By Michael Moore Jr., Jeffrey Waitkevich and Nancy McCann
A proposal to roll back history and abolish the independent accreditation of USF St. Petersburg passed its first legislative hurdle Wednesday while a stunned campus struggled to process the news.
In Tallahassee, the House Post-Secondary Education Subcommittee voted 12-1 to approve a massive bill on higher education with a single paragraph that would unite the three campuses of the USF system – St. Petersburg, Sarasota-Manatee, and Tampa – into a single university again.
The goal, said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Ray Rodrigues, R-Estero, is to ensure the St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee campuses benefit financially when the Tampa campus qualifies next year for what lawmakers call “preeminent university” status.
That status, now enjoyed by the University of Florida and Florida State, entitles schools to bonus funding for top achievement.
But on the St. Petersburg campus, which has had independent accreditation since 2006, the reaction was a mixture of shock, doubts and silence.
Most senior professors, often quick to grumble privately about interference from Tallahassee and USF system administrators in Tampa, had little to say Wednesday when approached by The Crow’s Nest.
Most declined to comment or reserved comment until they know more about the proposal, which did not become public until Tuesday.
But two senior professors did not hold their fire.
The purpose of the proposal may be admirable and its legislative sponsors may be well-intentioned, but their approach is ham-handed, said Ray Arsenault, a professor of Southern history and faculty member since 1980.
To “blithely change” the status of the campus without hearing from its faculty and administration “seems pretty outrageous,” said Arsenault, who first learned of the proposal Tuesday from a Crow’s Nest reporter.
Legislative “committees that have no expertise in intellectual education matters are exercising a kind of control in matters they should stay out of,” he said. “Springing this on us without a full airing is foolish.
“It’s very destructive to feel that we are subject to the whims of Tallahassee.”
V. Mark Durand, a professor of psychology who was founding dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 2003-2004 and acting vice chancellor of academic affairs in 2015-2016, echoed Arsenault’s sentiments.
News of the proposal to abolish the St. Petersburg campus’ independent accreditation has left many professors and employees feeling demoralized and deflated, he said.
“People are probably in shock. We spent so much time and effort across campus to get our initial accreditation,” Durand said. “Now it feels like we wasted our time to do something that was just going to be taken away.”
When the campus first applied for accreditation in 2006, Durand said, he spent “thousands of hours” and generated a stack of paperwork that was taller than he.
Phasing out that separate accreditation, as the bill proposes, would leave the campus reeling with “many consequences and a lot of unknowns,” Durand said.
“This is another example of somebody making decisions that really has no idea what the consequences are,” he said.
Rep. Rodrigues, the bill’s sponsor, brushed aside concerns that legislators are meddling in academic affairs.
“Constitutionally, it’s our responsibility to provide the appropriations” for the state’s community colleges and universities, Rodrigues said in a telephone interview. “With responsibility comes accountability. We are responsible for all students. This bill does that” for students in the USF system.
Arsenault and others have said they were told the bill is the handiwork of Pinellas legislators like Rep. Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor, who are concerned about low retention and graduation rates on the St. Petersburg campus. Some have speculated that the Tampa campus is pulling strings to gain more power.
When asked who was behind the idea to consolidate the three campuses, however, Rodrigues was succinct.
“It was me,” he said.
The legislative proposal is the second recent shocker for the St. Petersburg campus, which lost its popular regional chancellor, Sophia Wisniewska, in September.
Wisniewska was abruptly ousted by USF system President Judy Genshaft for the way she handled Hurricane Irma – a move that left the campus reeling in confusion and dismay.
It was the sixth time in Genshaft’s 17 years as university system president that she has orchestrated a leadership change in St. Petersburg, which was left with an interim regional chancellor, Martin Tadlock, who had arrived just 14 months before.
Still, some professors remain hopeful about the future of the campus.
Deanna Michael, an associate professor in the College of Education, is secretary of the Faculty Senate and formerly served as its president. She has been at the university for nearly 21 years.
“I’m optimistic there will be a desire on all sides to maintain Tampa’s strong programs and our strong programs,” she said.
Michael emphasized that the two campuses have a strong working relationship and that as it currently stands, USF St. Petersburg is autonomous, not independent. She doesn’t see the prospective changes as a “scolding or a punishment” and hopes that Tampa will still welcome faculty input from the St. Petersburg campus.
However, she did say that it would be sad to see the accreditation go after all the effort from campus faculty and employees. She added that she doesn’t think the campus has quite recovered from the departure of Wisniewska.
Tadlock has declined to comment on the proposal to end the campus’ separate accreditation, instead directing inquiries to Lara Wade, the university system’s director of media and public affairs in Tampa.
But Tadlock, who has worked to try to engage with students and faculty, has invited faculty, staff and adjunct professors to open forums at 3:30 and 4:15 Friday in Room 130 of Davis Hall.
Throughout its 52-year history, the St. Petersburg campus has operated in the shadow of the main campus in Tampa.
The St. Petersburg branch opened in September 1965, five years after the Tampa campus began offering classes.
Because the university had admitted more freshmen than it could house, nearly 260 freshmen were moved to St. Petersburg. They lived and took some classes in buildings on a small peninsula in Bayboro Harbor that once housed a U.S. Maritime Service Training Station. (The university’s College of Marine Science is there today.)
In 1968, St. Petersburg administrators began creating a “Bayboro Campus” on the 11.8-acre peninsula and offering classes to juniors, seniors and graduate students in a partnership with St. Petersburg Junior College.
In the years that followed, the campus grew in fits and starts, expanding its physical footprint in the city (now 52 acres) and constructing buildings that are today called Bayboro, Davis and Coquina halls and the Nelson Poynter Memorial Library.
As it grew, however, the St. Petersburg campus remained under the thumb of Tampa, leading some to grumble about being a redheaded stepchild.
One of the grumblers was Don Sullivan, a powerful state senator from Seminole.
Peeved at the way the Tampa campus governed St. Petersburg, he shook things up in 2000 with a startling proposal.
He filed legislation that would transfer most of the programs in St. Petersburg to a new school that would be called “Suncoast University.”
The proposal ultimately came to naught in Tallahassee, but it helped spark fundamental changes for the St. Petersburg campus – an expansion of course offerings and degree programs, increased autonomy, and planning for separate accreditation.
That accreditation came in June 2006. After 43 years under the control of the Tampa campus, USF St. Petersburg was awarded separate accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools – the state’s first regional campus to earn that distinction.
In academia, accreditation gives a growing institution like USF St. Petersburg both prestige and independence. Because the campus is independently accredited, it gets more control over hiring, curriculum and student admissions.
USF Sarasota-Manatee, which was founded in 1975, achieved independent accreditation in 2011. Like the St. Petersburg campus, its accreditation is up for renewal in 2021.
The St. Petersburg campus has an enrollment of about 4,700 students and the Sarasota-Manatee campus, 2,100. Enrollment at the Tampa campus is approximately 42,800.
The three campuses form the USF system, which is run by a 13-member Board of Trustees. The board hires and supervises a system president – Genshaft, since 2000 – and the president hires the regional chancellors for St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee.
Header photo courtesy of the City of St. Petersburg
