Florida Gulf Coast University
Amid alligators and hurricanes, a new campus is taking shape

 

By William Trombley
Senior Editor

FORT MYERS, FLORIDA
ON THE SULTRY southwest Florida coast, where alligators abound and hurricanes threaten, one of the nation's few new campuses--Florida Gulf Coast University--is taking shape.

A new public campus has become a rarity in recent years, as most states have reduced higher education spending in order to pay for the increased costs of health, welfare, K-12 schools and prisons.

But Florida is bucking this trend by building its tenth state university on a waterlogged 760-acre site in Lee County, 150 miles south of Tampa and St. Petersburg. Construction has been plagued by torrential rains and environmental permitting problems, but Florida Gulf Coast still expects to open its doors to 2,500 students next August.

The focus will be on undergraduate instruction, with only a handful of master's degrees offered and no plans for doctoral programs. Faculty members will be hired more for their teaching excellence than for their research records.

Most of the first students will be transfers form Florida community colleges. All upper division students (juniors and seniors) in the College of Arts and Sciences will take a set of interdisciplinary courses and all will be striving for the same degree--Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies.

Professors will not have tenure but will work, instead, on renewable three-to-five-year contracts. Students will receive conventional grades but also will be assessed on the basis of what they have learned, not simply the number of credit hours they have compiled.

It is hoped that 25 percent of the instruction at Florida Gulf Coast will take the form of "distance learning"--students learning on their own with computers, CD-ROMs and other technological aides, as well as in traditional classrooms and laboratories. There are plans to offer televised instruction in nursing, physical therapy, criminal justice and other fields throughout the state.

Most of these ideas have been around for some time but seldom have so many been tried in a single public university. "None of the things we're doing are unique," President Roy McTarnaghan said in an interview. "I want to copy things that work."

Florida Gulf Coast University was authorized by the Florida Legislature in 1991 because it did not seem likely that the state's nine existing public campuses would be able to accommodate an expected enrollment increase of 50,000 to 60,000 by the year 2010. In a 1995 report titled "The Emerging Catastrophe," a dozen of the state's leading business executives warned that failure to provide for these additional students "would be a disaster for Florida's economy."

The steamy southwest corner of the state was picked because its population is increasing rapidly and because the nearest four-year campus--the University of South Florida--is 150 miles away. It did not hurt that legislators from southwest Florida held key committee chairmanships.

Site selection turned into the usual political tussle, which was won by Ben Hill Griffin III, who has given more than $20 million to the University of Florida and for whom its football stadium is named. Griffin owns 16 square miles around the 760 acres he donated for Florida Gulf Coast University and hopes to build a new town around the campus.

Once the political rough-and-tumble of site selection was over, a careful planning process began. McTarnaghan, who has been executive vice chancellor of the state university system, was named president in April 1993.

Suzanne Richter, vice president for academic affairs and the driving force behind many of the curriculum reforms, arrived from Miami-Dade Community College soon thereafter. Eight deans are in place. They have been hiring faculty and planning courses for more than a year and soon they will be joined by the first complement of about 50 professors.

The operating budget for the first year of operation is a generous $21 million, while $36 million has been appropriated for the first group of buildings.

"The Legislature has given us pretty much everything we asked for," said Charles B. Reed, chancellor of the State University System of Florida.

A small University of South Florida branch in Fort Myers will be closed and its buildings will be given to Edison Community College, with which the USF branch has shared a campus. Most of the first students at Florida Gulf Coast will be transfers from the University of South Florida, and about 40 faculty members will make the move as well.

"A certain amount of ambivalence is built in from the start," said Joseph Ravelli, dean of planning and assessment at Florida Gulf Coast. "We're taking over a traditional campus while, at the same time, we're trying to develop a university for the 21st century." Perhaps the most unusual feature of FGCU will be the interdisciplinary courses that will be required for all juniors and seniors in the College of Arts and Sciences. In addition, all graduates of the college will receive the same degree--Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies, with "concentrations" in history, economics, physics or any one of a dozen other subjects.

