A Florida University May Drop the Name of an Outspoken Ex-President From Its Main Campus

What happens when a university names its main campus for a departing president, and then that president becomes a thorn in its side?

We’ll soon find out at Florida International University, where trustees are debating whether to remove the name of Modesto (Mitch) Maidique from the campus. Some board members say they are seeking a donor who might pay to have his or her name attached to the campus instead. The move follows a series of public criticisms by Maidique of the university he once led, and the trustees have been none too happy about his outspokenness.

“FIU is like my child. I love the place, and gave it 23 years of undivided attention,” he said in an interview on Monday. “I want the best for it, and my comments have always been directed at helping to make it better.”

When naming controversies have erupted elsewhere, it’s usually over more-serious allegations.

In March, Colorado College decided to strip the name of a former president from campus buildings after learning that he was accused of sexual misconduct more than 100 years ago.

In July, the founder of Papa John’s Pizza, John Schnatter, resigned from the board of his company after using a racial slur on a conference call — and Purdue University quickly announced it was removing references to the John H. Schnatter Center for Economic Research, and would return an $8-million donation to him. Other colleges, too, backed away from Schnatter, including the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky.

For his part, Maidique (pronounced may-DEEK) co-wrote an opinion piece for the Miami Herald in 2016 that said Florida International was at risk of being relegated to “third-tier status within the state university system.” The university trustees are “dormant,” he complained, and the admissions standards were too lenient.

When a bridge collapsed this year at FIU, killing six people and creating unflattering national headlines, there was Maidique again, giving interviews to the Herald and the local CBS affiliate. Maidique’s comments about the tragedy didn’t directly criticize the university, but when CBS asked if there should have been support beams in place until the bridge was completed, Maidique didn’t flinch.

“I would’ve put them in,” said Maidique, who studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Revenue or Retaliation?

The former president, who stepped down in 2009 and now earns $207,630 as a professor and president emeritus, still has relationships with many co-workers on the campus. Maidique’s accomplishments during his tenure as president include the opening of medical, law, and architecture schools.

On Monday, at a committee meeting of the university’s Board of Trustees, FIU leaders threw down the gauntlet. The committee voted 5 to 1 to recommend that the university no longer refer to its main location as the “Modesto A. Maidique Campus.” The full board is expected to take up the issue in two weeks.

FIU’s provost, Kenneth G. Furton, told the committee members that he had researched whether any of the university’s peer institutions have campuses named for an individual. None of them do, Furton said.

If the change is approved, the main campus would presumably return to its previous moniker, University Park. It was nine years ago that a very different Board of Trustees decided that Maidique’s presidency had been so transformational that he deserved the unusual honor.

One trustee on Monday suggested that the university could reap hundreds of millions of dollars by naming the campus for a donor instead of Maidique. But FIU has never received a private cash donation larger than $20 million, and the university’s provost later told The Chronicle that no donors have expressed interest in the main campus’s naming rights.

For legal reasons, it is better for trustees to talk about revenue opportunities than retaliation. A renaming decision designed to punish Maidique could prove more vulnerable to a court challenge, which Maidique has not ruled out.

FIU’s internal legal opinion on the issue anticipated that Maidique could sue over his constitutional rights or argue that the university was reneging on a gift. Key to a successful legal defense against such a challenge, FIU’s lawyer wrote, was a “reasonable desire to raise funds through a donative grant of a naming right (or on some other basis and not as merely a ‘punishment’).”

‘I Couldn’t Care What He Says’

The trustees in attendance on Monday insisted that their recommendation to remove the name had nothing to do with revenge. Maidique, after all, has his First Amendment right to free speech. And since he remains an FIU professor, he also has the protections of academic freedom.

“I’ve never read the op-ed piece,” Michael G. Joseph, the committee’s chairman, said during the meeting. “I couldn’t care what he says … Honestly, I don’t read the papers.”

Yet Cesar L. Alvarez, a trustee and committee member, said that when he was briefed by a senior staff member before Monday’s meeting, “They said, you know, Mitch provided that op-ed piece and people are really upset; they want to take his name off of the campus.”

Alvarez, who declined to identify the university staff member, was on the board in 2009, when the naming decision was made. He said the board had bestowed the honor on Maidique as part of a delicate negotiating process, with the ultimate goal of getting him to step down as president.

“We were trying to get Mitch to move on … there was a lot of give-and-take that was going on,” Alvarez told the other trustees.

The trustees plan to reach out to Maidique in hopes of negotiating a substitute naming honor — something befitting a successful president but more modest than an entire 342-acre campus.

In the interview with The Chronicle, Maidique disputed Alvarez’s recollection of events, saying that the 2009 naming decision had been a complete shock to him. Maidique said that the board chairman and vice chairman at the time had announced the decision before his final board meeting as president. The two board members had arranged a separate publicly advertised meeting for just the two of them, Maidique said, so that they could hash out their plan to surprise the president with the new campus name.

“I thought that they were going to name the law school after me,” Maidique said.

Monday was the first day of classes at FIU, but it’s unlikely that arriving students spent much time worried about the naming controversy. The student member of the trustee committee, Jose Sirven, said that the “Maidique” rebranding had never really caught on. Students, he said, still just call it the main campus.

Michael Vasquez is a senior investigative reporter. Follow him on Twitter @MrMikeVasquez, or email him at michael.vasquez@chronicle.com.