Legislature still out for blood after UCF scandal

Last fall, when news broke that the University of Central Florida had misspent public money, legislators pounded their fists and demanded answers — and I cheered them on.

Nearly six months later, I’m no longer cheering.

We now know what happened. The school used money that was supposed to be spent on teachers and spent it instead on classrooms, replacing a moldy building with newer one.

No one stole money or personally profited. But it was wrong. As a result, UCF has paid a steep price. Aside from repaying the money and making changes, the school has ousted or lost its CFO, its top finance staffers, the chairman of the trustees and the president himself.

If UCF was a multi-headed hydra, virtually every head has been chopped off.

Yet legislators’ thirst for blood still seems unquenched.

Even after the school offered up the ultimate sacrifice — the resignation of school President Dale Whittaker — legislators wanted more.

House ethics committee leader Tom Leek said Whittaker’s resignation merely reaffirmed his commitment to leaving “no stone unturned.” House Speaker Joe Oliva described Whittaker’s resignation as a “major step,” but not

the final one. Others members began talking about wresting financial control away from universities throughout the state.

It was like the humiliating defeat wasn’t enough.

If this was Waterloo, Napoleon and his troops were already slaughtered — and yet the British troops were still stabbing French corpses one more time with

their bayonets.

The question is: Well, as the Sentinel’s Tallahassee bureau chief, Gray Rohrer, explained last week, House leaders have been eager to cite “UCF’s misspending as evidence that state schools are awash in cash and ripe for cuts.” And there it is.

This isn’t really just about spending money meant for one thing on something else — which legislators do most every year, stealing money from trust funds to balance their budgets. (Truly, Florida legislators lecturing others about raiding funds is like Jabba the Hutt lecturing Princess Leia about gluttony.)

This is about House Republicans wanting to flog something they have been dying to flog for years — higher education.

They don’t like how much it costs. They don’t like the air of intellectual superiority they think academia has. They don’t like the liberalism they’re convinced higher education breeds.

Remember: One of the Legislature’s earlier ideas was to actually shut UCF down. State Rep. Randy Fine announced he’d been working on “a five- and 10-year potential shutdown of the university.”

Yes, he wanted to close UCF — the second-largest school in America and a key cog in Central Florida’ economy.

This nutty idea wasn’t coming from some random tinfoil hat-wearing dingbat roaming the streets of Tallahassee, but rather the

chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees university funding.

Fine later claimed he was joking. Sure.

Again, UCF clearly messed up. This newspaper has slaughtered many forests worth of trees printing details about what happened.

To briefly sum it up: Everyone seems to agree that the school’s CFO wanted to spend money meant for salaries and other operating costs on a building with classrooms instead.

Everyone also seems to agree that they didn’t think that decision was a big deal. The CFO said over and over he simply thought it might prompt an “audit comment.”

The players debate and contradict each other about who knew what when. But no one seems to argue that anyone thought they were doing anything illegal.

Instead of just saying that — and noting that the Legislature had starved schools statewide of construction money — UCF made problems worse with blame-shifting and fingerpointing. Trustees and administrators tried to blame finance officials. The finance officials then tried to blame administrators and the president.

And all that internal fighting was grist for the mill for legislators — who just seemed eager to set everything on fire.

(Interestingly, legislators have shown little interest in one of the more troubling things I saw in the depositions: Multiple employees complaining that board trustee Marcos Marchena — a Rick Scott appointee who also serves as attorney at the Orlando airport — kept trying to get some of his contractor buddies at the airport hired at the university.)

But at the end of all this, let’s say you still think everyone involved at UCF is guilty as sin and needs to suffer.

OK. They already did. The university has admitted fault, repaid the money, vowed to make changes and sacrificed bodies galore.

There isn’t much blood left to spill.

Yet House members are still screaming.

One Republican insider told me it’s worth noting that most of the screaming and threats are coming from just one chamber: the House. He noted that the Senate, the generally more deliberative/sane body, may once again be the check and balance — realizing that thriving and growing universities are crucial to any state’s economy.

Let’s hope so.

If some more basic checks and balances are needed, bring ‘em on. But enough already with the histrionics and threats. UCF has admitted fault, paid back the money and sacrificed one employee after another. At this point, any politician still ranting looks more interested in vendettas than solutions.