Guest AuthorFlorida State University trustees should not select state Sen. John Thrasher as the university’s next president when they vote today.
Not on the grounds faculty and students claim: he lacks academic credentials, prefers creationist myths to sound science, and conveniently forgot several of his key votes on climate change.
But for more compelling reasons:
— As a “non-traditional” candidate, Thrasher doesn’t cut it.
In 2012, Purdue University selected former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels as its president. Although not a traditional academic candidate, Daniels had extensive government and private sector executive experience.
His credibility as a change agent informed Purdue’s selection as a well as his high-level executive capacity as governor, White House budget director, think-tank CEO, corporate vice president.
As president of Purdue, Daniels has already served as a change agent: imposing a freeze on tuition, consolidating operations and cutting needless expenditures, venturing into competency-based curricula, while bolstering Purdue’s traditional STEM approach.
Thrasher has frequently maintained he would be an effective “advocate”, but there is much more for a university president to do, especially for a university pushing toward a greater national reputation.
Much of that will be administrative. He fails here.
— As a presidential candidate, Thrasher has been pushed onto the FSU community in a way that has compromised his potential effectiveness.
In any future battle, FSU faculty will never consider Thrasher a legitimate or good-faith actor. His candidacy has insulted two key constituencies – faculty and students.
Thrasher has not helped himself during the selection process. His lending gravitas to campus identity politics during the faculty and students forums came off as insincere. Whether he actually believes FSU requires more black faculty members, for instance, will not matter.
— As a presidential candidate, Thrasher has shown no comprehensive understanding of the role of a university.
No one expects Thrasher to be a Robert Hutchins, or to have read Allan Bloom, but he evinces little appreciation that universities are more than prestige and power.
Instead, he has relied upon stock responses and his past beneficence to FSU.
— As a compromised candidate, Thrasher is in a tenuous position to address the challenges of affordable and accountable college education head-on.
— If Thrasher is selected today, a key fact to consider is whether faculty and students will register further discontent through no-confidence votes by the Faculty Senate or Student Government Association (SGA).
Also, as Florida State unveils its public capital campaign and tries to repair its reputation after its handling of the Jameis Winston sexual assault scandal, will an acrimonious Thrasher presidency help the school?
The honest answer is no.
Chris Timmons is a writer based in Tallahassee. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
