The Student Life Center (left), which has been a hub of campus activities since 1990, would be named for former USF President Judy Genshaft under a proposal that the Board of Trustees will consider on June 15.
Courtesy of Google Maps and USF
By Nancy McCann
Six times in her 19 years as USF president, Judy Genshaft changed the leadership of the St. Petersburg campus, creating turnover that critics said blunted the campus’ stability and momentum.
And when the Legislature suddenly moved in 2018 to merge the three USF campuses under one accreditation, Genshaft backed the proposal and opposed St. Petersburg’s wish to operate as a full branch campus in the newly consolidated university.
Now, the Board of Trustees is poised to put the former president’s name on USF St. Petersburg’s Student Life Center –– a move that stuns some campus veterans.
“I regard this as a major betrayal of our campus,” said professor emeritus Jay Sokolovsky, who taught anthropology in St. Petersburg from 1996 until 2020.
“I cannot think of any USF president who had a worse relationship with the St. Pete campus than President Genshaft,” said professor emeritus Darryl Paulson, who taught government from 1975 until 2009. “We have been shafted enough by Genshaft.”
“Excessive and ill-advised,” said Ray Arsenault, professor emeritus of Southern history and president of the USF St. Petersburg Faculty Senate in 2018 through 2020.
“It is not difficult to see how many faculty, staff and students, current and former, may find this proposal repugnant,” said Stephen Ritch, the chief student affairs officer in 1984-2003 and founding director of the Bishop Center for Ethical Leadership in 2004-2011.
“She spent a long time serving the University of South Florida and she did a good job in developing the Tampa campus,” said professor emeritus G. Michael Killenberg, who taught journalism in St. Petersburg from 1988 to 2011. “But from our St. Petersburg perspective, she was an obstruction.”
When she retired in July 2019, Genshaft was lauded by university trustees and Tampa Bay leaders alike for expanding USF’s footprint while elevating its research, student success, innovation and fundraising.
She and her husband, longtime donors to the university, also contributed $20 million to help fund the honors college that now bears her name.
In St. Petersburg, however, the accolades for Genshaft were muted.
Some campus veterans and their allies in the community remembered her often-contentious relationship with St. Petersburg and what they called her habit of making decisions without consulting its leaders.
That history went unmentioned on May 12, when the St. Petersburg Campus Board voted quickly and unanimously to name the Student Life Center in Genshaft’s honor.
The honor reflects the “remarkable progress” of USF under Genshaft’s leadership and is for “substantial additions to this (St. Petersburg) campus, including new residential, classroom and research facilities,” according to a prepared statement read by Regional Chancellor Martin Tadlock at the meeting.
The naming proposal came from Debbie Nye Sembler, a Campus Board member who also served on the USF Board of Trustees for 12 years while Genshaft was president.
Sembler’s service “gave her first-hand insight into the important facilities and programs that President Genshaft helped bring to the St. Petersburg campus, including the Science and Technology Building, Osprey Suites residence hall and the Harborwalk, as well as the Student Life Center,” said university spokesperson Carrie O’Brion.
In a statement, Sembler said Genshaft’s presidency “was transformative for our campus in so many ways. I think it’s fitting that we continue to celebrate the tremendous impact she’s had on our community and our students by renaming the Student Life Center in her honor.”
Melissa Seixas, the chair of the Campus Board and member of the USF trustees, echoed that praise in a statement.
“We had been searching for a while for the best way to honor President Genshaft’s many contributions to our campus,” she said. “Given her strong commitment to the success of our students, renaming the Student Life Center in her honor is a fitting tribute.”
The naming proposal goes next to the Board of Trustees, which is expected to consider it on June 15.
The Student Life Center, at the northeast corner of Second Street (University Way) and Sixth Avenue South, opened as the Campus Activities Center in 1990 and was renamed in 2012. Long a hub of campus activity, it houses offices for Student Government and other student organizations –– the Wellness Center, the Fitness Center and the Student Life and Engagement staff.
The move to enshrine Genshaft’s name on the building comes at an uneasy interlude for the St. Petersburg campus.
Two years into consolidation, St. Petersburg is still feeling its way through the abrupt changes that came when it lost its much-cherished independent accreditation. One of the issues the St. Petersburg Faculty Council has been grappling with is salary fairness within the consolidated university.
A survey last year found that 72 percent of St. Petersburg faculty believed that they had been negatively impacted by consolidation.
Despite the survey being almost a year old and carried out under a different leadership, O’Brion ensures that “consolidation is a process that continues to evolve and provides our students, faculty and staff with many benefits.”
Tumult at the top
Bill Heller had been the leader of the St. Petersburg campus for eight years when Genshaft became USF president in 2000.
