Florida students have long been the soft underbelly of public university funding. The price of an education continues to increase at unprecedented rates as political and academic leadership, people who graduated in an era when a college degree was considered a public good and not a personal investment, offload their responsibilities to a generation of students.
It should be no surprise that when presented with a bucket of unallocated funds as vast as the fee increase passed in 2010 to pay for the University Student Center, university leaders would reach in with both hands. To achieve this, they manipulated the students’ faith and traded them a small game room, a couple of couches and the renovation of the old Campus Activities Center building.
Perhaps the university should be congratulated for making a $2.9 million investment (the cost of the renovation) with a minimum $57 million payoff (the minimum amount of fees paid for the USC at current enrollment levels). But at least they could have thrown in new furniture for what is now called the Student Life Center.
There is also the question as to why the university so desperately needed another large meeting space in the USC ballroom. With the collapse of plans to rebuild the old Dali museum into a world class business school, the large central gallery was left intact. In it, the university has hosted speakers, events and award breakfasts to schmooze with the local economic and political elite.
The Student Government is not free from blame in all this. By rubberstamping big capital projects and giving in to high-pressure, sign-this-or-lose sales tactics, they lose credibility as true representatives of the student body and stewards of fee money. If university leaders, including those with whom top student politicians develop close relationships, come to the Senate asking for an immediate answer, the default should be “no.”
Two independent groups of students have told The Crow’s Nest they are exploring legal options for returning excess activities and services money dumped into the USC. Their demands, while slightly different in scope, are reasonable: the building should have a neutral net income, rather than be a clearinghouse to transfer student fees into university-controlled housing and auxiliary accounts. Revenues above net will be returned to student-controlled coffers.
The last thing the USF system needs after a tumultuous legislative session and an internal audit accusing a former regional chancellor of gross financial negligence is a scandal involving the misappropriation of student fees.
There is no doubt some good will come from the building. The campus, in order to expand, needed to provide both a health clinic and dining services. It also needed a central gathering point to foster a campus culture, and food plays a big part in this, as any Old World grandmother will attest.
But tricking students who face difficult job prospects and rapidly expanding debt into giving up their one bit of influence at their university is unconscionable.
