UF sees itself as the flagship university of the state, and with such power comes responsibility.
In this case, that responsibility is to share the expertise and knowledge of its faculty with the state of Florida - something the Board of Governors is seeking to regulate.
In a meeting of the Board of Governors' Strategic Planning Committee last Friday, changes in regulation wording were approved and set to go before the full Board in September.
This proposed regulation addresses universities that are seeking to expand their academic programs outside of their geographic locations. The controversy comes when these expansions are made into another university's territory.
Under the new wording, universities seeking such expansion must gain approval by the Board of Governors Chancellor Frank Brogan and chairwoman Ava Parker.
The proposed program must be deemed "market-driven," and "mission-justified" in order to avoid wasteful duplication of programs.
This clause in the regulation had been tempered from a previous draft that required universities seeking to expand programs into another region to first gain approval from the local university's president before coming to the Board of Governors.
UF Provost Joe Glover, a member of the task force charged with rewording the regulation, said the university is satisfied with the result and does not think it will limit UF's future endeavors to expand programs.
An example of such a program brought up in an earlier meeting of the Board was that of UF's pharmacy program at St. Petersburg College. The nearby University of South Florida also has a pharmacy school, and Brogan questioned if having two similar programs so close together was a waste of state funding.
All existing programs were grandfathered in, including UF's pharmacy school and the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, which has outposts in all of Florida's 67 counties.
"We are willing to work with the Board of Governors and are confident that they will make decisions about our programs based on the best interest of the citizens of the state of Florida," Glover said.
