The University of Florida’s accreditor plans to investigate the flagship campus over the revelation that administrators denied three professors’ requests to serve as paid experts in a voting-rights lawsuit.
Belle S. Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, told The Chronicle on Monday that the accreditor would follow its policy on investigating unsolicited information. Under those rules, accreditors can dig into campus happenings between review cycles if they learn of potential “significant issues of compliance.” Accreditation is needed for colleges to receive federal student aid.
Wheelan said the accreditor would send a letter to Florida’s president, W. Kent Fuchs, on Monday or early Tuesday “asking for information to verify or clarify the news media’s account of what happened,” she wrote in an email. “From there, we will decide if there are any noncompliance issues.” She declined to comment further.
Many accreditors, including Florida’s, demand that governing boards be independent and free from influence from external sources.
In a federal-court filing on Friday, plaintiffs’ lawyers in the case wrote that university administrators had told the three faculty members that “they were not authorized to serve as experts” in a lawsuit that challenges a new Florida law limiting the ways in which state residents can vote. In a statement, the university acknowledged that it had barred the three professors from taking part in the lawsuit, saying that such paid work was “adverse to the university’s interests as a state of Florida institution.”
The state enacted a law this year that restricts the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots and adds requirements on voter identification, among other things. The lawsuit in question challenges the legislation as racially discriminatory.
The plaintiffs planned to lean on experts to explain what they say is the racially disparate impact of the law, according to the Friday filing. The three professors serve in the political-science department, and their lawyers wrote that they had been approved to serve as experts in “numerous” prior cases.
Hessy Fernandez, a campus official, told The Chronicle that the university had taken issue with the fact that the professors would be paid for their testimony — a practice that is common at colleges across the country — in litigation against the state.
“The university, as a public institution, is part of the state — therefore, that would be adverse to the university’s interests,” Fernandez wrote in an email. “However, to be clear, if the professors wish to do so pro bono, on their own time without using university resources, they would be free to do so.”
A professor named in the filing, Michael McDonald, wrote on Twitter that the university had not initially used that rationale in its denial.
Daniel A. Smith, another of the professors, testified in a lawsuit against Florida in 2018 with the university’s permission, The New York Times reported.
