Barely three months have passed since Florida Atlantic University rose to national prominence in an unlikely run to the last four of the March Madness Men’s College Basketball Championship.
It was a heady time for Florida’s fifth-largest public university, a 30,000-student campus in Boca Raton that prides itself as the state’s most diverse seat of higher education.
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But now dark clouds of extremism are clouding the university, with its search for a new president halted by state officials alleging “abnormalities” in the process. The alleged intention is to install a right-wing lackey of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Faculty members and others are speaking out against state intervention immediately after FAU administrators listed three finalists, none of them Randy Fine, the Republican state congressman behind much of DeSantis’ “hate list” legislation targeting the LGBTQ+ community and other minorities.
Despite his lack of higher education experience, Fine said he was “flattered” to be chosen by DeSantis to fill the role, and his surprise omission led critics to conclude that the research suspension was a retaliatory ruse to engineer a revamp in which the self-proclaimed “conservative focus” will find themselves hired.
“In general, we have a state where cronyism and pay-to-play are strongly at work,” said William Trapani, a professor at FAU’s Dorothy F Schmidt College of Arts and Letters.
“And knowing as we did that Randy Fine is the governor’s preferred candidate, many of us believe that a second ballot, a second search process, would result in a re-selection. The political pressure to choose Randy Fine, at least for a campus visit and potentially the selected nominee, will be so intense that committee members will be forced to acquiesce.
The precedent for such a move is already set. DeSantis’ “war on revival” has specifically targeted Florida’s higher education system, with the Republican presidential hopeful insisting it must tackle a perceived wave of liberal indoctrination seeping into campuses and classrooms.
He signed a bill banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public colleges and universities. And just this week, the state board of education approved revised academic standards for black history, teaching that slaves “benefited” from new skills.
Amid the turmoil, several in the governor’s orbit have lucrative new jobs. There have been protests over the controversial nomination of former Republican Senator Ben Sasse to lead the University of Florida; and the conservative “hostile takeover” of the liberal New College in Sarasota by DeSantis loyalists.
Governor’s board appointees soon awarded New College’s new acting president, former DeSantis education commissioner Richard Corcoran, a salary more than double that of his ousted predecessor; while returning senior students were told this week they had to be housed in dorms with mold issues.
The situation at FAU, meanwhile, bears striking parallels to the appointment last month of another DeSantis henchman, Republican State Rep. Fred Hawkins, as president of the 19,000-student South Florida State college at Avon Park.
Hawkins sponsored the bill that allowed DeSantis to remove power from Disney over his feud with the theme park giant over its opposition to the Don’t Say Gay law banning classroom discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Like Fine, he has no experience in higher education and has been previously suspended from duty for impersonating a police officer; Still, Hawkins became the only candidate when the college revived its search after three well-qualified finalists mysteriously withdrew and administrators lowered the recruiting bar.
“Another GOP politician with no real qualifications for a job like this being appointed head of a college. Institutions of higher learning should not serve as investment plans for political cronies. The scam is real,” tweeted Thomas Kennedy, a Florida member of the Democratic National Committee.
Critics of the FAU developments center on Ray Rodrigues, appointed by DeSantis, chancellor of the state university system, who demanded a halt to the research while the state investigates “anomalities” in the process.
They included a mock poll organized by the FAU committee to narrow down nearly 60 candidates, and a demographic survey sent by a research firm that Rodrigues said was inappropriate but had been used in other presidential research, including the one that resulted in Sasse’s nomination.
FAU board chairman Brad Levine defended the process in his response to Rodrigues and called for the search to be allowed to resume unhindered.
“Rodrigues is grabbing every partisan straw he can find in order to create false causes to undermine a research process that thus far has been both fair and collaborative,” Andrew Gothard, president of the United Faculty of Florida, said in a statement.
“Clearly the Chancellor only jumps when the Governor pulls his chain. The Florida university system deserves better than this partisan leadership sham.
Neither FAU nor Rodrigues responded to Guardian requests for comment.
Trapani, the FAU professor, said he feared for the future if Fine, as he expected, found himself president.
“This university will never recover. And the community will suffer because, as you saw in his public record, Mr. Fine is the antithesis of a university and its core commitments,” he said.
“The atmosphere among my colleagues is gloomy. Literally every faculty colleague I speak to is either an active candidate, or certainly looking for a job, and has application letters ready to go if they find something that interests them. It’s become a very inhospitable place to work, and that’s really sad.