For FAU’s next president, DeSantis will probably want the prison guy | Opinion

In a parallel universe, you’d assume the next president of Florida Atlantic University comes down to a choice between two career educators with decades of valuable experience in public university administration.

You’ve got Michael Hartline, the dean of the business school at Florida State University, and John Volin, the provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Maine.

Picking Hartline or Volin would be a sensible move. But with the current state of higher education in Florida, sensible moves become longshots.

So, I’m already penciling in the private-prison-company guy as the next president of FAU.

He’s the third finalist for the job, Adam Hasner, a former Republican state legislator. After losing a bid for a U.S. House seat, Hasner ended up as a public policy executive at GEO Group, a Boca-Raton based private prison company. 

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GEO is a for-profit private prison outfit that relies heavily on immigrant detention and surveillance business, while serving as a reliable piggy bank for the political campaigns of Republican lawmakers.

GEO has a blemished history at FAU

GEO has a blemished history at FAU and its Florida Owls identity. This came to a head in 2013 when the company bought the naming rights for FAU’s football stadium for $6 million. The deal was approved by the school’s board of trustees but later rescinded after students began protesting and calling the stadium, “Owlcatraz.”

Maybe Hasner can argue that his potential career shift from a private prison promoter to the president of a public university isn’t completely unrelated. 

After all, private prisons and public universities are both large tax-supported institutions that house predominantly young adults for years, feed them and credit their time served for eventual release.

The galling part of this selection process is that there’s a good deal of window dressing involved to make the selection of FAU’s next president look like a meeting of many minds on a level playing field. 

On its face, a search committee vets candidates and submits finalists to the Florida Atlantic University Board of Trustees, which makes the pick. That’s 13 different individual worldviews right there on the board.

But if you look a little closer, you find out that six of these trustees are appointed by the governor, five by the state Board of Governors, and two by virtue of their position (the student body president and faculty senate president).  

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And as for the people on that state Board of Governors, the body that oversees all the state’s public colleges and universities? It’s made up of 37 members with 34 of them appointed by the governor.

So, if you do that math, Gov. Ron DeSantis, through the power of appointments, has the opportunity to employ a controlling hand in centralizing decision making. 

DeSantis is remaking Florida's university system

And DeSantis has shown an insatiable appetite to do just that as he remakes Florida’s university system with a heavy hand that often seems more geared to serve his own political ends than anything else.

He began by taking a wrecking ball to New College of Florida in Sarasota, appointing trustees who fired the school president, chased away a third of the faculty, and tarnished the school’s academic reputation.

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Most recently, he used early resignations on the Board of Trustees at the University of West Florida in Pensacola to pack it with new appointees that included Scott Yenor, a political science professor at Boise State University who has called educated women “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.”

Yenor has virtually no ties to Florida, other than writing glowingly about the “anti-woke” DeSantis, who professes not to know about Yenor’s misogynist politics, which includes referring to colleges and universities as “citadels of our gynecocracy.”

You’d think a guy like Yenor who speaks so disparagingly about educated women and calls universities “indoctrination camps” doesn’t belong in the position of authority at a public university anywhere, yet alone one that is 2,273 miles from where he teaches in Idaho.

Yenor’s politics are far beyond what might be considered “conservative.” 

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“If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to be mothers, not finding every reason for women to delay motherhood until they are established in a career or financially independent,” he has said.

That’s the guy DeSantis appointed in December to serve at a Florida university that has a student body that is about 60 percent female.

It has been a lightning-quick rise to the top for Yenor since then.

A month after DeSantis appointed Yenor, the UWF board had an emergency meeting via Zoom at a time when the university was shut down due to bad weather. 

And without any discussion, DeSantis’ other new appointees pitched in to nominate and approve Yenor as the new chairman of the university’s board of trustees.

Alonzie Scott, one of the board members who wasn’t in on the fix, wondered aloud at the meeting why the board would consider a chairman with no ties to the community.

“You have no standing in the community at this stage,” Scott told Yenor.

Watching the meeting, you’d never guess that Yenor was an educational flamethrower. 

“I’ve been working with the governor in higher ed reform, among other things,” Yenor said during his brief remarks. “That leads me to a great interest in higher ed, its possibilities, and problems and its challenges going forward.”

He didn’t mention that he has also been working with the Society for American Renewal, a men-only fraternal order that calls for replacing the U.S. government with an authoritarian “aligned regime.” 

Yenor, through his affiliation with a right-wing think tank, Claremont Institute, has helped to write and define the principles of the Society for American Renewal, The Guardian newspaper disclosed.

The internal mission statement of the society, obtained by the Guardian, shows Yenor’s promotion of what amounts to a radical form of Christian nationalism.

The memo says the group is founded by men who are “un-hyphenated Americans, and we believe in a particular Christianity that is not blurred by modernist philosophies.”

 “Our aim is to build and maintain a robust network of capable men who can reverse our society’s decline and return us to the successful path off which America has strayed.”

And that they are willing to “act decisively” to further their beliefs. 

 “Most of all, we seek those who understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise in the temporal realm.”

Yikes. It looks like we can check off UWF on DeSantis’ list of state universities to wreck. It’s turning into his hobby.

I’m guessing FAU is next on the list. 

The good news for FAU is that once the two more qualified finalists are pushed aside to make Hasner the next president of FAU, his Jewish faith will make him an unlikely Christian nationalist warrior exercising his “legitimate forceful exercise” in Yenor’s army of men.

Frank Cerabino is a news columnist with The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA Today Network.