Cries of cronyism as DeSantis bids to place rightwing ally at top university

Barely three months have passed since Florida Atlantic University gained national prominence during an unlikely run to the final four of the March Madness men’s college basketball championship.

They were heady times for Florida’s fifth largest public university, a 30,000-student campus in Boca Raton that prides itself on a claim to be the most diverse seat of higher education in the state.

But now dark clouds of extremism are shadowing the university, with its search for a new president halted by state officials alleging “anomalies” with the process. The presumed intention is installing a rightwing lackey of Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis.

Faculty members and others are calling foul over the intervention of the state immediately after FAU’s trustees listed three finalists, none of them Randy Fine, the Republican state congressman behind much of DeSantis’s “slate of hate” legislation targeting the LGBTQ+ community and other minorities.

Despite his lack of higher education experience, Fine declared himself “flattered” to be hand-picked by DeSantis to fill the role, and his surprise omission led critics to conclude the suspension of the search was a retaliatory ruse to engineer a do-over in which the self-declared “conservative firebrand” will find himself hired.

“In general, we have a state where cronyism, and pay to play, is strongly at work,” said William Trapani, a professor at FAU’s Dorothy F Schmidt college of arts and letters.

“And knowing as we did that Randy Fine is the governor’s preferred candidate, a lot of us feel that a second round of voting, a second search process, would result in a new selection. The political pressure to pick Randy Fine, at least for a campus visit and potentially the selected candidate, will be so intense that committee members will be forced into acquiescence.”

Precedent for such a move is already set. DeSantis’s “war on woke” has specifically targeted Florida’s higher education system, with the Republican presidential hopeful insisting he needed to tackle a perceived wave of liberal indoctrination seeping into campuses and classrooms.

He signed a bill banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs in public colleges and universities. And just this week, the state board of education approved revised academic standards for Black history, teaching that slaves “benefited” from new skills.

Amid the turmoil, several in the governor’s orbit have lucrative new jobs. There were protests over the controversial appointment of Republican former senator Ben Sasse to lead the University of Florida; and at the conservative “hostile takeover” of the liberal New College in Sarasota by DeSantis loyalists.

The governor’s board appointees promptly awarded the incoming interim president of New College, DeSantis’s former education commissioner Richard Corcoran, a salary more than double that of his ousted predecessor; while returning senior students learned this week they were to be housed in dormitories with mold issues.

The situation at FAU, meanwhile, has striking parallels with the appointment last month of another DeSantis henchman, Republican state representative Fred Hawkins, as president of the 19,000-student South Florida state college in Avon Park.

Hawkins sponsored the bill that allowed DeSantis to strip power from Disney as part of his feud with the theme park giant over its opposition to the Don’t Say Gay law banning classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Like Fine, he has no higher education experience, and was once suspended from office for impersonating a police officer; yet Hawkins became the only candidate when the college relaunched its search after three well-qualified finalists mysteriously withdrew, and trustees lowered the bar for recruitment.

“Another GOP politician with no real qualifications for a job like this being appointed to lead a college. Higher education institutions shouldn’t serve as job placement plans for political cronies. The grift is real,” Thomas Kennedy, a Florida member of the Democratic National Committee tweeted.

Critics of the FAU developments are focusing on DeSantis appointee Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the state university system, who demanded the search be halted while the state conducted an investigation of “anomalies” in the process.

They included a straw poll held by the FAU committee to whittle down almost 60 candidates, and a demographic survey sent out by a search firm that Rodrigues asserted was improper, but which had been used in other presidential searches, including the one that resulted in Sasse’s appointment.

FAU board chair Brad Levine defended the process in his reply to Rodrigues, and asked the search be allowed to resume unhindered.

“Rodrigues is grasping at any meager, partisan straw he can find in order to gin up false cause to undermine a search process that until now has been both fair and collaborative,” Andrew Gothard, president of the United Faculty of Florida, said in a statement.

“It is clear the chancellor only jumps when the governor yanks his chain. Florida’s university system deserves better than this partisan sham of leadership.”

Neither FAU nor Rodrigues responded to requests from the Guardian for comment.

Trapani, the FAU professor, said he fears for the future if Fine, as he expects, ends up as president.

“This university will never recover. And the community will suffer because, as you’ve seen from his public record, Mr Fine is the antithesis of a university and its core commitments,” he said.

“The mood among my colleagues is grim. Literally every faculty colleague I speak to is an active job applicant, or is certainly looking, and has application letters ready to send if they find something they’re interested in. It’s become a very inhospitable place to work, and it’s truly sad.”