When Carrie Meek was the most prominent FAMU graduate in the
Florida Senate, she provided the leadership necessary to ensure that FAMU
gained and kept control of the budget for the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering
(COE).But after all the hard work Meek did to keep the budget at FAMU, current Senate Democratic Leader and FAMU alumna Arthenia Joyner failed to battle against it being taken away from the university in 2015.
Back in 1987, FAMU President Frederick S. Humphries struck a deal with FSU President Bernie Sliger for FAMU to receive control of the COE budget
in exchange for him agreeing to support Innovation Park as the building site
for the COE.
Meek used her seat in the Florida Senate to help move the
annual appropriation for the COE into the FAMU general revenue line in 1987.
She also made sure that it stayed there up until she left the state Senate for
the U.S. House of Representatives in 1992.
“Once you have a group of faculty who are dedicated to the
production of African Americans and Hispanics in science and engineering, and
they have an understanding of how to achieve this, then the biggest impediment
[to success] is finding the financial support for them,” Humphries said in a
1998 article by Black Issues in Higher Education.
Humphries’ work to expand FAMU faculty at the COE and raise
more funds for scholarships paid off big for the university. FAMU reached the
“R3”category in the “Doctoral Universities” on Carnegie Classifications while
he was president and just climbed up to “R2: Doctoral Universities – Higher research
activity” this year. Most of the Ph.D. programs at FAMU are in the FAMU-FSU
College of Engineering. They are: Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering,
Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and
Industrial Engineering.
The number of FAMU faculty and students at the COE has gone down since Humphries retired in 2001. FAMU needs to stop this decline in order
to stay at R2, but now it can’t count on using the COE budget to deal with this
problem.
Joyner, who is currently the highest ranking FAMU graduate
in the Florida Senate, didn’t follow Meek’s lead in defending FAMU control of
the COE appropriation in 2015.
In May 2015, after the legislature created a new budget
entity for the COE appropriation, a new Joint College of Engineering Governance
Council decided that it was going to start calling the shots about what happens
to the $12.9M COE budget instead of FAMU. This has made it possible for the FSU
representatives and Board of Governors (BOG) Chancellor Marshall Criser, III to
just outvote FAMU on budget decisions.
FSU President John Thrasher tried to split the COE when he
was state senator in 2014 by shifting an additional $13M into the FSU general
revenue line to start an independent engineering college. According to an article
in the Tampa Bay Times that year, a number of FSU advocates “believe the
university should have a standalone engineering school as it pursues a top 25
ranking.” But this is no longer necessary because the FSU delegates on the
council and the BOG chancellor can now vote together to help FSU get its way in
decisions on the $12.9M COE budget that FAMU used to control.
Joyner hasn’t done anything to challenge this even though
the there isn’t any language in the General Appropriations Act that says the
Joint College of Engineering Governance Council is in charge of the $12.9M
budget for the COE.
The COE crisis isn’t the only FAMU issue where Joyner has
fallen short of Meek-level leadership. Meek publicly blasted the Board of
Regents when members of that group talked to Humphries in a demeaning manner.
But Joyner has remained quiet in the wake of Board of Governors member Norman
Tripp talking to FAMU administrators in a condescending way.
Arthenia Joyner will leave the Florida Senate this year due
to term limits. FAMUans in Florida should support new alumni legislative
candidates who will combat attacks on FAMU with the same level of boldness that
Carrie Meek had.