Pictured Above: The campus name will remain unchanged on large signs like this – at least for the foreseeable future.
Patrick Tobin | The Crow’s Nest
The university administration stirred the pot last summer when it announced that USF St. Petersburg’s name was getting a tweak.
Henceforth, it would be known as the “USF St. Petersburg campus” – with a lowercase “c.”
Out went instructions to students, faculty and staff to change the name in email signature blocks, letterhead logos, flyers, PowerPoint presentations and even casual conversation.
The administration also said it was conducting an inventory to determine how many campus signs needed to be changed and what that would cost.
Here’s the latest on the sign change: Never mind.
“We were told not to worry about changing signage, that it isn’t necessary to change signage while we are looking at budget reductions,” Regional Chancellor Martin Tadlock said Friday. Otherwise, things “remain the same as we’d been instructed, like using ‘campus’ in emails.”
The budget reductions, which are coming amid the worst public health crisis in a century, have university officials scrutinizing virtually every expenditure in the quest to save money.
USF spokesperson Carrie O’Brion said that the university’s “rough estimate” on the cost of replacing signs and adding “campus” to existing signs was $82,150. About $4,000 has already been spent to replace pole banners.
When he announced the name tweak back in August, Provost Ralph Wilcox told a Board of Trustees committee that altering the names of USF St. Petersburg and USF Sarasota-Manatee was necessary to keep the newly consolidated university in compliance with accrediting standards.
The regional agency that accredits USF was concerned that using those names suggested that “we are still separate institutions” and that the trustees and Tampa “somehow do not have sufficient organizational control over all campuses,” Wilcox said.
“We should never forget or neglect to include …. USF Tampa campus; USF St. Petersburg campus; USF Sarasota-Manatee campus.”
But Wilcox seemed to forget how popular the name USF St. Petersburg is.
Annoyed that Tampa-based administrators appeared to be using consolidation of the three USF campuses to undercut St. Petersburg, key Pinellas County legislators amended state law in 2019 to stipulate that it “shall be known as the ‘University of South Florida St. Petersburg.’”
When those administrators moved to tweak the name anyway, there were howls of protest.
It “drives me crazy,” Ed Montanari, the chair of the St. Petersburg City Council, told The Crow’s Nest in October. “Our name is everything to us. We have taken so much pride and we’ve had so much effort into branding our city and putting St. Petersburg on the map and having the University of South Florida St. Petersburg right here in our downtown. It’s part of our DNA.”
St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman also criticized the change in a letter to Jeff Brandes, a state senator from St. Petersburg who helped lead the move in 2018 to end St. Petersburg’s independence – but then helped enshrine the name in the statutes the next year.
For himself, Brandes told The Crow’s Nest last fall that he questioned “why they (administrators) need to do any of this … It seems like much about nothing … to focus on signage and create all kinds of internal consternation” about it.
Emails obtained by The Crow’s Nest under the state Public Records Law show that Nick Setteducato, the interim regional vice chancellor of administration and finance, asked several St. Petersburg staff members on Aug. 21 for a “30-minute Teams call … to discuss the approach to changing out signs noted by the Provost (Wilcox) on his recent site visit” to St. Petersburg.
On Aug. 24, Tadlock emailed USF President Steve Currall to say he had authorized an inventory of signs, “but I am not going to approve the expenditure or changes unless directed by you.”
He raised three concerns.
First, Tadlock wrote, “this is the 4th change to campus signage in the past 4 years due to changes in USF branding.” And that is “costly.”
Second, he noted the legislative mandate of 2019 that the campus “will continue to be called USF St. Petersburg.”
Third, while signage change was coming in St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee, there was no indication it would also happen on the Tampa campus, Tadlock wrote. “I’d like to clarify that this applies to all three campuses.”
“I know this seems like a small matter amid so many others that we are coping with, but I believe it is important to quite a number of people here and in the community,” Tadlock wrote.
Currall responded the next day.
“I am in the process of actively seeking clarity from SACS on this matter,” he wrote to Tadlock. “Will let you know when I receive the response.”
There was nothing further from the two administrators in the emails provided to The Crow’s Nest.
Even seemingly little changes can be costly, as the administration learned in 2018 when it decided to change the school’s academic logo.
The new logo, which featured a big, lime-green bull (the school’s mascot) on a dark-green background, was so unpopular that the university tweaked and then abandoned it a year later.
The back-and-forth on the logo cost an estimated $1 million, including $200,000 on marketing, Joe Hice, USF’s then-vice president of communications and marketing, told the Tampa Bay Times.
“Premier” designstion does nothing for the student body or their education. Best to spin off as a stand-alone educational institution. Keto the name (and the logo); change the USF President and Provost!
USF sure loves to waste money over b******t