“Students are on the hook for a minimum of $57 million over the next 30 years,” said the headline on the Sept. 4, 2012, front page.
Courtesy of David Sheddon, Nelson Poynter Memorial Library
By Crow’s Nest Staff
The University Student Center was about to open, and The Crow’s Nest sniffed a scandal.
In a 2007-2008 survey of the student body, 60 percent of the more than 700 respondents had supported using student fees to help build a student union with a dining hall, a health clinic and spaces for student organizations.
But the new building didn’t have the floor for organizations and the clinic as once promised. That was scrapped by the administration for financial reasons. In its place: revenue-generating ballrooms and student housing.
For the next 30 years, students would help pay for the building, as reconfigured, with some of the money from their activities and service fees.
In one of the boldest front pages in Crow’s Nest history, the staff superimposed an image of the new building in the middle of a giant $100 bill that was dangling from a fishhook and line.
“USC BAIT-AND-SWITCH,” said the headline on the Sept. 4, 2012, front page. “Students are on the hook for a minimum of $57 million over the next 30 years.”
“Students are not ATMs,” read the headline over a Page 6 editorial criticizing the way the finances were handled.
The administration in Tampa was perturbed, said Ren LaForme, the paper’s editor-in-chief in 2012-2013.
It summoned LaForme, managing editor Allison Guinn and other editors to a boardroom in Tampa to respond. Guinn had published the story under a previous name.
“We sat in the middle of what felt like a dozen suits and ties and asked them to point out any mistakes we’d made,” said LaForme, who is now a digital tools reporter at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
No mistakes were cited, he said. Instead, the editors got a lecture on “our tone and criticism.”
One administrator called it “inaccurate and slanderous” to say USF system President Judy Genshaft influenced the decisions, The Crow’s Nest reported on Oct. 1.
At first, the administration indicated that Student Government would have budgetary authority over the revenue from A&S fees that would be allocated to pay down the USC bond. (In 2019-2020, the amount is $1.7 million.)
But then-Interim Regional Chancellor Bill Hogarth appeared before SG’s senate executive committee on Oct. 15 to say that the administration had changed its mind about that. He apologized for the confusion.
“First we said you did (have authority), then we said you didn’t, then we said you did,” he said, according to a Crow’s Nest story on Oct. 22.
He urged them to move past the issue.
This story was updated on Nov. 1, 2019, to correct the name of the former managing editor. Her name is Allison Guinn.
