The pet projects some lawmakers have written into the 2003-04 education budget serve their own egos better than they do the voters or universities.
Published May 27, 2004
Politicians long have interfered in higher education, but E. T. York, chancellor emeritus of Florida's university system, makes a fair point about this year's peculiar brand of legislative gift-giving. Some of the budgetary perks tucked into the 2003-04 education budget ignore not only the wishes of voters, who called for an independent board to oversee universities, but of the schools themselves.
Who originally asked for an Alzheimer's research center, budgeted for $12-million next year, at the University of South Florida? Not USF.
Who asked for $9-million for a chiropractic school at Florida State University? Not FSU.
Who asked for a $200,000 check for an Israel institute affiliated with Florida Atlantic University? Not FAU.
This is the busywork of legislative leaders with the influence and vanity to create edifices to themselves, or with the gall to try to convert campus goodies into campaign goodwill. But this brand of pork differs from past home-cooking, maneuvers that were made through back channels as university boosters twisted legislative arms to get what they couldn't win through the normal budgeting process. This time, the beneficiaries claim no victory and sometimes claim ignorance. This time, the budgeting runs directly counter to the requests made by the Board of Governors, which is constitutionally empowered to determine "the distinctive mission of each constituent university" and to avoid "wasteful duplication of facilities or programs."
"This action by the Legislature is clearly in violation of the spirit and letter of Amendment 11 to the Florida Constitution," York writes.
". . . In fact, the purpose of Amendment 11 was to prohibit the sort of legislative intrusion into the affairs of the state universities that occurred so blatantly in the past legislative session."
The chiropractic school, for example, was the handiwork of Senate Majority Leader Dennis Jones, who just happens to be a chiropractor. As York notes, not a single one of the 17 licensed chiropractic schools now operating in the United States is located on a university campus, and FSU did not ask to be the first. The center will be housed in a new life science building to be named after, yes, Senate President Jim King.
It would be unfair to pick only on Senate leaders, though. In this game of budgetary manipulation, House Speaker Johnnie Byrd knows no peer. The Alzheimer's institute he created at the university in his home district is now named after his late father, who suffered from the disease and who happens to share the same first and last names. For good measure, USF president Judy Genshaft asked the institute's board, which is led by Byrd, to name the first endowed chair after Byrd as well.
The more amusing, and baldly political, Byrd stunt may be the $200,000 appropriation to the Florida-Israel Institute. Neither the Senate nor the governor budgeted any money for the institute, which has lived off smaller amounts from university and private sources, and institute director Nancy Rosen told a reporter she never asked anyone for it. Of course, the institute did find time to help Byrd, who is courting Jewish votes in his bid for the U.S. Senate, schedule a six-day trip to Israel. Said Rosen: "I do know that we didn't pay for his trip, and there was no quid pro quo."
These are acts of budgetary larceny, and each line item deserves both public condemnation and gubernatorial veto.