The interdisciplinary courses will account for 24 of the 60 units that most upper division students must complete, and the exact nature of the courses will not be known until faculty members have arrived to plan them. But the general direction is clear from the comments of Jack Crother, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

"Knowledge is not a fragmented affair," Crother said. "It's really one fabric." The dean is determined to avoid what he called the "tyranny of the disciplines" by creating courses that link one academic field to another.

For example, a course in environmental studies might be taught by faculty members from chemistry, economics, political science and other subjects. "We might study both the science and the social implications of environmental questions, using the campus as a sort of laboratory," Crother said.

Campus planners believe this approach is not only educationally sound but also less expensive. "At this point we can't afford a full range of courses in all those subjects," Richter, the vice president for academic affairs, said.

Crother acknowledged that it might be difficult to find faculty members who are willing to teach in an interdisciplinary manner, since most have been trained as academic specialists.

He also expects students to worry that a "liberal studies" degree will not help them get jobs or gain admission to graduate or professional schools.

There has been some grumbling from community leaders who fought for the new campus but now find that it will have no engineering school, no football team and that many students will be earning degrees in something called "liberal studies."

"This is a conservative part of Florida and some people here would like this to be a traditional little regional university," Richter said. "But I believe a traditional regional university would not meet the needs of the 21st century, and I can be just as stubborn as they are."

Perhaps a quarter of the students transferring from the University of South Florida to the new campus will enter the College of Business, where Dean Richard Pegnetter hopes to train students to be "fast on their feet, able to put things together in a constantly changing environment...I think that's the way business is going and it's the way business education must go, too."

Pegnetter also wants to build close working relationships with local businesses, especially the many health care and computer software enterprises that are springing up in southwest Florida.

He noted that more than 100 former chief executives of "Fortune 500" companies live in retirement in or near Naples, about 20 miles south of the campus site. Pegnetter hopes to enlist some of them as "executive professors" in the business college.

Other local partnerships are planned. The teacher training program will be based entirely in local schools, while the College of Health Professions expects to hire several local health professionals on joint faculty appointments.

To start its library, the new university was able to purchase 65,000 volumes from Upsala, a defunct liberal arts college in New Jersey. But Carolyn M. Gray, dean of library services, said the print collection will never be very large. Instead, FGCU will rely heavily on electronic systems.

Gray also plans to contract with private vendors for cataloguing and other processing, which she said would save about one-third of the usual cost of operating a university library.

Florida Gulf Coast is joining the growing ranks of colleges and universities that are trying to abandon or modify tenure, in the belief that faculty members will work harder if they are not assured of lifetime employment after a probationary period.

The system's Board of Regents tried to impose the no-tenure policy on all ten public campuses but the faculty union resisted and the board had to settle for an "experiment" at the newest campus.

McTarnaghan said not having tenure will make it easier to try "team approaches," in which some instruction is done by local citizens and not by regular faculty members.

He dismissed as no longer relevant the argument that tenure protects academic freedom--the freedom, for instance, of a Florida Gulf Coast professor to criticize local land developers or planning agencies for actions believed to be detrimental to the environment.

"People are protected" against arbitrary dismissal by "50 years of legal rulings," McTarnaghan insisted.

But Mary Burgan, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, said faculty members who have been fired for unpopular views often must go through years of litigation to win back their jobs and are not always successful.

"I believe it is a grave error for a new institution to try to begin without tenure," Burgan said. "It says, right from the beginning, 'we're really not interested in being part of the mainstream of American academic life.'"

Faculty members who transfer from the University of South Florida will retain their tenure-track status but most new professors will be hired on renewable three-to-five-year contracts.

"This means you're going to have two cultures right away," said Edward T. Wimberley, dean of the College of Professional Studies. "Faculty members will wonder if what they did in the past will count and they will wonder, 'what are the expectations?'"

