Pictured above: Under the prospectus sent to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, the St. Petersburg campus will lose its independent accreditation on July 1. SACSCOC is one of six regional accrediting agencies in the United States. According to its website, it monitors, evaluates and accredits education institutions in Florida and 10 other Southern states.
Courtesy of the City of St. Petersburg
By Nancy McCann
In what now seems like the old days – right before spring break in mid-March – the USF Tampa administration submitted an important document to the regional agency that accredits higher education institutions in the South.
The document informed the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) about changes that will come as the three campuses of the USF system are consolidated into one university.
The document is called a Substantive Change Prospectus. It’s required when significant changes are being made at accredited institutions.
The Executive Council of the SACSCOC Board of Trustees is scheduled to take action on USF’s proposed consolidation on June 12.
The main focus of the prospectus is to describe the roles and responsibilities of the regional chancellors; the level of autonomy of the branch campuses; and the alignment across the three campuses of curricula, student government, student fees and faculty governance, tenure and promotion.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has upended college life since early March, USF Provost Ralph Wilcox said no changes will be made to the prospectus before the vote in June.
The SACSCOC board “will make its decision based solely on what was included in the substantive change prospectus and supporting documentation that was submitted in advance of the March 15 deadline,” said Wilcox.
Organization of the consolidated university
Organizational charts in the prospectus show five regional vice chancellors in St. Petersburg reporting directly to Regional Chancellor Martin Tadlock.
This is a key feature of the proposed consolidated university.
Earlier plans — including what USF system President Steve Currall called a “preliminary blueprint” — had no academic or student success personnel reporting directing to Tadlock and moved these responsibilities to Tampa.
That organizational structure drew fierce opposition from the St. Petersburg campus and community and was finally abandoned.
On top of that, the proposed model did not appear to comply with state law (passed in 2019) requiring USF St. Petersburg and USF Sarasota-Manatee to operate as branch campuses with their own budgetary and hiring authority and their own faculty and administrative organization.
Under the single university starting in July, the prospectus says, the two regional chancellors will have roles with “primarily local, branch campus-based responsibilities.”
Tadlock and Sarasota-Manatee Chancellor Karen Holbrook will continue to report to Currall “on all administrative matters.” Their responsibilities for the branch campuses will include implementing the budgets, assessing faculty hiring needs, and collaborating with college deans.
The depiction of the consolidated university shows one college and one college dean for each “overarching disciplinary area,” with some having academic programs and faculty on more than one campus (“multi-campus colleges”).
The college deans for areas like arts and sciences, business, education, engineering, and marine science report to Wilcox, the Tampa-based provost.
Deans of the Morsani College of Medicine, College of Nursing, College of Public Health and Taneja College of Pharmacy report to Charles Lockwood, senior vice president of USF Health.
Deans who have been reporting to Tadlock will have new position titles and report directly to the college deans in Tampa.
In the new College of Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg’s current arts and sciences dean, Magali Michael, will be a campus dean reporting to College Dean Eric Eisenberg in Tampa.
In the Muma College of Business, St. Petersburg will have a Kate Tiedemann School of Business and Finance (instead of the Kate Tiedemann College of Business). St. Petersburg’s business dean, Sri Sundaram, will become a campus dean and dean of the business and finance school. He will report to Dean Moez Limayem in Tampa.
In the College of Education, St. Petersburg will have a School of Innovation with Brenda Walker as its associate dean. Walker, now the interim associate dean of St. Petersburg’s education college, will report to College Dean Rob Knoeppel in Tampa.
Each college dean has a seat on the USF Council of Deans and is responsible for ensuring that programs are unified on all three campuses. St. Petersburg’s regional vice chancellor for academic affairs will be a member of the deans council.
Members of the provost’s leadership team, who up to now have mainly served USF Tampa, will serve the three campuses of the consolidated university.
USF Tampa will be the parent campus. USF St. Petersburg and USF Sarasota-Manatee will keep their names as branch campuses.
Preeminence metrics and freshman enrollment
In 2018, USF Tampa was named a preeminent state research university – a designation that the university stresses in its marketing and planning.
The preeminence designation was created by the Florida Legislature in 2013 to give extra funds to the state universities that meet at least 11 of 12 metrics – or standards – designed to measure high academic and research achievements.
Three of Florida’s 12 public universities have been awarded preeminence status: Florida State, the University of Florida and USF Tampa.
Although USF St. Petersburg and USF Sarasota-Manatee are scheduled to become branch campuses of the singly accredited USF in July, data from the two smaller campuses will not be used in determining USF’s eligibility to remain preeminent until July 1, 2022.
The prospectus highlights three of the preeminence metrics related to student performance and the potential impact that those campuses will have on the numbers.
One is the requirement for a four-year graduation rate of at least 60 percent for first-time in college freshmen (FTICs).
Between 2014 and 2019, the four-year graduation rate for FTICs attending USF Tampa went from 44.3 percent to 61.6 percent, according to the prospectus.
