UWF trustees back Judy Bense


  • September 15, 2014
  • /   Shannon Nickinson
  • /   education

The University of West Florida Board of Trustees gave their full-throated support of President Judy Bense today, passing a resolution in support of her tenure as she faced criticism from the faculty senate.

“I don’t think this is too personal,” Bense said after the board meeting. “I think it’s a sign of terrible frustration and often they’ll take it out on the boss. I understand that.

“It comes with the job,” she said. “It is frustrating times. I don’t like it, but I don’t like the times, either. The times have got to get better and we’ve all got to pull in the same direction. What I appreciate is that our Board of Trustees understands that we are all in a difficult economic time and we are trying to make it better. I appreciate their support very much.”

On Friday, the faculty senate voted no-confidence in Bense, citing a decline in academic standards, a lack of focus on the educational business of the university and salary concerns.

On Sept. 9, the trustees gave Bense her annual evaluation, where eight of 11 trustees gave her and A or B. Read Bense’s eval here.

Lewis Bear Jr., chairman of the Board of Trustees, said he thought Monday’s meeting was important to show the community that Bense has the board’s support.

“With the 17-person vote, the community might seem to think that was representative of the entire faculty,” Bear said after the meeting. “We thought is was very important that we let the community know that we are in full support of our president. And in the resolution we spelled out the many reasons why we are in support of her successes.”

The resolution, which you can read here, praises Bense for national designations the university has received in her tenure for leading performance in civic engagement and military friendliness; the university’s economic influence on the Pensacola metro area; seeing UWF named to lead the Complete Florida and Florida Virtual campus initiatives; achievements of university’s student athletes; and increases in research and fundraising, all in trying economic times.

Faculty concerns aired

That seemed of little comfort to the faculty who crowded into the meeting room in Building 12 to voice their displeasure at what they see as an erosion of academic standards and commitment to staff for the sake of external projects and football.

William Belko, an associate professor in the history department, took the lead in the public comment period, telling the trustees he felt they were unaware of the reasons behind the faculty senate’s vote.

The concerns Belko raised touched on student-faculty ratio, salary compression, lowered academic standards and the development of projects and partnerships away from the academic world. These include UWF’s Business Enterprises Inc., a private entity created to find new revenue for the university through real estate and other development projects, and the creation of a football team.

Belko said what he sees as an institutional failure to support faculty under Bense could “ultimately undermine the health of UWF.”

He cited the pursuit of a “flawed” admissions policy that accepted students who were not academically prepared for college for the sake of increasing enrollment (and by extension increased money coming into the university).

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Lowering admission standards brought more students to campus, but created a retention problem that ultimately haunted the school on state metrics used to gauge funding for Florida’s 11 universities, Belko said.

It also stressed faculty and their ability to deliver quality instruction — without adequate financial compensation for the added workload, Belko said.

Belko also said the development of a football program at UWF has been elevated above addressing academic needs. He also criticized Bense for spending “an inordinate amount of time in Tallahassee” rather than tending to growing concerns among her own faculty.

Other speakers said they understood that a university president’s job was split among external and political process and supporting staff and faculty. But a focus on the former was coming at the expense of the latter.

Anthony Franklin, of the university’s IT department, said, however, that the emotional appeals made to get the 17-2 vote from the faculty senate would have unintended consequences.

“Sometimes when we get desperate, we use desperate measures,” Franklin said. “I think we went squirrel hunting with an elephant gun” in reference to the no-confidence vote.

Franklin said salaries and respect were the core of the complaints.

“If our leaders spent all of their time giving us praises, when would there be time to get work done?” he said.

He also said that while some seemed to view football as a drag on the university’s mission and resources, it could be a much-needed revenue stream for the university in tight financial times.

Bense vows improvement

Though she did not respond to any of the speakers during the meeting, afterward Bense said she felt that many of the faculty’s concerns were born of frustrating and difficult financial times.

She has been president since July 2008. She founded the university’s archaeology/anthropology program and 1980.

“Raises are rare... funding is 22 percent less than it was when I became president,” she said. “We’ve gotten bad cuts. They’re holding up $4 million of our dollars because of our position on the metrics, which are at the bottom of the state university system. All of those rolled in together make it very frustrating time.”

Football, she said, is funded by student fees, athletic fees, parking fees and the like and that money cannot be used for anything but football.

“It cannot be used for salaries for anyone,” she said.

She acknowledged that academic standards were relaxed for some admissions, something she said has stopped.

”I will tell you that students were let in who were too much at risk,” she said. “We’ve stopped it. We’ve reversed it and now the students who are admitted (first time in college freshmen), those students have this year met the highest standards ever for entrance into the University of West Florida and have the highest academic credentials. (But) it’s true. We reversed it. I hate it. I didn’t know that it was going on, but I’m responsible at the end of the day.”

The six-year graduation rate and the retention rate of sophomores with a GPA of 2.0 or better were two areas where Bense said in March that the university would make progress and improve its ranking.

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UWF scored 21 out of 50 points, putting it last among Florida’s 11 universities.

Bense said Monday that “we are going to move up, I’ll guarantee you that. We hope to move up 50 percent, but I can say with assuredness that we will be off the bottom and we will not lose money next year.”

Schools that score 25 points or fewer are penalized by having 1 percent of their recurring state funding taken away. Bense said the state Board of Governors will keep the same scoring system for this year.

“(That ) would put us above 26, which is where you have to be not to lose money,” she said. “It could put us as close as eighth place, where we could get money.”

In March she pledged an increased emphasis on academic advising to help students pick a major that suits them and that they can complete, reaching out to freshmen who have dropped out about what would make it possible for them to return and complete their education, and channeling more financial aid to to the B+ and A- students who have financial difficulty but would, as Bense said, “stick with us” if they can make it work financially.

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