Pictured Above: Twice in two days, David Rosengrant (left) complained to USF President Steve Currall about the lack of representation for St. Petersburg on a university task force.
Courtesy of David Rosengrant and USF
By Nancy McCann
An advisory task force that was appointed last month to help craft a strategic plan for USF has 19 members.
Only one of them works in St. Petersburg, and she teaches in the College of Marine Science – which has long been separate from the rest of the campus.
And that, says the chair of St. Petersburg’s Faculty Council, is a wrong that needs righting.
“We are just completely left out and ignored,” David Rosengrant told President Steve Currall and Provost Ralph Wilcox in a meeting of the USF Faculty Senate Executive Committee on Jan. 13.
“With . . . one (member) from the College of Marine Science, 17 from Tampa, and one from Sarasota-Manatee, what in essence has happened is that the voice of what makes the St. Petersburg campus unique, what makes that history important to the future of USF, is not present,” said Rosengrant, who is a professor in the College of Education.
Although the College of Marine Science is in St. Petersburg it is “vastly different than the other campuses and the other colleges on the St. Petersburg campus,” Rosengrant said.
Rosengrant’s concerns about representation had a familiar ring.
Throughout three years of planning and implementing consolidation, the St. Petersburg campus and its allies in local government and business have complained repeatedly that Tampa-based administrators are overlooking or slighting the campus.
Currall told Rosengrant that he doesn’t “believe that the St. Pete perspective is not present” and “the process . . . is going to ensure that there is truly meaningful representation of the St. Petersburg voice” on the task force.
Wilcox added that “history is important, but we want this task force” to look forward.
“I think we have, as an institution, seen very clearly that the College of Marine Science will be an integral part of St. Petersburg’s campus community,” Wilcox said. He mentioned that the marine science dean is on Regional Chancellor Martin Tadlock’s leadership team, which wasn’t the case before consolidation of the three USF campuses.
“The College of Marine Science was sequestered off in their little part of the promontory . . . and never really engaged with the St. Petersburg campus community,” Wilcox said. “We expect that to change.”
The following morning, during a meeting of the St. Petersburg Campus Advisory Board, Rosengrant again asked Currall to reconsider St. Petersburg’s representation on USF’s new Strategic and Planning Advisory Task Force.
“Out of the 19 (task force) members, our representative from St. Petersburg is Dr. Mya Breitbart from the College of Marine Science. Dr. Breitbart is wonderful; no discussion, no arguments about that,” Rosengrant said. “But the College of Marine Science has in the past had a different vision than what the St. Petersburg campus has had.
“I tell my colleagues that what we had in St. Petersburg . . . is going to be different moving forward. But . . . I think there’s such a uniqueness about us.”
Currall asked to hear more.
“There’s no undergraduate programs within the College of Marine Science,” Rosengrant said. “And when you look at the three different colleges that are on the St. Petersburg campus, they all have undergraduate components within them.
“Historically, the College of Marine Science has also been considered part of the Tampa campus.”
Currall told Rosengrant that he raised “good points.”
So did Stephanie Goforth, chair of the Campus Board.
In an email to The Crow’s Nest on Friday, university spokesperson Adam Freeman said that Currall’s “office intends to reach out to Dr. Rosengrant to further discuss the matter.”
The members of the Strategic and Planning Advisory Task Force, who were appointed by Currall, will help create a plan for consideration by the USF Board of Trustees on June 8 and by the Board of Governors of the State University System of Florida on June 22.
According to the university’s Strategic Renewal webpage, the task force is charged with “developing a formal vision and strategy” and “articulating a list of the university’s core commitments and/or values.” The members are asked to do this by getting feedback from faculty, administrators, students, staff, and governance organizations on all three campuses.
The USF Faculty Senate sees this plan as inextricability linked to the large cuts that need to be made to the university’s budget because of the COVID-19 crisis.
In a memo last month to the Board of Trustees, the Faculty Senate Executive Committee asked the trustees to “pause the process of strategic (budget) realignment” and layoffs until there is a sound plan for the changes.
“A pause and slow-down will head off the potential long-term damage that could follow from rushed balancing of the budget being implemented in the absence of a shared strategic plan,” the memo says.
