Florida chancellor: FAMU not underfunded
The Florida State University System begs to differ with the federal government after Gov. Ron DeSantis received a letter urging him to equitably fund Florida A&M University.
While U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack say FAMU has been denied nearly $2 billion by the state since 1987, a response from the university system in a Wednesday release states that “on the contrary, FAMU’s operational funding has increased by 37.6%” with DeSantis as governor.
“The State University System of Florida is proud to have FAMU, the no. 1 public HBCU in the nation, as a part of our system,” Chancellor Ray Rodrigues said in a prepared statement. “During the DeSantis administration, our FAMU students continue to benefit from unprecedented state investments in faculty, classroom operations, housing and the campus experience.”
“As a result, FAMU will continue to provide an elite education to students for generations to come,” he added.
The university system’s response comes about two weeks after the Biden team sent letters to 16 state governors on Sept. 18, calling on them to equitably fund 16 land-grant HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities) across the nation.
Jeremy Redfern, press secretary for the Governor’s Office, told the Tallahassee Democrat, “The SUS response speaks for itself ” when asked for comment from DeSantis about the issue.
According to the U.S. secretaries, there is a disparity of over $12 billion in funding between the schools and their non-HBCU land-grant peers.
But the State University System says otherwise.
The federal government’s letters and the state of Florida’s response also come after FAMU was recently ranked in the Top 100 among public national universities by U.S. News and World Report while also maintaining its streak of being the top public HBCU in the nation for the fifth consecutive year.
“Under Governor Ron DeSantis’s leadership, the State University System of Florida has affirmed its support of FAMU by increasing funding, investing in infrastructure and expanding access through tuition reduction and student assistance,” the university system said in the release. “These investments, under the stewardship of President Larry Robinson, have propelled FAMU into the Top 100 Public National Universities.”
The university system’s response also went into greater detail by laying out several numbers as a backboard for its argument.
There has been a 44% reduction of FAMU students in debt, a 25% reduction in the average FAMU student loan and a 31.5% improvement in FAMU’s four-year graduation rate while DeSantis has been Florida’s governor, according to the release.
On top of those stats, education officials say, the university system approved $125 million in debt issuance for FAMU to create a new residential facility that housed an additional 700 new beds through FAMU Towers North and South as well as a dining hall on its campus.
But at the same time, the response does not account for the decades that came before DeSantis’ time in office as governor, which began in January 2019.
With FAMU’s land-grant counterpart being the University of Florida, the U.S. secretaries’ letter to DeSantis states that $1.973 billion of state appropriated funding has been held back from the HBCU in the last 33 years compared to the amount of money that UF has been receiving from the state.
Moving forward, it is unclear if the state of Florida will accept the Departments of Education and Agriculture’s offer to work with its budget office to examine the funding data and bring balance to investments in FAMU.
Contact Tarah Jean at tjean@tallahassee.com.