Judge halts pay to ASU's Lee for now

Photo: Former ASU President Joe Lee.

A Montgomery County circuit court judge has issued a restraining order, temporarily halting a severance package that Alabama State University trustees awarded former president Joe Lee.

The restraining order follows an injunction that ASU trustees Joe Reed and Thomas Figures filed last week in which they claimed paying Lee nearly $289,000 in a lump-sum payment was illegal because it violated Section 94 of the Alabama Constitution.

In issuing the order, Judge William Shashy offered no decision on the legality of the severance agreement, but did order all parties into mediation within the next seven days. Local attorney Lee Copeland will serve as mediator.

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AAMU Jennings alternately praised, criticized during tenure

Change welcome in beginning, but soon led to friction.

Dr. Robert Jennings was never trustees' first pick to become the 10th permanent president of Alabama A&M University.

They voted 5-4 to offer him the job on Dec. 16, 2005, after their unanimous first choice, Dr. Julian Earls, then director of NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, had turned them down in October.

Jennings, now 57, was the executive vice president and chief operating officer of Future Focus 2020, an academic think tank and research training center in the Babcock Graduate School of Management at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.

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AAMU Jennings fired for financial improperiety