"It's really a story on his leadership style," said William White, dean of MSU's school of leadership and co-author of the book, titled "Apex Thinking."

"[Polk] did use tenets of the book to run the school," said White, who also is a state Board of Education member. "It pretty much tells you what his philosophy is."

Polk, who was fired by MSU's board of trustees last month in the midst of the school's serious accreditation problems, wrote "Apex Thinking" in 2007. The book is now a required text for students in MSU's School of Leadership.

"A . . . misconception about life at the top is that those who make it do so because they exemplify positive human behavior - honesty, integrity, and morality," Polk wrote in the opening chapter. "Unfortunately there is another side of the success story which, sometimes, involves negative characteristics which we generally ... consider inappropriate within our leaders."

Those people, Polk wrote, who "have the ability to employ politics, instill fear in subordinates, and make power plays that often require hurting others also make it to the top."

Former MSU employees, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, said the book's idea that mind games and power plays are integral to effective leadership wasn't just a thought experiment. They say "Apex Thinking" became the playbook for how administrators ran the university.

"Some great people were let go in the most underhanded, manipulative, disgusting ways, because they did a great job," said a former staffer at MSU's Martinsburg campus. "Polk thinks that anyone who does a good job could be a threat, so he fires them. That's what they did with all the qualified people. It's a trickle-down effect throughout the university."

Theory of power

"In issues of survival or non-survival, sometimes the deliberate misuse of power becomes the only way to survive, even though such misuse may involve unintentionally harming others. This tactic again requires the chief executive to answer that very important question. How far am I willing to go in the use of my power in order to survive?" -- "Apex Thinking"

Former MSU employees said Polk and other administrators were willing to go to great lengths to maintain power. People who did not toe the university line were fired in what Polk called "boxing parties," they said.

"Whatever he said went, that's how they did things at the school," said a former faculty member at the Martinsburg campus. "Everyone lived in fear of him."

Based on what he wrote in "Apex Thinking," Polk adhered to the Machiavellian idea that it is better for a leader to be feared than loved.

"Traditional ideology maintains that when fear can be instilled in subordinates, one can effectively control their behavior," states the book.

MSU had incredible faculty turnover in recent years -- from employees voluntarily leaving the school or being fired. At the Martinsburg campus, from 2006-2008, there was a nearly 120 percent faculty turnover rate, according to one source.

One former MSU employee said he had a job one day and then was abruptly fired the next. There was no warning, no explanation, he said.

"They gave me no notice, no severance pay," said the source, who is an MSU graduate. "Just showed up and fired me."

Three years before the Higher Learning Commission, MSU's primary national accrediting body, placed the university on show-cause status in June 2011, the HLC said the administration's relationship with employees posed a major problem.

"Many faculty and staff expressed concerns about their ability to provide input into university decision-making," said the HLC's 2008 report obtained by the Gazette-Mail. "In addition, existing processes for communication have created an environment of uncertainty, and rumors in some instances have contributed to low employee morale."

In MSU's response to the HLC report, Polk said administrators were making strides to increase collaboration with faculty.

"I took the organizational leadership and the masters in strategic leadership," said one former student, who also requested anonymity. "So after taking all these leadership studies and then seeing no leadership at the school . . . it was concerning."

Leadership at MSU

"The belief that one may, once at the top, eliminate the use of force, deceit, or power which may have been employed to get there in the first place is not correct." -- "Apex Thinking"

MSU faculty members said Polk misused his position as president, using the university he rebuilt in the 1990s as his personal playground. He placed family members in prominent university positions and jetted around the country on MSU's two private airplanes for what appeared to be personal business.

Polk appointed his son, Anthony, as business manager and assistant CFO of the Martinsburg campus one month after Anthony graduated from MSU with a business degree in 2010.

No one else was interviewed for the job, Polk told the Gazette-Mail in an earlier interview.

He said he didn't view his son's hiring as a conflict of interest.

"Conflict of interest says you're benefiting from that relationship, but there's no benefit accruing to anyone aside from the university," said Polk. "We put someone who is qualified to do the job."

As the Gazette-Mail previously has reported, Polk also made frequent use of the university's two airplanes. He made more than 100 flights to and from the Statesville Regional Airport in North Carolina, near his home in Mooresville, since 2007, according to Federal Aviation Administration records. He also used an MSU plane to fly to his hometown of Luftkin, Texas, where his mother still lives.

The flights to North Carolina cost MSU at least $170,000 and the Texas flights more than $62,000. All of MSU's flights come out of the university's operational budget, which is about $55 million this year.

In a previous interview with the Gazette-Mail, Polk said all the flights were made for university business, but he could not specifically identify the business purposes of particular flights.

Jerry Ice, president of the MSU board of trustees and now the school's acting president, said Polk's use of the university's planes did not play a role in the decision to fire him in January, saying the board's "major concern was this accreditation." Ice did say the trustees were reviewing Polk's use of the university's aircraft.

