Syracuse athletic director John Wildhack is retiring, as he's planning to leave the school on July 1. He exits the job after a decade in charge, leaving Syracuse without an athletic director, a chancellor who is departing for Michigan and with the basketball program struggling in the post-Jim Boeheim era. Wildhack came to Syracuse in 2016 after a long tenure as an ESPN executive in the wake of Mark Coyle's sudden departure for Minnesota after less than a year on the job.
Enter Frank Bisignano. The Jamie Dimon protegee had a storied career in banking, and was appointed to lead SSA last spring (he has since added the job of IRS CEO to his resume, which you can read about here.) But the changes he has quickly enacted at SSA-drawing heavily on his time in the private sector-are real, and they're impressing even the Administration's fiercest critics.
Earlier this month, Morris Brown College's Board of Trustees abruptly laid off the historically Black college's president, Kevin James, after seven years at the helm. James took to social media and decried the board's actions, noting that the college regained accreditation during his tenure and the institution couldn't afford instability with an upcoming meeting with the accreditor. A week later, the board announced his reinstatement, even as allegations against James surfaced in local media.
In April, District 6 Councilmember Kevin Jenkins, who was serving as interim mayor at the time, fired Leigh Hanson, his chief of staff. Hanson had originally been hired by Sheng Thao and stayed on Thao was recalled and indicted. The impetus for Hanson's pink slip was the public uproar about notes that she took during a meeting that included a pejorative term for Black people. Hanson said the meaning of the notes was being misconstrued,
Niccol was expected to be a turnaround artist due to his track record at Taco Bell and Chipotle. His magic at Starbucks has been a line of statements primarily about how Starbucks might return to its roots as a community coffeehouse where baristas are friendly and well-dressed. When people order, their orders will come fast. The baristas will remember people's names.
OAKLAND - Floyd Mitchell is leaving his job as Oakland's police chief in part because he grew frustrated at needing to answer to so many bosses - or, at least, that is the consensus among several Oakland police and city officials who worked closely with him. The chief, who will have lasted just over a year and a half by his Dec. 5 resignation, is the latest in a long line of top cops to exit sooner than expected.
Databricks finds itself in an awkward situation following the departure of Naveen Rao, its head of artificial intelligence, as rivals like Snowflake, Teradata, and hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, intensify their push to develop offerings for building generative AI applications. Rao's exit comes at a time when Databricks is aggressively trying to expand its offerings inside the Data Intelligence Platform, mainly with Lakebase and Agent Bricks, thanks to the infusion of capital from this week's $1 billion Series K funding round.
On the administrative side, the tenure of senior leaders is also shrinking, leading to increased leadership turnover. New leaders come in with change agendas to fix some prior unaddressed issue or manage significant budget deficits or other operational inefficiencies. In this environment, faculty disillusionment is high, as is disengagement. It is all too easy for administrators to treat faculty as expendable resources, forgetting that there is a human component to leadership and fostering distrust between these two critical groups of campus leaders.