Florida’s ‘Groundhog Day’: Lawmakers trying to hide college president searches
Nearly 140K voters in 25 states quit the party, analysis finds
In “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray’s character lives the same bad day over and over.
In “Groundhog Session,” Florida lawmakers introduce the same bad bill over and over each year, hoping to pass a law making the selection of university and college presidents a state secret.
Each session ends with the law not getting passed, but we always wake up the following year to find the bill is back again, just as before.
It’s been introduced again in 2021, this time by the powerful chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jeff Brandes.
It’s basically the same bill, tweaked to offer an illusion of openness. Don’t be fooled. The bill is designed to ensure that college presidents, vetted in the sunshine since the 1970s, are chosen in the dark.
We struggle to understand why this particular part of Florida’s Sunshine Law has had a target painted on its back for so long.
It’s as if the system of open searches has produced a string of losers who ran Florida’s universities into the ground. We don’t see it that way.
At the University of Central Florida, open searches produced Trevor Colbourn and John Hitt, who built a school that’s massive in size and growing in prestige.
The University of Florida found Robert Marston, John Lombardi and Bernie Machen, who turned UF into one of the nation’s leading academic institutions.
Florida State landed Bernie Sliger, Sandy D’Alemberte and John Thrasher, whose impending retirement has FSU looking for a new leader — in the sunshine.
And yet, lawmakers and university administrators have bellyached about open searches throughout those decades.
In February 1989, prominent Orlando attorney Charles Gray, a member of the
committee searching for a replacement for Colbourn, was so dissatisfied with the crop of candidates he suggested suspending the search and pressing the Legislature to pass a Sunshine Law exemption.
That hasn’t happened in the three decades since, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Bills to close the door on open searches have been introduced in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.
Unable to get the law changed, universities have cooked up other ways to game the system.
Just last year, UCF chose a new president whose name wasn’t reveled to the public until a Wednesday morning, just 48 hours before the UCF Board of Trustee picked the mystery candidate
on Friday. (It turned out to be Alexander Cartwright, then chancellor of the University of Missouri.)
This after the board’s chair promised a selection that would be “inclusive, collaborative and transparent.” Pfft.
The bill introduced by Brandes supposedly protects the public’s right to know by requiring that public universities and colleges reveal the names of candidates 21 days before trustees hold a meeting to interview candidates or make the appointment (which at least would have made the UCF process problematic).
But as the First Amendment Foundation has pointed out, so what?
Universities have largely turned over the selection of presidents to headhunting firms, which then winnow down the field in secret and present trustees with a group of finalists. What’s to prevent a headhunter from presenting just one finalist?
Brandes’ bill already has passed one committee and is headed for another next week, so it’s sailing along. It doesn’t have a companion bill in the House, but just you wait. There’s never a shortage of lawmakers in Florida willing to throw in with attempts to bottle up information.
We have said before what a perilous time this is for open government in Florida. It’s not just laws getting changed but it’s the outright contempt that official institutions show for it.
We don’t have to look any farther than the office of Ron DeSantis, which the Sentinel had to sue just to get weekly federal reports on the status of the coronavirus outbreak in Florida. The governor’s lawyers offered no legitimate defense for failing to follow the law. They just didn’t feel like it.
If lawmakers believed in open government, they’d work on finding ways to strengthen the law, like cracking down on the ruses that universities already wield to skirt open searches (see UCF example above).
We have a bad feeling this movie is not going to end with Florida waking up to a brighter day, as Bill Murray finally did. Unless lawmakers reject this bill away, the ending will be a gloomier one, with Florida having less government in the sunshine.
Editorials are the opinion of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board and are written by one of its members or a designee. The editorial board consists of Opinion Editor Mike Lafferty, Jennifer A. Marcial Ocasio, Jay Reddick, David Whitley and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Send emails to insight@orlandosentinel.com.
In the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the phone lines and websites of local election officials across the country were jumping: Tens of thousands of Republicans were calling or logging on to switch their party affiliations.
In California, more than 33,000 registered Republicans left the party during the three weeks after the Washington riot. In Pennsylvania, more than 12,000 voters left the GOP in the past month. And more than 10,000 Republicans changed their registration in Arizona.
An analysis of January voting records by The New York Times found that nearly 140,000 Republicans had quit the party in 25 states that had readily available data (19 states do not have registration by party). Voting experts said the data indicated a stronger-than-usual flight from a political party after a presidential election, as well as the potential start of a damaging period for GOP registrations as voters recoil from the Capitol violence and its fallout.