St. Petersburg was still a small satellite of the Tampa campus, but under Heller it had enjoyed an increase in enrollment, programs and ambition.
The campus was working to gain independent accreditation, and it was negotiating with St. Petersburg to lease and manage the city’s nearby arena and theater complex (a precursor of today’s Duke Energy Center for the Arts and Mahaffey Theater).
Then, with little public explanation, Heller was out.
Genshaft forced him to resign in June 2002, demoted him to professor and appointed a temporary caretaker to replace him.
The move stunned senior faculty members and Pinellas County leaders, and a miffed St. Petersburg City Council shelved the plan to lease the arena and theater to the university.
Among the dismayed faculty members was Arsenault, who had joined the faculty in 1980.
“Administrators, as a general rule, are not beloved,” he told the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) shortly after Heller was sacked. “But I’ve never encountered an administrator that inspired so much affection and loyalty. He’s been such a leader that it’s hard to imagine the campus without him.”
Heller was “uniformly admired by the faculty, and he elevated the status of the St. Pete campus with government and community leaders in Pinellas County,” Paulson told The Crow’s Nest last week. “Heller was an omni-present voice for the St. Pete campus. As his reward, Heller was relieved of his duties.”
The ouster of Heller set in motion a pattern of turnover at the top in St. Petersburg. In the 17 years that followed, Genshaft changed the leadership five more times.
St. Petersburg leaders (who over the years were variously called campus dean, chief executive and regional chancellor) “had less security than Republican critics of Donald Trump,” Paulson said. They were “flying out the doors faster than New York Yankee managers during the [George] Steinbrenner years.”
Four leaders came and went before Sophia Wisniewska became regional chancellor in July 2013. She served four years and, like Heller, built rapport with faculty and community leaders as the St. Petersburg campus grew in prestige and stability.
One of those community leaders was retired entrepreneur Kate Tiedemann, who in 2014 donated $10 million to the campus’ business school, which now bears her name.
But shortly after Hurricane Irma blew past Tampa Bay in September 2017, Wisniewska was forced out by Genshaft.
The president concluded that Wisniewska had botched preparations for the hurricane and then –– without informing her –– left town the day before the storm was expected to hit, jeopardizing the safety of the campus and its students.
Wisniewska disputed Genshaft’s account of events, and in April 2019 she sued Genshaft and the USF Board of Trustees for defamation and breach of contract. That case is pending in Hillsborough County Circuit Court.
On the St. Petersburg campus, meanwhile, the faculty and staff reeled in confusion and dismay when yet another leader was sent packing.
Noting the near-constant turmoil in campus leadership, Arsenault called Genshaft’s move a “gross over-reaction” that trampled on due process, ignored senior faculty and ruined Wisniewska’s reputation. It was, he said, “more like an execution than a resignation.”
Genshaft’s popularity in St. Petersburg “suffered grievously” because of the ousters of Wisniewska and Heller, Arsenault said last week.
‘Selling out’ the campus
If anything, Genshaft’s standing in St. Petersburg suffered even more during the prolonged skirmishing that followed the Legislature’s surprise move in 2018 to abolish the campus’ independent accreditation and return it to the control of Tampa.
For decades, St. Petersburg had labored under the thumb of Tampa. But that seemingly ended in 2006, when St. Petersburg earned separate accreditation, a development that gave the campus a lot of independence and a jolt of prestige.
When, without warning, key Pinellas County legislators abruptly moved to unravel that accreditation in January 2018, the news hit the campus like a bomb.
Tadlock, the regional chancellor, told a campus forum that Genshaft “was as surprised as we were” to learn of the proposal.In fact, legislators had alerted Genshaft three months earlier that they were considering the move, and when the president quickly embraced the proposal –– after first being neutral –– the Tampa Bay Times editorial board chided her for being “less than candid.”
As USF prepared for consolidation and unified its admissions across the three campuses, St. Petersburg’s freshman enrollment began to drop. When Genshaft retired in 2019, the number of St. Petersburg’s new freshmen in the combined summer and fall semesters was down by 40 percent from the 2016 figure. Genshaft’s administration did little about this dramatic decline, and it wasn’t until legislators intervened the following year that the campus’ freshman enrollment climbed back up.
A Tampa Bay Times editorial in September 2018 posed a question that was on many people’s minds about the Tampa administration’s early plan for combining three campuses into one university: “Is this a merger or a hostile takeover?”
Genshaft and her administration declined to embrace a state-created consolidation task force’s recommendation to make USF St. Petersburg a branch campus with budgetary and hiring authority and its own faculty and administrative organization. The legislature ultimately had to write those guarantees for the St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee campuses into state law.
Genshaft’s maneuvering during the months of consolidation planning is another reason to keep her name off the Student Life Center, the veteran faculty critics said.
