Thank you members of the Board. My name is Mike Sanderson.
First, about Gen Ed, I’m not going to have time to make a full comment, but I wanted to warn you that someone has been going around saying the Florida Legislature wants space exploration removed from the Gen Ed curriculum.
No, the Florida Legislature does not want space exploration removed from Gen Ed. The guy who wrote that has no STEM background whatsoever. Kind of a problem he has the made-up title “Chief Academic Officer.”
I traced the removal to the University of West Florida and the trustee who suggested that since has been rejected by the legislature for the second time. I invite you to read my letter to the Chair of the UWF Board of Trustees on my website, mikesand.com.
Moving to the accountability plan, my comment last year got quite a bit of attention. That was of course when I pulled the prior year accountability plans and found that for the 4-year graduation metric, you were lowering the goal for the current year for the third year in a row.
But then before the BOG met in June, you changed it back to 49%. Even though you you thought you weren’t going to make it. I know you thought that because during that BOG meeting at FAU Provost Thiessen told me.
Don’t be so hard on him, I said directly, “Brad, I know you know the min max for that graduation figure, what’s the min max.” President Stephenson saw me talking at the FL Poly staff table and came rushing over, but it was too late.
If you think the Provost shouldn’t have told me the min max for graduation because that’s some kind of state secret, i think you might want to step back and rethink your role as a public university trustee.
As an aside, too bad about the General Counsel office, I get saving money, not having in-house counsel seems like a false economy.
Anyway, returning to the Accountability Plan, the problem isn’t that you told me that, it’s that a few hours later President Stephenson didn’t tell the BOG Chair that.
In April 2024, two years ago, your former president wrote directly that Florida Poly expected to exceed 50% in 2025 (Page 7). Rather than telling the chair of the Board of Governors that you weren’t going to meet that goal and why, you just blah blah blah we have to do better.
Florida Poly’s 2024 Accountability Plan said 2021-25 Four-year Graduation Rate would be 50%
I know blaming COVID, and sounding like you’re throwing the former president under the bus for overpromising wouldn’t be well received at the BOG, but it’s the truth. Either that’s the truth or President Stephenson has really dropped the ball.
Finally, I invite you to check out last year’s Gender Studies ROI study. It was commissioned by the Chancellor but released by Anna Eskamani because it showed Gender Studies does have a good ROI. It also has a graph titled, “What you study matters more than where you study,” and it seems to show that Computer Science majors at Florida Poly make less money and are less likely to use their degree than even UWF or UNF. So that’s an important area for follow up.
Salary isn’t everything — I’m a computer programmer, I have gotten a great salary working on the iPhone app for Facebook for Dogs. That is not a joke, dogs don’t use the app but dogs have profiles, they follow other dogs, like other dogs’ photos, etc.
It’s safe to say that no one has ever been as excited for an Accountability Plan as I am for New College’s which of course has not bee released.
Good luck with all your goals. It’s too bad land acquisition isn’t a metric, amirite?