Among those who recently left the party are Juan Nunez, 56, an Army veteran in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He said he had long felt that the difference between the United States and many other countries was that campaign-season fighting ended on Election Day, when all sides would peacefully accept the result.
The Jan. 6 riot changed that, he said.
“What happened in D.C. that day, it broke my heart,” said Nunez, a lifelong Republican who is preparing to register as an independent. “It shook me to the core.”
The biggest spikes in Republicans leaving the party came in the days after Jan. 6, especially in California, where there were 1,020 Republican changes on Jan. 5 — and then 3,243 on Jan. 7.
In Arizona, there were 233 Republican changes in the first five days of January, and 3,317 in the next week.
Most of the Republicans in these states and others switched to unaffiliated status.
Voter rolls often change after presidential elections, when registrations sometimes shift toward the winner’s party or people update their old affiliations to correspond to their current party preferences, often at a department of motor vehicles.
Other states remove voters who are inactive or who have died, or those who have moved out of state from all parties, and lump those people together with voters who changed their own registrations. Of the 25 states surveyed by The Times,
Nevada, Kansas, Utah and Oklahoma had combined such voter list maintenance with registration changes, so their overall totals would not be limited to changes that voters made themselves. Other states may have done so, as well, but did not indicate in their public data.
Among Democrats, 79,000 have left the party since early January.
But the tumult at the Capitol, and the historic unpopularity of former President Donald Trump, have made for an intensely fluid period in American politics. Many Republicans denounced the pro-Trump forces that rioted Jan. 6, and 10 Republican House members voted to impeach Trump. Sizable numbers of Republicans now say they support key elements of President Joe Biden’s stimulus package; typically, the opposing party is wary if not hostile toward the major policy priorities of a new president.
“Since this is such a highly unusual activity, it probably is indicative of a larger undercurrent that’s happening, where there are other people who are likewise thinking that they no longer feel like they’re part of the Republican Party, but they just haven’t contacted election officials to tell them that they might change their party registration,” said Michael McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida. “So this is probably a tip of an iceberg.”
But, he cautioned, it could also be the vocal “never Trump” reality simply coming into focus as Republicans finally took the step of changing their registration, even though they hadn’t supported the president and his party since 2016.
Kevin Madden, a former Republican operative who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, fits this trend line, though he was ahead of the recent exodus. He said he changed his registration to independent a year ago, after watching what he called the harassment of career foreign service officials at Trump’s first impeachment trial.
“It’s not a birthright and it’s not a religion,” Madden said of party affiliation. “Political parties should be more like your local condo association. If the condo association starts to act in a way that’s inconsistent with
your beliefs, you move.”
Some GOP officials noted the significant gains in registration that Republicans have seen recently, including before the 2020 election, and noted that the party had rebounded quickly in the past.
In Arizona, 10,174 Republicans have changed their party registration since the attack as the state party has shifted ever further to the right, as reflected by its decision to censure three Republicans — Gov. Doug Ducey, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain — for various acts deemed disloyal to Trump.
The party continues to raise questions about the 2020 election, and this week Republicans in the state Legislature backed arresting elections officials from Maricopa County for refusing to comply with wide-ranging subpoenas for election equipment and materials.
It is those actions, some Republican strategists in Arizona argue, that prompted the drop in GOP voter registrations in the state.
“The exodus that’s happening right now, based on my instincts and all the people who are calling me out here, is that they’re leaving as a result of the acts of sedition that took place and the continued questioning of the Arizona vote,” said Chuck Coughlin, a Republican strategist in Arizona.
For Heidi Ushinski, 41, the decision to leave the Arizona Republican Party was easy.
After the election, she said, she registered as a Democrat because “the Arizona GOP has just lost its mind” and wouldn’t “let go of this fraudulent election stuff.”
Nunez, the Army veteran in Pennsylvania, said his disgust with the Capitol riot was compounded when Republicans in Congress continued to push back on sending stimulus checks and staunchly opposed raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
“They were so quick to bail out corporations, giving big companies money, but continue to fight over giving money to people in need,” said Nunez, who plans to change parties this month.
“Also, I’m a business owner and I cannot imagine living on $7 an hour,” he said. “We have to be fair.”
She is known on campus as Patient Zero, the unidentified student who returned to the University of Michigan after winter break carrying an unwanted stowaway from her trip to England — a highly contagious variant of the coronavirus first detected in Britain.
Quickly the case became a cluster, with at least 23 confirmations of the B.1.1.7 variant, concentrated in the Wolverines’ athletic program. Late last month, the university instructed students to stay in their rooms as much as possible and paused campus sports, disrupting a winning basketball season and any hope that the spring semester might be less chaotic than the fall.
