By Nancy McCann
A bill designed to clarify that USF St. Petersburg will become a branch campus once the USF system is consolidated has been filed in the Legislature.
The bill is sponsored by Rep. Ray Rodrigues, R-Estero, the lawmaker who was also the listed sponsor last year when the Legislature abolished the independent accreditation of the St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee campuses and ordered them consolidated into a single university.
But the principal architect of last year’s consolidation move was Rep. Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor, who is chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee and speaker-designate of the House in 2021-2022.
The language in Rodrigues’ 22-page bill, which was filed on Feb. 14, does not include a specific definition of what a branch campus is.
The bill comes at a crucial juncture for the St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee campuses.
A task force mandated by last year’s Legislature to help plan consolidation has recommended to the USF Board of Trustees that St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee be full branch campuses once consolidation takes effect in July 2020.
That designation is vital to backers of the St. Petersburg campus who strongly opposed consolidation, arguing that it would undercut the gains and prestige of the campus in recent years.
But USF system President Judy Genshaft and her administration have equivocated, pointedly declining to embrace the recommendations of the task force.
At a trustees meeting on Feb. 12, Genshaft said that “what we have to do is to find out which structure is the best that fits our personality at the University of South Florida.”
She told the trustees that branch campuses for other universities in Florida are structured differently and can be “somewhere in-between” a branch campus and what accreditors call an off-campus instructional site.
But the president of the accrediting agency that oversees USF says that “somewhere in-between” is not an option.
“For accreditation purposes, it’s either one or the other – a branch campus or an off-campus instructional site – and there is nothing in-between,” Belle Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, told The Crow’s Nest last week.
Read the legislation at: https://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Documents/loaddoc.aspx?FileName=_h0839__.docx&DocumentType=Bill&BillNumber=0839&Session=2019
