Peter Schorsch
Florida’s state universities are filled with master teachers, gifted researchers, and highly motivated students.They and their families make incalculable sacrifices to pursue knowledge, truth, and a better society for all. They persevere in the face of headlines that are deeply disheartening. The stories have been around much too long, and they are not going away anytime soon.
For decades, the Salons of Secrecy and Slush Funds known as direct support organizations have raised and spent hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private funds. There is precious little scrutiny from the legislature, and less from the press. Highly underpaid classroom faculty, and students wildly overburdened with debt, have long wondered what, exactly, their universities are getting for the proliferation of six-figure employees at the university “foundations,” and their growing retinues of lobbyists. Now that House Speaker Richard Corcoran is wondering the same thing, there’s a chance we might find out. University foundations market themselves as the secret sauce that takes a fledgling school from “good to great.” They are the providers, we are told, of the “margin of excellence” which takes a great university all the way to “preeminent.”
That’s a borderline ludicrous case to make in a week like this,when Florida’s oldest university, and its newest, are failing basic tests of competency. It took a public flogging by the Naples Daily News to make Florida State University and Florida Polytech rethink their roles in laundering public money and folding it into the pockets of politically connected people bearing “services” of dubious value. A lot of holiday dinners are being washed down with Pepto-Bismol as university administrators wonder where the next front page story will drop.
The road to academic preeminence is long and arduous. You can’t map it out in secret places where foundation directors and their well-paid sycophants meet to do whatever it is they do when they’re done dreaming up new exemptions to the public records law.
You can’t win the respect and confidence of exceptional students and inspirational teachers when the profiteering and self-dealing is happening under their noses and in their faces,and generating a paper trail for any reporter with the time to follow it.