In 2019, the combined graduation rate for the three USF system campuses was 59.4 percent (up from 58.6 percent in 2018).
That means that the four-year graduation rate for St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee must be “improved significantly” by the academic year 2021-22, the prospectus says.
The four-year graduation rates of USF St. Petersburg and USF Sarasota-Manatee (32.1 percent and 31.1 percent) for the years 2014-18 “fall well short” of the Tampa campus’ rate for those same years (60.5 percent) and the threshold required for preeminence, Wilcox told The Crow’s Nest last month.
“If USF St. Petersburg and USF Sarasota-Manatee remained separately accredited institutions and they were pursuing preeminence independently, their four-year graduation rates would roughly have to double to reach the preeminence threshold,” Wilcox said.
Xiaoying Liu, the associate director of institutional research at the St. Petersburg campus, said in a May 4 email to The Crow’s Nest that USF St. Petersburg’s FTIC four-year graduation rate for 2015-19 was 36 percent by spring 2019 and 43.3 percent by the end of the summer semester.
Another preeminence metric requires a 90 percent freshman-to-sophomore (one year) retention rate.
“Although the combined performance of the three USF campuses fell short of this threshold in 2018 . . . the freshman-to-sophomore retention rate for all campuses combined exceeded 90% in 2019,” the prospectus says.
Liu said the 2018-19 retention rate for the St. Petersburg campus was 82.9 percent – a number Tadlock has noted is well above the national average of 75 percent.
A third metric for maintaining preeminent status requires that, as an average, incoming freshmen have at least a (weighted) GPA of 4.0 and 1200 on the SAT.
In order to meet this metric as a consolidated university, admission standards at the St. Petersburg campus were rapidly raised to be consistent with Tampa’s for 2019 student enrollment.
Immediately following the hike in admissions requirements, there was a dramatic decline in freshman enrollment in St. Petersburg. Enrollment for the fall semester fell from 368 new freshmen in 2018 to 178 new freshmen in 2019.
Yet the prospectus that USF submitted to SACSCOC says that consolidation of the three campuses “is not expected to materially increase or decrease student enrollments . . . in the near term.”
Denise Young, the SACSCOC vice president assigned to USF, said in a May 5 email that her agency is aware of the recent decline in enrollment in St. Petersburg.
She also said that enrollment numbers are not specifically requested in the guide for a consolidation prospectus, although institutions typically provide the most recent figures.
But Wilcox said SACSCOC did instruct USF to provide enrollment figures, specifically asking the university “to compare the year immediately prior to consolidation (2019-20) to the year immediately following consolidation (2020-21) … That is what we meant by ‘in the near term.’
“Student enrollments on the St. Petersburg campus are not expected to decline between 2019-20 and 2020-21 as they did between 2018-19 and 2019-20,” Wilcox said.
Numbers provided by Tadlock in a recent regional chancellor’s update show an expected increase in St. Petersburg’s upcoming summer enrollment.
Faculty can expect ‘equitable’ workloads
“Consolidation is not expected to reduce the number of faculty or the percentage who are full-time,” according to the prospectus sent to SACSCOC.
Here are other faculty highlights in the report:
- There will be equity in faculty workloads and support for “research, scholarly and creative activities.” That means teaching loads in St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee “will require some reduction.”
- The biggest impact on faculty workload in St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee will be a reduction in committee and administrative service obligations as the burden for those is distributed more widely across the three campuses.
- The reduction in service obligations on the two smaller campuses will free up more time for “scholarly research and creative activities.”
- Faculty hired at USF St. Petersburg and USF Sarasota-Manatee who had three years of tenure-earning credit on July 1, 2019, will be considered for tenure under the guidelines being used at those campuses prior to consolidation.
- All other “tenure-earning faculty” will be evaluated for tenure and promotion using a single set of guidelines developed by the USF System Faculty Council (effective July 1, 2020).
- The new tenure guidelines set “higher expectations for scholarly productivity for faculty formerly” in St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee.
Students can expect some changes
The consolidated university will continue to offer students essentially the same array of degree and certificate programs that the three separately accredited institutions now offer, plus a few previously approved new academic programs that will start in 2020-21.
Here are other student highlights in the prospectus:
- “Transactional services” like those provided by admissions, financial aid and the registrar will be centralized under consolidation.
- Services that rely more on individual relationships and depend on building trust will be less centralized and more customized at the local campuses, including student development, career counseling, student engagement and mental health counseling.
- The honors programs in St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee will fall under the Tampa-based Judy Genshaft Honors College.
- Campus-based recreational programs will differ because of the different types of facilities on each campus. Each campus will have an organized fitness program and an intramural sports program.
- Under consolidation, student governing bodies on each campus will address local concerns, and a central government based in Tampa will address concerns that apply to students on all campuses. The student governments of USF Tampa, USF St. Petersburg and USF Sarasota-Manatee approved a unified constitution in November 2019.
Editor’s Note
This article was updated on May 11, 2020, to correct the abbreviation for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC). The image was also replaced at SACSCOC’s request.
