By Nancy McCann
Legislation that would ensure that USF St. Petersburg becomes a full branch campus under consolidation has emerged in the state House of Representatives.
If approved by lawmakers in both houses, St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee would become branch campuses as defined by the region’s higher education accrediting agency once consolidation takes effect in July 2020.
That means the two smaller campuses would have their own budgetary and hiring authority and their own faculty and administrative organization.
The legislation has not been approved by the full House, however, and the same language is not in the Senate’s version of a broad higher education package.
That leaves things in limbo as state lawmakers head into the final two weeks of the 2019 session – a stretch typically dominated by horse-trading and last-minute deals.
If the House language becomes law, it would be a victory for the St. Petersburg campus, its allies in the Pinellas County business and political communities, and a task force established by the Legislature last year to make consolidation recommendations.
The task force called for St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee to become branch campuses as defined by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, the regional agency that accredits higher education institutions in the South.
But USF system President Judy Genshaft has equivocated on that.
She has said that officials planning the administrative structure of a single, consolidated university need to study examples that are “somewhere in between” a branch campus and an instructional site that has little control over campus identity.
The Tampa Faculty Senate did not equivocate, however.
In a stinging put-down of St. Petersburg, it “voted overwhelmingly” in February to oppose making St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee branch campuses as defined by accreditors.
Giving the two smaller campuses that designation “would threaten” the preeminent status – and funding – that USF Tampa achieved for the first time last year, the Tampa faculty said.
The higher education package in the state House might ease the Tampa faculty’s fears, at least for now.
The legislation stipulates that data from St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee would not be combined with Tampa’s data when the state calculates preeminence metrics until 2022.
