So Florida Senate President Mike Haridopolos floated an idea for Florida public universities to swap professors and programs like baseball cards (or maybe Magic: The Gathering cards)? I’d been holding off commenting on another trial balloon sent up by Senator J.D. Alexander, the idea of switching USF Polytechnic (a small campus about which much has been discussed this year) to the University of Florida, but maybe I should put these ideas and that of Rep. Matt Goetz into perspective: the idea of deleting “South” from statutory language on USF Polytechnic is of dubious legality, since it’s the Board of Governors that runs the state public university system, and the board is a constitutional body created by voters in 2002. The legislature writes the state budget, can earmark appropriations through the budget process, and set some conditions as well as oversee the university system, but I don’t think the legislature could reconfigure the system by either the budget process or statute.
That separation of powers holds doubly for the functions that the BOG has actively been exercising and would normally be considered the job of universities themselves, including any use or delegation of authority for program approval and change. There have already been discussions at the BOG level over the appropriate extent of and availability of specialized programs. ((Some of that is related to duplication of programs at the former-two-year level and four-year level. Hmmmn…. who encouraged the state’s community college missions to metastasize, again?)) Maybe we should let this play out rather than meddle, folks. It’s not as if university administrators aren’t having to figure out what they can feasibly do with the much smaller pot of money they currently have to serve more students.
One historical irony here: Senator John Thrasher (Jacksonville-R) is also former House Speaker John Thrasher, who was the primary instigator for disassembling the old Board of Regents when the Regents decided that Thrasher’s alma mater (Florida State) shouldn’t have a brand-new, expensive medical school because the state had enough medical schools. If there were still a statutory Board of Regents, then the legislature could legally reconfigure the system by fiat. The voters made clear what they thought in the vote for the new Board of Governors in 2002. But then again, if Thrasher hadn’t blown up the Regents system, there wouldn’t be as much costly duplication as currently exists (with many more med schools, law schools, and what-have-you at both the university and old community-college/new state-college levels).
And, now that it appears Rep. Goetz has filed a proposed constitutional amendment to remove the president of the Florida Student Association from the Board of Governors, this demonstrates that at least some legislators read the state constitution’s provision on the state university system. ((This proposal, which may be payback for the student Governor who spoke his mind at the last BOG meeting, stands little chance at passage in the legislature to be put on the ballot and none with the voters.))
To answer your question, who encouraged the state’s community college missions to metastasize, there are a number of suspects: with Florida’s graduation levels so low, politicians have been cooking up ways to ‘up’ degree production for years (without much attention to quality, viz Edison State meltdown), and the citizens supported this; there were overly ambitious community college presidents that wanted to rule over REAL colleges, not just vo-tech schools; and legislators salivated at the prospect of landing a “state college” in their district (maybe even having a building named after themselves).
James Wattenbarger, the grandfather of Florida’s community college system, was adamantly opposed to turning them into 4 yr schools, and I was privileged to talk with him about this shortly before his death. He said, they had no business doing this, and laughed at the pretended quality of education at the new schools.