Faculty Senate president Ray Arsenault. All images courtesy of USF St. Petersburg
By Nancy McCann
All of a sudden, the people planning the consolidation of USF’s three campuses want more input from faculty and staff.
In a memo dated Jan. 7, USF system Provost Ralph Wilcox announced that it was “critical at this juncture to further actively engage our faculty and other key stakeholders” in consolidation deliberations.
In turn, St. Petersburg campus leaders hastily worked up a list of 54 nominees and notified them Jan. 9 that their names – if chosen – would be spread among 17 teams that are expected to meet three or four times, work up recommendations on key issues, and then deliver them by Feb. 9.
That’s less than a month away and just six days before the USF system administration must deliver a plan to the system’s Board of Trustees, which – in turn – must report to the state board that oversees Florida’s public universities by March 15.
“We just learned about this right before the weekend” of Jan. 5-6, said Catherine Cardwell, the St. Petersburg campus’ interim deputy chief of academic affairs. “It’s hard for me to speculate about the timing of this, and I can’t say exactly what prompted it.
“It was a surprise.”
The consolidation planning process has been underway since last summer, with countless public and private meetings, conference calls and reports, plus 86 pages of recommendations from a Chicago-based consulting firm.
So why the sudden need for still more work at the eleventh hour?
“We had this big emergency conference call,” said Ray Arsenault, a professor of Southern history and president of the USF St. Petersburg Faculty Senate, who was tagged to help Cardwell compile the list of the campus’ nominees.
He said he was “taken aback” by the out-of-the-blue move and noted that the beginning of a semester is a “terrible time” to put an additional burden on faculty members.
All along, some have complained that faculty members – especially St. Petersburg faculty – have been neglected in the consolidation planning effort.
Arsenault said he has heard that this latest curve in the process was prompted by Deanna Michael, an associate professor of education in St. Petersburg and member of the USF system Board of Trustees.
He said he heard that Michael complained that faculty didn’t have sufficient input on consolidation planning and “that kicked this off.”
In an interview, however, Michael declined to take credit.
“I’m always coming from the perspective that faculty input is important” in university governance, she said, but faculty were involved in the internal work groups on consolidation that met for several months.
“Now decisions are in another stage” of the planning process, she said. “It was expected that the next step would be to take what the internal committees have already done and take it to the next level.”
Is there enough time for the 17 hastily assembled teams – whose members were announced on Jan. 12 – to complete their work?
The whole consolidation planning process has been “nightmarishly fast,” replied Michael. But the new groups can “probably do it.”
Without advance notice and little public debate, the state Legislature decided last spring to abolish the independent accreditation of the St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee campuses and roll them into a single unified system under Tampa’s control.
Legislators also ordered USF administrators to present a plan of consolidation to their Board of Trustees by Feb. 15 – now just a month away.
The planning for consolidation has essentially followed two tracks.
On the first track was a high-profile, 13-member task force that – working through three subcommittees – held a series of public meetings on all three campuses.
On the second track, working privately and quietly, were 86 administrators, professors and staff members in a series of internal work groups.
That second-track group, called the Consolidation Implementation Committee, has produced a 104-page draft report with findings on governance, degree program offerings, curriculum, educational policies and academic structures.
Its draft report, like the recommendations of the outside consulting group, appears to favor the large Tampa campus at the expense of St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee.
The two smaller campuses stand to lose most of their colleges, and they will have to adopt Tampa’s policies on everything from admissions to general education requirements.
There is also talk that St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee might become instructional sites, as opposed to branch campuses where academic research is a priority. Instructional sites are generally considered less prestigious than branch campuses.
That, said Arsenault, is “the elephant in the room.”
“That would be a terrible development for us,” he said. He said he has heard that Huron, the Chicago-based consulting firm, “was acting as if it was a done deal that we would be an instructional site.”
“I don’t know if that will come up in the 17 committees,” Arsenault said. “That’s one of the reasons we will encourage nominees to participate even though it’s a burden.”
It was the Consolidation Implementation Committee that prompted USF system leaders to hastily assemble the 17 new study teams.
In its draft report on Dec. 19, the CIC said that there was “an urgent need to proactively engage faculty and staff” to help “transform the CIC considerations to a concrete plan for consolidation” in everything from “program alignment and college structure” to faculty governance and “building a digital ecosystem.”
The CIC’s co-chairs are Pritish Mukherjee, vice provost and associate vice president of the USF system and professor of physics in Tampa, and Donna Petersen, senior associate vice president of USF Health and dean of the College of Public Health in Tampa.
In a statement to The Crow’s Nest, they said their committee “recognizes the importance of consulting with additional faculty members and other stakeholders around some of the key issues in consolidation.
“These discussions will build on prior input by CIC members and help provide direction, not only for finalizing an implementation plan, but also as a consolidated university takes shape over the next several years,” they said.
In an email to USF St. Petersburg employees on Jan. 10, Regional Chancellor Martin Tadlock said this final stage of the planning process will help deal with “some unresolved questions about organizational structure of a consolidated university.”
“This is a complicated and significant planning process,” Tadlock wrote. “It will result in a plan that will take years to implement and will require a lot of patience and tolerance for shifts in direction.”
In a semester kickoff meeting with St. Petersburg faculty on Jan. 11, Tadlock said the campus should strongly oppose any move to make it an instructional site, not a branch campus.
This post was edited on Jan. 14, 2019. A previous version of the article incorrectly listed the order of people identified in the photo.
