallel jobs and save thousands and thousands of dollars in salaries?

Perhaps nothing at all comes of all this.  Admittedly, there are a lot of “ifs” in the above questions.

But Tennessee fans should definitely be paying attention.

For one of the SEC’s top athletic departments, the confluence of a bad economy and a new president could bring about some major changes in the next year or two.