Adam WeinsteinAs early as Tuesday, we may learn who the trustees of Florida State University care about more: The FSU learning community, or their cronies.
They can choose as college president any of three highly qualified administrators, fundraisers, and professors at other top-notch public universities. Or they can pick the man they’ve always wanted for the job, their politically connected and academically underwhelming friend, Sen. John Thrasher.
I’ve said plenty about Thrasher’s lack of qualifications for the job, and the corrupt machinations of money and ideology that brought him to the cusp of this position. What I didn’t expect was for the best argument against his candidacy to come from Thrasher himself.
The lifelong politician’s public interviews last week were a train wreck. He felt so entitled to an A-plus that he didn’t prepare at all for the exam.
He threatened to walk out. He accused students and faculty of incivility where there was none. He bristled at questions about his beliefs on science and grasped to come up with specifics. Asked multiple times about sexual assault on campus, Thrasher took a bold stand: He said he was against it. (Sexual violence, he later added, “has to do with a lot of factors, such as alcohol.”)
Asked about a bill he’d sponsored two years ago to prevent state lawmakers from waltzing into jobs at the public universities they legislated — a bill that would have prevented him from pursuing this FSU job — he stammered that it didn’t apply in his case.
In that answer, and in answers to several other questions about campaign donations he’d received, including some from well-connected friends on the hiring committee, he said he didn’t have a clue about who donated what to his campaigns.
Thrasher’s lack of insight into his own coffers is especially strange, since he’s staked his entire candidacy on an ability to collect money from FSU benefactors. After repeatedly mentioning a “100-day plan” for his would-be administration, one student finally asked him for specifics: What would he do with his first days in office?
He casted about for a few seconds, then said, “Fundraising on the private sector.” He added a beat about communicating with the Florida Legislature. Beyond that, he couldn’t suggest much.
Fundraising is good; every university president needs to raise money. And every other candidate for the job has lots of experience looking for donors in the public and private sectors. Where is Thrasher’s vision for education? Where is his commitment to cutting-edge scholarship, or even a basic knowledge of FSU’s strengths and weaknesses?
Asked whether he would open the door to climate-change denial at the university — after all, he’s fought environmental legislation in the Senate and worked for anti-climate-science donors — Thrasher said he’d first have to check with FSU’s scientists to see what they said on the issue.
He should already know: They haven’t been quiet in the past two months. There’s been a flurry of stories about how 43 Florida climate scientists, including 10 leading researchers from FSU, demanded and got an audience with Gov. Rick Scott to show him that climate change was “not a hypothetical.“
Thrasher is chairing Rick Scott’s re-election campaign. Either he was being deceitful and covered up his knowledge of the scientists’ encounters with Scott, or he’s a pretty clueless campaign chairman.
The sum total of that disastrous job interview — and of the other candidates’ stellar performances, replete with bold specifics and detailed knowledge of Florida State’s operations — has been to put the trustees on notice: If they proceed with their plan to install an underqualified favor-peddling corporate-welfare politician in the president’s office, they will make FSU a laughingstock.
It is a testament to the trustees’ insularity that they seem not to care. But why should they? After all, John Thrasher was responsible for installing them.
For anybody else, the presidency of Florida State University would be an awesome responsibility. For Thrasher, it would be a cushy retirement gig with a lifetime upgrade on Seminoles football seats.
But he’s about to get his reward. And FSU degree-seekers are about to get screwed.
Adam Weinstein is a Tallahassee-based senior writer for Gawker. He has worked for the Wall Street Journal, Village Voice, and Mother Jones. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
