BY: JACKIE LLANOS – JULY 19, 2023 7:00 AM
Florida Phoenix
This month, Florida Atlantic University became the latest institution to get dragged into what education advocates call a “real mess” of state interference in higher education.
The state’s public universities have weathered profound changes under Gov. Ron DeSantis, from weakening tenure protections to defunding diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Now, presidential searches at FAU, the University of Florida, New College of Florida, Florida International University, and South Florida State College, a community college, have garnered attention for alleged political manipulation.
Education groups and researchers blame a 2022 law that fermented secrecy in the presidential search process.
The law, SB 520, shields the identities of applicants until near the very end of the process, when they have been winnowed to the few finalists.
Before Gov. DeSantis signed that into law, people could know who’d applied for the top post at public universities and state community colleges.
In the case of UF, FIU, and South Florida State College, only one person emerged as the finalist, leaving the public in the dark about the quality of applicants who were passed over.
The United Faculty of Florida had been fighting against the move for eight years, union president Andrew Gothard told Florida Phoenix in an interview. He referred to the current situation as a “real mess.”
“Throughout those eight years, we were very vocal with members of the public, with members of the Legislature, with the governor that doing this would lead to partisan appointments of inexperienced and unqualified politicians into these roles and we would lose access to the most highly qualified applicants as college and university presidents,” he said.
“Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s happened.”
At FIU, a number of candidates for president withdrew their names, leaving the interim president, Kenneth Jessel, as the sole finalist, according to the Miami Herald. He got the job.
But backlash keeps mounting against the increasingly common appointments of folks with political backgrounds, such as former Republican U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse at UF, former Republican House Speaker and Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran at New College and, most recently, former Republican state Rep. Fred Hawkins at South Florida State College.
“One of the things that I said consistently when SB 520 was before the Legislature is that this policy would streamline corruption, and the Board of Governors called me out for that,” Gothard said. “They pushed back and said that that was an inappropriate thing to say, that this process was actually going to draw better candidates and we were going to have more people to choose from. I think time has actually proven that I was right.”
Even when the presidential searches yield candidates with experience working as administrators at other higher education institutions as was the case at FAU, the law creates opportunities for seeming political motives, Gothard said.
Chancellor Ray Rodrigues intervened in the presidential search at FAU over practices the university claims other Florida institutions used. Rodrigues started an inquiry on July 7, pausing the FAU search, and later launched an investigation last week into FAU’s presidential search because of alleged transparency problems. FAU is based in Boca Raton, in South Florida.
The allegations included the use of a straw preference poll to narrow the pool of applicants, which Rodrigues said lacked transparency, and a questionnaire asking applicants about their gender and preferred pronouns.
George Mason University professor Judith Wilde studies president searches and their contracts and exit agreements at universities across the country. She said she has seen both of the procedures Rodrigues criticized implemented elsewhere.
The chancellor’s reasoning for the pause seems like a political maneuver considering that Florida House Rep. Randy Fine didn’t get on the final list, Wilde said.
Fine is a former gambling industry executive and is a member of the Florida House Education Quality subcommittee. In March, he said Gov. Ron DeSantis approached him about the position “but had not received a formal offer or said if he would accept the job,” according to The Palm Beach Post.
“The other thing about [Fine] is where we have seen other people with what I’ll just generically call a political background, having been a governor or a senator or something appointed as president. They have typically had much more high-level policy or executive experience,” Wilde said.
“From what I can tell, he [Fine] doesn’t seem to have that. So, if he’s the governor’s choice, he may not be the best choice. Does he have the experience to really move into this? People don’t realize how much stress there is for presidents these days.”
Still, the 2022 law that took the sunshine out of presidential searches is not the only contributing factor to the situation at public universities and state colleges. Gov. DeSantis holds the power to appoint 14 members out of 17 of the Board of Governors — who oversee Florida’s public university system — and six people to the Board of Trustees of individual institutions. (Those boards have other trustees as well.) Both boards have to approve the presidential picks.
So far, DeSantis has appointed eight of the sitting members of the Board of Governors and will have the opportunity to appoint three more in January, according to the board’s website. His appointments must be approved by the Florida Senate but, with a GOP supermajority, there hasn’t much pushback against the governor’s picks. DeSantis hasn’t shied away from using the full extent of the appointment powers to replace the entire Board of Trustees at New College.
Having few folks standing in his way allows DeSantis to claim victories in the culture wars, Gothard said.
“It’s an easy target,” he said. “Don’t forget that higher education, the state university and college system, is located in the executive branch of Florida, which I think has created most of the problems that we’re facing.”
Most governors in the country hold similar powers, which has led to appointments of “non-traditional” candidates to university presidencies, Wilde said. Only Nevada allows voters to choose members of its Board of Regents, the state’s equivalent to Florida’s Board of Governors, according to a report from the Education Commission of the States. Other states such as Michigan, Minnesota, and North Carolina have mixed processes by which their legislatures appoint members of some public university oversight panels.
Most recently, Virginia’s Gov. Glenn Youngkin appointed to the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors two people who had donated more than half a million dollars to his political efforts, Virginia Public Media reported.
“The big difference is that, in Florida, it really seems much more like what is typically referred to as political patronage,” Wilde said. “The governor knows that by appointing people like Ben Sasse … and others of that ilk, they owe him for a lot of money.”
Along with the job promotion, Sasse received a pay bump from $174,000 as a U.S. Senator to a base salary of one million, according to his contract. For his interim position, New College is paying Corcoran $699,000.00, according to his contract. The previous president got paid $305,000 before DeSantis’ appointees fired her, Sarasota Magazine reported. A year before the 2022 law was passed, Corcoran had wanted to take helm of Florida State University in 2021 but didn’t make the finalist list, according to WUSF Public Media.
In Florida, the controversy is still fresh, with Sasse, Corcoran, and Hawkins having assumed their roles this year. However, universities in other states have seen the extreme outcomes of secret presidential searches.
At the University of Colorado, former Minnesota Republican congressman Mark Kennedy left the presidency after only two years, according to Chalkbeat Colorado. He’d been the sole finalist named in the search preceding his appointment, according to The Denver Post.
Oil executive James Gallogly quit leading The University of Oklahoma less than a year into the job, according to Inside Higher Ed. The university’s board of regents didn’t release the names of any other candidates or finalists at the time of his appointment, according to the Norman Transcript.
Wilde calls these cases failed presidencies, and she said Florida could see its own in the future.
“When we use that term, we’re not meaning that the presidents in and of themselves have been bad, but that they don’t last through the second year for whatever reason,” she said.
“Some of them have been very good in what they did, but, for whatever reason, did not last through the second year. We feel that frequently this is a problem with the searches, particularly secret searches, because in the secret searches, nobody has a chance to actually vet the candidates.”
On a national scale, university presidents’ terms are growing shorter, and most Florida public university presidents have held their positions for three years or fewer. As of 2006, the average time a president had spent in the role was eight and a half years, according to a survey by the American Council on Education. Last year, the average term length was fewer than six years.
Out of the 12 public universities in Florida, only the presidents of Florida A&M University, Florida Polytechnic University, and the University of West Florida have been at the helm for longer than three years, the Phoenix found.
“At the end of all this, it’s going to be, and it already is, the students and the families of Florida who are going to suffer the most,” UFF’s Gothard said. “A higher education institution that has lots of people in administration, and lots of faculty who are highly qualified and have a lot of experience, that institution can continue to run along for a while with a terrible president, but not forever.”