Board of Trustees

"If the CEO becomes too tyrannical or domineering, the board of directors might feel that it is little more than a rubber stamp. Whatever the chief administrator wants to do, they go along with. ... Unless one exercises caution and strategy, the working relationship can become subordinate and the chief executive placed in a position where he is told what to do." -- "Apex Thinking"

Members of MSU's board of trustees said they had a positive, not adversarial, working relationship with Polk and credited him with growing the university from a nearly bankrupt junior college into a financially sound university.

In the past, however, trustees said they did not know how bad the accreditation problems that wracked the School of Nursing were. The ongoing problems led to the university's shaky primary accreditation status.

"There was a breakdown somewhere that's going to be remedied," said trustee Max Beard. "We never realized the depth or the severity of this. We knew there was a problem and we assumed it was being taken care of."

"As a board, you're managing these processes," said trustee Elmer Coppoolse. "And the impression was that the problems were being handled and that the outcome was going to be positive. And that's really the role of the board, not to micromanage the process but to take action based on outcomes."

The board fired Polk in January, but some people wondered why board members had not stepped up before the university was on the brink of accreditation failure.

Dan Binkley, a business owner in Beckley and an adjunct professor at MSU's predecessor, Beckley Junior College, said Polk had "great leeway" with the board of trustees.

"They saw what the college was before he got there," said Binkley. "And they see what it was after him. [MSU] was getting a pile of money."

As the Gazette-Mail previously has reported, Polk was one of the most highly compensated university presidents in the country in 2009, according to MSU's Form 990 filed with the Internal Revenue Service. Polk's base salary for 2009 was $371,269. He received more than $1.4 million in other pay and more than $4,000 in nontaxable benefits, according to the tax forms.

Required reading

"Depending upon the situation, rather than owning up to an error, a CEO might want to say, 'Well, it was not my fault. What went wrong happened because either a subordinate or a board member or someone else caused the problem.' More often than not, the best scapegoat technique is to pass blame along to some abstract agency or organization. Those kinds of institutions can be more easily blamed in many situations when it is awkward or impossible to refute the accusation." -- "Apex Thinking"

Ruth Wylie, associate dean of MSU's school of leadership, said "Apex Thinking" is taught in a comparative-leadership course at MSU. A committee of faculty members selects each book that makes it into the curriculum.

Students must buy the book, but Polk and White receive no royalties from the sales, said MSU spokesman Andy Wessels. All book proceeds finance staff development for faculty in the School of Leadership.

White, co-author of the book, said he thought "Apex Thinking" was an "exciting prospect" because the leadership curriculum at MSU used to teach a very optimistic and consensus-building approach to management -- "it was a very Pollyanna approach."

"Lots of classes only talked about the good things of leadership," said White. "We thought that these students needed to be exposed to a different idea. As far as I was concerned, it is a great book to make students think about leadership and not regurgitate the ideal situations. This book gave them an understanding of what leadership does."

Faculty members, however, said that while they were required to teach the book, many disagreed with the leadership style.

"Even instructors have said that they don't follow what they teach in the leadership school," said a former professor. "And that's too bad, because they have great faculty who care about the students."

A paradox

"It is also interesting to observe that those individuals who habitually resort to questionable, and coercive - even slightly to one side of being legal - tactics over the course of their career to accomplish various goals, lose objectivity regarding 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'bad.' They become conditioned to the point where they can no longer honestly distinguish good from bad with the dictates of acceptable personal or business ethics." -- "Apex Thinking"

Polk first came to MSU in 1990, after he resigned as president of Daytona Beach Community College in Florida amid an investigation by the Florida Ethics Commission that he had violated Florida law for having a contractual relationship with a real estate developer who was doing business with the college.

In 1991, the Ethics Commission found that Polk did violate Florida law and said he should be publicly censured, according to the Ethics Commission case report.

Binkley was on a citizen board that recommended Polk to the Beckley Junior College board of trustees, although he said he didn't vote for Polk to be hired. He said Polk had a history of turning around struggling colleges -- and a history of ethical violations.

"What impressed the rest of the group was that he took a junior college in Daytona, Fla., and got enrollment way up," said Binkley. "He had quite a record there. However, he got into trouble with state politics, whatever it was, and he had to get out of there."

Trustees and staff said Polk's legacy at Mountain State University would be one of mixed successes -- transforming a struggling college into a major university, but running into serious accreditation problems along the way.

"He had tremendous creative ideas and imagination on what to do with this college," said Binkley. "Unfortunately, he ran into this problem with the nursing program. But he enjoyed the spoils. Polk started making a whole lot of money, a huge amount of money to run the college, used the airplane, and then he ran into this nursing problem. He's a paradox."

Ice and other trustees said Polk would be remembered for building the school up into an economic powerhouse for West Virginia and expanding educational access to students.

"I think Polk's legacy is one of growth and development of Mountain State from a junior college to a four-year university with a masters' program," Ice said. "He leaves a great history of higher education growth and development."

Reach Amy Julia Harris at amy.har...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-4814.