“The fact that Genshaft is perceived of selling out the St. Pete campus after their years of struggle for separate accreditation and greater independence is reason enough not to name any St. Pete campus building” after her, Paulson said.
Under consolidation, Arsenault said, “we lost much of our autonomy and most of our momentum.
“Rightly or wrongly, many faculty and staff members –– and St. Petersburg community leaders and citizens –– feel that President Genshaft bears a significant amount of responsibility for this debacle,” he said.
“I fear that many St. Petersburg campus citizens and supporters would regard the naming of a major campus building in her honor as equivalent to rubbing salt in their wounds.”
Although many campus veterans oppose naming the building for Genshaft, one of the seven St. Petersburg campus leaders who served under her endorsed the proposal.
William T. “Bill” Hogarth was dean of USF’s College of Marine Science in 2008-2011 and then became executive director of the Florida Institute of Oceanography. He served as interim regional chancellor from August 2012 until Wisniewska took office in July 2013.
The marine science hub, which is based on the St. Petersburg campus but has always reported to Tampa, enjoyed a positive relationship with Genshaft, Hogarth said.
She helped the marine scientists get new labs and two new research vessels, one of which is named for Hogarth.
“I think definitely President Genshaft needs to be recognized [on the St. Petersburg campus]. The University of South Florida grew tremendously and it got its reputation under the leadership of President Genshaft,” Hogarth said. “It’s a hard, tough job. When you have three entities – USF Tampa, USF St. Petersburg and USF Sarasota-Manatee – you have to sort of do a balancing act and the number of students at USF Tampa was by far the largest.”
What they’re saying
Regional Chancellor Martin Tadlock, in a prepared statement he read before the USF St. Petersburg Campus Board endorsed the proposal on May 12
Judy Genshaft has made significant contributions to the University of South Florida System throughout her 19 years of service. Under her leadership, the University of South Florida made remarkable progress, attaining national and international recognition in key institutional areas including student success, research and innovation, fundraising, and economic development. Dr. Genshaft’s support of the USF St. Petersburg campus resulted in substantial additions to the campus, including new residential, classroom and research facilities to accommodate the consistent growth in both student numbers and the academic programming array offered on the campus.
Scott Goyer, vice chair of the Campus Board and president and CEO of the YMCA of the Suncoast
In my world, recognizing and naming buildings is traditionally attached with a significant financial contribution. As I’ve learned about Dr. Genshaft’s commitment to this university, it was easy for me to make the leap… from saying that the contribution is not necessarily a financial gift… but her contribution to this campus makes this a very worthy naming opportunity and something that I will support 100 percent.
Ray Arsenault, John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History emeritus and president of the USF St. Petersburg Faculty Senate 2018-2020
I was surprised to learn that USF’s Board of Trustees is contemplating naming the St. Petersburg Student Life Center after former President Judy Genshaft. In my opinion, this gesture is excessive and ill-advised, considering that the USF Honors College already bears her name (recognizing her generous $20 million personal contribution to the College) –– and considering that throughout much of her presidency her relationship to the campus was at best mixed and at worst highly contentious. Her popularity on the St. Petersburg campus suffered grievously after she fired a series of well-respected and effective Regional Chancellors, beginning with Bill Heller in 2002. In more recent times, her key role, along with that of several legislators, in coercing the university to undergo a centralizing consolidation –– a move that was extremely unpopular at USF St. Petersburg –– further tarnished her image and diminished her effectiveness overseeing regional campus affairs.
With separate accreditation, we had a great deal of momentum as a semi-autonomous USF St. Petersburg, and we became something of a model for student-centered public education, commitment to civic engagement, and undergraduate research opportunities. But with the repeal of that separate accreditation under consolidation, we lost much of our autonomy and most of our momentum.
Rightly or wrongly, many faculty and staff members –– and St. Petersburg community leaders and citizens –– feel that President Genshaft bears a significant amount of responsibility for this debacle. Thus, I fear that many St. Petersburg campus citizens and supporters would regard the naming of a major campus building in her honor as equivalent to rubbing salt in their wounds. I hope the Board of Trustees will choose another campus champion to honor –– one whose name will be more appropriate as a high-profile symbolic presence on the façade of the campus student center.
G. Michael Killenberg, professor emeritus and founding director, USFSP Department of Journalism and Media Studies (now Department of Journalism and Digital Communication)
It’s not the oldest or most historically significant building on campus, but for those of us who started here in the late 1980s, just as USFSP was beginning to mature, the Student Life Center had significance as a community asset. It was where we held a series of very successful community-campus lectures attended by up to 500 people in the gym area.
