If these challenges were not enough, all of this occurred during a time of budget cuts and decreased funding that leaves Florida’s best universities with state funding per student down by 22.7% since 2008. State funding as a percent of total operating budgets is also way down. In short, the universities have been lied to, given more grief and supervision, less money and even less authority to determine their own prices or control their own destinies. And now House Speaker Richard Corcoran is proposing to make things even worse, picking a gratuitous fight over state-paid fundraisers and public records of university foundations.
For his part, Corcoran, holding degrees from private colleges, has no meaningful ties to our state university system. But it is still difficult to see the motivation for his recent foray into higher education fundraising operations, other than a desire to score political points on some easy targets that can’t fight back. Had Corcoran sought to determine why there are no conservatives on our campuses, or insight into the liberal bias at our schools, as pointed out by Professor Paulson of USF in a series of articles on the subject, one might at least understand his motivation. This pursuit, however, just makes no sense.