Judy Genshaft, who took office in 2000, is expected to announce her retirement in a press conference Monday. Jonah Hinebaugh | The Crow’s Nest
By Anna Bryson, Whitney Elfstrom and Emily Wunderlich
Judy Genshaft, the longest serving president in USF system history, is expected to announce Monday that she is retiring after 18 years.
Genshaft confirmed her retirement plans in an email to the USF system Monday stating that due to the university’s upward trajectory she and her family decided it was the right time to step down as system president.
This will take effect July 1, 2019.
A press conference is set for 2 p.m. at the Patel Center for Global Solutions on the Tampa campus.
In a phone interview with The Crow’s Nest on Sunday evening, Regional Chancellor Martin Tadlock said he had no knowledge of Genshaft’s plans to retire.
“You know about as much as I do,” he said. “I’ll be glad to talk about it when I know the facts.”
Since Genshaft became president in 2000, USF has grown in enrollment and stature as a research institution and powerful player in the state and Tampa Bay region.
In July, USF Tampa joined Florida State University and the University of Florida as “a preeminent state university.”
To qualify, the university had to meet 11 out of 12 benchmarks regarding average GPA for first-time-in-college students, research spending, student retention and graduation rates, and size of endowment as specified by the Florida Legislature.
The designation will bring an additional $6.15 million to the university this year and put pressure on the St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee campuses to raise their admission requirements ahead of consolidation in 2020.
USF also was awarded a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, another milestone.
Over the years, Genshaft’s star has risen in both academic and business circles as the university system she leads – three campuses now serving more than 48,000 students – grew in stature.
She has a compensation package of about $925,000 in pay and deferred compensation, and in 2016 she was the second highest paid president of a public university in the state, after W. Kent Fuchs at UF, according to published reports.
A timeline of turbulence
Genshaft’s long tenure has not been without controversy.
In 2001, she suspended and banned a Tampa-based computer science professor named Sami Al-Arian from campus amid controversy over allegations he supported terrorists.
Civil libertarians criticized her for violating his rights to free speech, and some professors warned she was violating his rights as a tenured professor.
Two years later, when Al-Arian was arrested on federal charges, Genshaft fired him. He later pleaded guilty to telling lies and committing non-violent acts to help terrorists and was deported.
In 2010, Genshaft fired the university’s founding football coach, the popular and successful Jim Leavitt, after university investigators found that he had slapped a player.
On the St. Petersburg campus, which has labored in the shadow of the Tampa campus since the first students enrolled here in 1965, Genshaft has sometimes been controversial.
In her 18 years as president of the USF system, she has changed the leadership in St. Petersburg six times – most recently last September, when she abruptly ousted then-Regional Chancellor Sophia Wisniewska for her handling of Hurricane Irma and named Tadlock, 64, as her replacement.
That move renewed criticism, at least among some senior faculty, that Genshaft routinely acted without consulting anybody in St. Petersburg.
The criticism grew louder several months later, when the St. Petersburg campus learned that Florida legislators were planning to abolish the independent accreditation of the St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee campuses and consolidate all three campuses under the control of Tampa.
The legislation was enacted, and consolidation is scheduled to take effect in 2020.
In recent months, Genshaft’s administration strongly opposed efforts by adjunct professors to join a union.
Despite the opposition, the adjuncts voted 326 to 91 last spring to be represented by the union.
In Genshaft’s 18th annual “State of USF” address last Wednesday, Genshaft gave no indication of her future plans. She unveiled the new logo for USF academics (see story page one) and spoke about about the consolidation of the three universities.
This is a developing story. Stay with The Crow’s Nest for updates.
This story was updated at 10:52 a.m. Sept. 10 to reflect Genshaft’s system email.
