CHARLES “R.” DREW UNIVERSITY — About nine months ago, I was encouraged to include a “Susan Kelly Watch” in Soulvine due to the steady stream of complaints I was receiving about Susan Kelly’s performance as president and CEO of Drew, as seemed her high-handedness, abrasive personality and peccadilloes were not only offending the people she worked with, but were even incurring the rancor of the highest officials in county government — past and present. Disdain for Kelly spewed from everywhere: students, faculty, administrators, vendors, Black contractors, trustees, health care providers and advocates and elected officials.

The only person who seemed to like her was former Assemblyman Merv Dymally. I listened to and read the Kelly complaints and, counter to my usual response of jumping all over them, I saved, catalogued and filed them away and did nothing about them for one simple reason: I was loathe to do anything that would cause us to lose Charles R. Drew University. After all, we had already lost MLK Hospital and I didn’t want to open a can of worms that would lead to the demise of Drew. It was my hope that the Drew community members would work out their problems with Kelly by themselves without me exposing them in the harsh light of the media. (Hey, I have earned the right to make that kind of decision!) The Drew community took the first step toward solving its problems last week by ousting Kelly.

Drew’s remaining administrators are trying to put an amiable, face-saving spin on Kelly’s departure (i.e. “she resigned,” “she met her goals,” blah, blah, blah), and are refusing to admit that she was the lightning rod of all the university’s troubles. They refuse to acknowledge these as some of the complaints against Kelly that gave rise to so much animus toward her:          

• When Kelly became president and CEO on May 1, 2006, the university had $12.9 million in cash and cash equivalent reserves that dropped to $4.1 million in February 2009, with the prospect of the school outspending its total revenue by more than $8 million this fiscal year.

• Amid accusations of fiscal mismanagement, calls for investigations into the cause of the university’s dwindling resources have been ignored while student fees were doubled — increasing twice in one year. The employees’ health benefits were eliminated to save $1 million while Kelly paid her husband almost a half a million dollars to do some unspecified work on the campus, and she laid off and/or fired most of the school’s Human Resources Department workers on April 7.

• Kelly practiced nepotism. Not only did she hire her husband to work for Drew, but her daughter was reportedly working somewhere on the campus as well. What she didn’t hire, however, were Black contractors to help build the highly touted and over budgeted Nursing School, resulting in student and community protests.

• She was accused of anti-Black racism. Fearing for her safety, Kelly reportedly refused to reside in the president’s house the university provides in Ladera Heights, forcing the school to shell out additional funds to house her elsewhere in Marina del Rey. She was perceived as trying to eradicate the university’s African-American roots and muting its pride at having sprung from the 1965 Watts Riots, while moving it toward a Latino- prominent institution. Those African-American artifacts and exhibits that were in the lobby of the Cobb Building for many years disappeared upon Kelly’s arrival and no one seems to know where they are. Kelly dropped the R from what had historically been known as Charles R. Drew University, making it CDU, but I’m putting it back. After all the man’s name was Charles Richard Drew and people resented her for messing with it.

• Kelly obstructed the smooth transfer of the county’s massive alcoholism and domestic violence program from Drew to the Shields agency last year by waiting until the very last possible moment to sign off on the transfer, thus making county officials and other health care givers dislike her even more. I don’t even want to talk about the community enmity she provoked when she closed the university’s Head Start Program, one of the first established in the county.

Those are some of the reasons Kelly had to go and the board needs to take the second step and send Liz Garcia packing as well, because Garcia is characterized as Kelly’s Dick Cheney.

MURPH WATCH — While I was waiting for documents to arrive confirming the results of the AME Ministerial Efficiency Committee’s hearing into the matter of the Rev. Frederick Murph, 13 pages of three other documents came shooting out of my FAX machine: Promissory notes for three loans taken out by Murph and Cora Fossett with the Bank of America on the Brookins Community AME Church. One note, dated Feb. 21, 2006, is for a loan of $2.6 million. The other two loans, both executed on June 24, 2005, are for $920,000 and $540,000 for a total of $4.06 million Murph and Fossett borrowed on the church. Needless to say, Brookins AME is in deep trouble. The church is more than a year in arrears on these loans and is facing default. Church officials and their legal representatives are scheduled to meet with BofA executives Thursday to see if they can give the bank some other church properties in payment of part of the BofA debt and retain the church building, itself. That is, if the church still owns other properties; they don’t know for sure. They say Murph took loan documents with him when he was removed from the church and they expect to have to sue him to get them back. Shortly before Murph left Brookins, Fossett was reported to have been approved for a $350,000 loan from some small, back-woods bank in November. On what collateral, I wonder?

OK, I GIVE — I simply cannot fail to vote against a candidate who is endorsed by the National Rifle Association. Therefore, I am bowing to the will of the Black police officers’ Oscar Joel Bryant Foundation, the Latino police officers’ Latin-American Law Enforcement Assn., LAPD Chief William Bratton and Councilman Herb Wesson and casting my vote for Councilman Jack Weiss for city attorney. Even though I’m not happy with Weiss, I am compelled to vote against his opponent, Carmen Trutanich, who not only has the endorsement of the hated NRA, but is endorsed by “every major newspaper,” the L.A. Times and the Daily News. I was going to skip the race and not vote for either of them, but these three Trutanich endorsements shoved me firmly toward Weiss. The NRA? No way. The Times and the Daily News? Didn’t they both endorse Bernard Parks over Mark Ridley-Thomas for supervisor last year, clearly indicating they don’t know what the heck they’re talking about?

OK. I hereby formally endorse Jack Weiss for city attorney, but if he doesn’t work out and continues to just carry the water for the mayor, I’m going to blame the Black and Brown police officers, Bratton and Wesson for making me vote for him and we are going to fall out.

AND FINALLY — President Barack Obama can’t do a thing without generating criticism from White people. The other day, he replaced the bust of Winston Churchill that President George W. Bush had positioned in the Oval Office with a bust of Abraham Lincoln. He took flak for that. It became such a big deal, that one of Churchill’s grandsons had a whining fit and demanded that Churchill’s bust be returned to the president’s office because “it’s an important symbol of the close relationship between the U.S. and Great Britain.” Oh, shut up! It’s Obama’s office and he can put whatever he wants in it! If I were president, I’d put in my office a bust of Nefertiti, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr. and Terrence Howard.