“I’ve started wearing two masks,” said Alyssa Frizzo, a junior, who described the variant as a haunting presence on the Ann Arbor campus. “I think a lot of people have.”
With nearly a year of coronavirus experience behind them, leaders at Michigan and other U.S. universities ushered in the new term pledging not to repeat the errors of last year, when infection rates soared on campuses and in the surrounding communities. A New York Times effort has recorded more than 397,000 cases and at least 90 deaths connected to campuses since the pandemic began.
But although most schools have pledged to increase testing as a way of spotting outbreaks early, it is an expensive proposition when many are struggling financially, and not all are testing students as often as recommended by public health experts.
The plans to keep the virus under control at Michigan, which had more than 2,500 confirmed cases by the end of the fall semester, included increased testing, offering more courses online, limiting dorm rooms to one occupant and establishing a policy of no tolerance for rules violations.
Yet already more than 1,000 new virus cases have been announced by the school since Jan. 1.
Other universities across the country have also encountered obstacles to a smooth spring, ranging from the unexpected challenge of emerging variants — also detected at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Miami, Tulane University and the University of California, Berkeley in recent days — to the more common problem of recalcitrant students.
At Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, students returning after winter break were required to be tested upon arrival, and then asked to avoid social interactions while awaiting results. But some had other ideas.
“We identified a cluster of positive COVID-19 cases linked to students who did not follow the arrival shelterin-place rules,” a campuswide email reported Jan. 23, blaming two student organizations for violating protocols. “More than 100 students are now in
quarantine.”
Tulane in New Orleans, which is testing students at least twice a week, said it had placed 18 students and six Greek organizations on interim suspension after they violated social distancing rules in the first weeks of classes.
The foundation of most university plans for the spring semester is built on ramped-up testing to quickly identify infected students before they display symptoms, then place them in isolation to prevent the virus from spreading. The testing push has grown since July, when a study by researchers including A. David Paltiel, a professor of public health policy and management at the Yale School of Medicine, recommended that college students be tested twice a week to better detect asymptomatic infections.
The American College Health Association later embraced the idea, issuing guidelines in December.
“For the spring, we specifically recommend that all students are tested on arrival
and twice a week thereafter if possible,” said Gerri Taylor, a student health expert who serves as co-chair of the organization’s COVID-19 task force.
Taylor said her organization did not know what percentage of schools had adopted the recommendations, and a survey of colleges across the country revealed a variety of requirements, ranging from only voluntary testing to mandatory testing twice a week.
Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, an industry group, estimates that testing has cost U.S. colleges and universities an average of $9 million per institution, part of $120 billion in total expenses and lost revenue stemming from the pandemic. Some schools have already had to cut programs, lay off staff and even close for good as costs mount.
Federal stimulus funds have helped offset some of the testing expenses, and President Joe Biden’s proposed stimulus plan includes an additional $35 billion for
higher education. But even the least-expensive tests — which have ranged from $6 at the University of California, Davis, to $25 for a consortium of schools partnering with the Broad Institute in New England — can become costly when applied aggressively at a large campus.
The more expensive PCR swab tests used to diagnose the coronavirus typically cost $50 or more apiece from commercial suppliers, though some schools have lowered the price by developing their own tests or partnering with a nonprofit lab.
Michigan requires only one test per week for students, but even with fewer of them on campus this spring, it has tripled its testing since the fall semester to 15,000 tests per week from about 5,000. The school has also increased the use of the more expensive PCR tests because their results can be used for genomic sequencing to identify variants, said Emily Toth Martin, an associate professor of epidemiology who devised the campus testing program.
Martin said that the first case of the variant at Michigan was identified because both the state health authorities and the university had geared up to increase genomic testing, particularly for people who had traveled to hot spots. By the end of last week, more than 600 genomic sequencing tests had been carried out in an effort to locate variants, she said.
“This is a variant that moves 50% faster than anything we had to deal with last semester,” she said.
As of Feb. 5, the university had identified nine new cases of the variant since the previous week, according to Susan Ringler-Cerniglia, a spokeswoman for the Washtenaw County Health Department. “The good news, if there is any, is that it’s still associated with the campus community, and we haven’t had any cases in the broader community.”
Ringler-Cerniglia said that the first-identified carrier of the variant at Michigan — Patient Zero — “did everything right.” After testing positive in early January, she advised health authorities that she had been in England during winter break, leading to additional testing that isolated the variant.