A few University of South Florida faculty members have elected to transfer to other USF campuses, rather than move to Florida Gulf Coast University.

"I didn't want any part of the new university," said James Spence, professor of economics at the USF branch in Fort Myers. "They want the faculty to teach three or four courses each semester, work closely with students, participate in 'distance learning' and help plan the curriculum. That sounds like 'Sweatshop U' to me."

But Richter, the academic vice president, said the new campus has received more than 3,000 applications for teaching positions and "we're very pleased with the quality" of the applicants.

Accreditation of the new campus presents problems.

The Board of Regents has approved 26 academic programs for Florida Gulf Coast University but specifics must await the arrival of faculty. Lacking detailed information about courses, among other questions, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools has been "quite sticky" about accreditation, according to David Spence, executive vice chancellor of the state university system.

If Florida Gulf Coast has not reached a certain point in the lengthy accreditation process when the doors open, its students might not be eligible for federal financial aid. In addition, accrediting agencies in nursing and other specialized fields want to know more about FGCU before approving its programs.

President McTarnaghan is irked by some of these questions. "This is not exactly 'Joe's Barber College,'" he said. "We're going to have a $21 million budget next year."

But campus and statewide officials believe the accreditation problems will be solved. If necessary, the University of South Florida probably could take Florida Gulf Coast under its accreditation wing until all the "i's" have been dotted and the "t's" crossed.

Officials are not as certain that the campus will be ready in time, because of long delays caused by bad weather and hassles over environmental and growth management issues.

The remote campus site, 15 miles from downtown Fort Myers, had no roads, sewers or other infrastructure. But it did have patches of quicksand. About 400 of the 760 campus acres are officially designated wetlands. 765,000 tons of landfill must be trucked in to provide foundation for the first group of buildings.

In a "normal" year much of the campus would be under a foot of water after the rainy season, which generally runs from June to October. After last year's downpours--some parts of South Florida received 90 inches--the water was two to three feet deep. Deer were drowning in the Everglades. Local residents were evacuated. Wags were calling the campus "Mildew U." And construction stopped.

But rainfall has been lighter this year and "we're only a couple of months behind schedule," said Jack Fenwick, director of Facilities.

Local conservationists and environmentalists, banded together as the "Coalition for Responsible Growth Management," fear that Florida Gulf Coast University will provide the "anchor" for large-scale development in a largely empty, environmentally sensitive area.

"There is concern about reducing the size of the 'natural' area," said Bob Barron, a project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "People are afraid that the west coast of Florida is going to look like the east coast."

The Corps of Engineers is one of a half dozen state and federal agencies that have been involved in a series of environmental disputes that have delayed campus construction by at least seven months.

Although the campus wetlands harbor several endangered species of animals, birds and reptiles, much of the skirmishing has been over the Florida Panther, a creature about the size of a California mountain lion, that ranges widely in search of prey. Only 30 to 50 panthers remain in all of South Florida, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is trying to increase these numbers.

University officials in Tallahassee insisted there are no panthers on or near the campus. "Our consultant says no self-respecting panther would be caught dead near that site," said state university facilities planner Robert Friedman, pounding his desk for emphasis.

But the Army Corps of Engineers, acting in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, disagreed and required the university to buy $2 million worth of land for panther habitat, in the general vicinity of the campus.

Flood control, water quality and the preservation of wetlands areas are other major environmental concerns. To deal with these, Florida Gulf Coast has agreed to build seven new lakes (which immediately became homes for alligators) and to uproot and burn thousands of melaleucas--invasive, exotic trees that are destructive to wetlands. The trees are being removed by state prisoners.

So far, these mitigation efforts have cost $2.4 million, and have occupied much of President McTarnaghan's time.

"I came down here thinking this was a great educational opportunity," he said. "Instead, I've become an expert on environmental permitting."