Who’s the Boss? DSU to Have President and Chancellor

Dakota State University is the biggest (by fall enrollment) of South Dakota’s small universities and the second-largest faculty (behind Mines) among our four small schools. Apparently this small-bigness requires that DSU have not just a president but a chancellor.

At their October meeting, the South Dakota Board of Regents announced that DSU President Dr. José-Marie Griffiths will step down from the fifth-highest-paying state job in South Dakota next year. But Griffiths isn’t retiring. The Regents are creating a new position for her, chancellor:

The South Dakota Board of Regents and Griffiths announced this was her final academic year as president on Oct. 7. She will step into the newly-announced chancellor position, where she will serve as a type of ambassador to promote the university’s connections in the government, military and industry.

Griffiths stressed she was not leaving DSU or Madison in an interview with the Daily Leader. For some time, the SDBOR has encouraged university presidents to think about succession planning, and Griffiths said a new type of position was a fitting way for her to serve the university and provide a smooth transition for the new president, whoever they may be.

When Griffiths joined the university in president, she had to build many of her relationships from scratch. With the SDBOR and Griffiths unwilling to slow DSU’s rise to national prominence, serving as the chancellor will allow Griffiths to leverage her position with key stakeholders while a new president has time to receive mentorship and establish themselves in the day-to-day dealings of the university [Wren Murphy, “With New Role, Griffiths Aims to Position DSU for Future Success,” Madison Daily Leader, 2025.10.12].

O.K., when you see leverage and stakeholders, you know you’re reading admin-bullshit.

Since when have new university presidents needed old presidents to stick around and hold their hand? And since when have we created a whole new sinecure—not just let them hang around and teach a class or two, like David Chicoine did when he retired from presiding over SDSU, but a new administrative position that no state school in South Dakota has ever had—to keep those old presidents around for this handholding and stakeholder-leveraging?

We give the DSU president $345,004 a year (plus a house!), under the presumption that that administrator has all the skills necessary to do the job. And it’s not like running DSU is that hard. Dr. Marysz Rames did it for a year during the interim between David Borfosky and Griffiths while keeping her day job as VP for student affairs up the road at SDSU. Do we not anticipate finding a candidate who can single-handedly lead the Madison campus? Plus, the DSU president already has a secretary, an assistant, and an assistant for special projects who all three together likely cost less than one president or one chancellor.

Since we’re now going to hire a DSU president who needs a chancellor/mentor/handholder, do we get to pay that apprentice-president an apprentice rate? A lower wage may reflect the lower quality of candidates this new apprentice-presidency position will draw. Truly qualified and gung-ho executives will turn their noses up at an apprentice-presidency: What, I’ll have the old president hanging around Heston Hall second-guessing my every decision? No thanks! 

And when the new DSU president finally does get up to speed and can earn her full salary without help, will the chancellorship disappear? Or are the Regents creating permanent administrative bloat? Will Griffiths’s successor automatically become chancellor when she tires of presiding? What will the Regents do if the next president gets fed up with Madison after a few years and leaves for a better job out of state? Whom would they hire to be chancellor then, when the DSU chancellor’s raison d’être, as laid out now by Regents, is to leverage the retiring president’s experience and connections to mentor the incoming president?

In American academia, chancellor is usually a university system boss, reigning over the presidents of individual campi. The “chancellorship” the Regents are creating for Griffiths does not appear to have any authority over or relationship to any of South Dakota’s other state institutions. Even within the cozy confines of the Madison campus or out and about as an “ambassador“, the authority of the “chancellor” remains undefined. That vague authority would add to the new president’s unease if not clearly addressed.

The Regents have not announced a salary for the chancellor. Perhaps the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee will ask the Regents for that figure during Session and ask why DSU needs a new administrative position that no other campus in South Dakota has.