I was hired in 1988 to be part of the mass communication department in Tampa and I was assigned to what I considered the outpost campus. But I liked that. We got to build a journalism program from scratch. I only discovered years later that the frostiness I perceived from my colleagues in Tampa was real: They did not want a journalism program on the St. Petersburg campus. In fact, there were a good number of them who did not want the St. Petersburg campus to grow at all and felt that it was a waste of money and drawing resources away from Tampa. That was the kind of environment I came into and I’m sure it was that way for others like Ray Arsenault and some of the faculty in criminology and other departments I knew well.
[Genshaft] spent a long time serving the University of South Florida, and she did a good job in developing the Tampa campus. But from our St. Petersburg perspective, she was an obstruction… Even in the years after we won a degree of independence (in 2006) most of us felt that Tampa yielded to any kind of autonomy for us very grudgingly. It was forced upon the Genshaft administration, and the sentiment in Tampa was that St. Petersburg was seized by politicians and Tampa needed to get its territory back. Before she left office, that’s what she accomplished. She got St. Petersburg back… I can see why the old-timers are reacting with some degree of disgust over naming the Student Life Center after Genshaft.
Stephen Ritch, former chief student affairs officer and founding director of the Bishop Center for Ethical Leadership
I have always believed that university buildings should be named by those who contributed exemplary service to the campus overall or to the programs being housed in the particular building. The Marshall Center and Heller Hall are prime examples. University buildings may also be named for donors who fund part or all of the construction. Former president Genshaft meets neither of these criteria in the case of the Student Life Center.
In fact, it is not difficult to see how many faculty, staff and students, current and former, may find this proposal repugnant. Some no doubt believe they have ample reason to conclude that she did not contribute exemplary service to USF St. Petersburg or to Student Life here. Indeed, many may conclude that her actions, especially with regard to lack of candor, accreditation and student housing, were detrimental and thus disqualifying.
Moreover, on a practical level, this removes a significant donor-based naming opportunity that could be worth millions to student life programs and operations.
Personally, knowing what I experienced and know to be true, it may be considered an affront to name the Student Life Center in her honor.
Darryl Paulson, professor emeritus of government
There is no doubt that former USF President Judy Genshaft was responsible for numerous significant changes to USF during her tenure. The university grew significantly in terms of the size of the study body and faculty, and there was tremendous growth in outside research funds. These changes and other accomplishments led USF to achieving status as a premier university in Florida, but also to a growing recognition of USF as a top-tier research university. In addition, President Genshaft has contributed millions of dollars of her personal funds to various USF programs. Those contributions are worthy of recognition.
What is at issue here is the naming of a specific USF St. Petersburg building, the USFSP Student Life Center, after President Genshaft. President Genshaft has already been recognized for her numerous contributions and will continue to be recognized, but this effort is inappropriate for several reasons. As a faculty member of USFSP from 1975 to 2009, I experienced numerous USF presidents and their relationship with the St. Petersburg campus. I cannot think of any USF president who had a worse relationship with the St. Pete campus than President Genshaft.
Let me provide a few examples. First, St. Pete regional campus deans (one of the names for the top campus leaders) often had brief tenures, which many believed was her means of controlling campus (leaders) who exercised independence from Tampa… Genshaft removed two of the most popular… Bill Heller and Sophia Wisniewska. No campus (leader) was more admired by the faculty and staff than Bill Heller. He was uniformly admired and respected by the faculty, and he elevated the status of the St. Pete Campus… As his reward, Heller was relieved of his duties.
Wisniewska was like Heller in terms of her community outreach and popularity with the faculty. Then, along came Hurricane Irma, and Wisniewska was one of the casualties.
What upsets most St. Pete campus faculty about Genshaft is how she undermined the long struggle of the St. Pete campus for separate accreditation and greater independence… The fact that Genshaft is perceived as selling out the St. Pete campus after the years of struggle for separate accreditation and greater independence is reason enough not to name any St. Pete campus building after Genshaft. We have been shafted enough by Genshaft.
Jay Sokolovsky, professor emeritus of anthropology
I was involved with the last iterations of re-establishing the accreditation of the campus and we were all enormously proud of what we had accomplished. So we were incredibly shocked when politicians pushed to have Tampa retake control of our campus and there seemed no good reason to do it, other than they felt they could do it. I speak for myself and I think my opinion was shared by many staff and faculty that this was a betrayal of everything we had worked for in gaining autonomous accreditation and developing programs.
And while some see the initial unification as potentially bringing positives to our campus, the reality is that very few people see it now that way. I regard this as an incredible betrayal of our campus – having her name on anything major on our campus – and I’ve talked to other faculty who will remain unnamed and they feel the same way. I would urge the body who is deciding on this to totally reject this or perhaps assign her name to a smaller venue on campus.
