New College has fewest Trustee committee meetings of any university

Written By Brian Cody

Amid concern about lack of proper board oversight as New College of Florida’s new administration introduces radical changes to the school, a new data set shows that New College of Florida’s Board of Trustees has held the fewest committee meetings in 2023 compared to the other eleven Florida universities. New College has held only 11 committee meetings, which is half of the average across Florida’s 12 universities.

The data set was produced from publicly available data on Florida universities’ websites by the Policy Support Committee of the Novo Collegian Alliance.

Committee meetings are vital for the proper functioning of a public university such as New College, and is where a Board of Trustees typically conducts more detailed oversight and evaluates potential proposals in depth before they come to the full board.

Faculty and student trustees at New College of Florida have repeatedly called for additional committee meetings in light of the rapid changes happening at the school, and have voiced frustration at the lack of meetings and concerns about lack of good governance and proper oversight. Trustee Keenan at the October 20th NCF Board of Trustees meeting made a motion asking for committees to meet:

“can I please propose a motion that in the next four months, which I think is a reasonable amount of time, we have the Strategic Planning committee, the Presidential Review committee, and I think the Student Affairs committee meet? If four months is not enough time, or you need more, I just think we need some sort of motion to make sure this happens because we’ve been asking for this for a couple months now.”

Trustee Rufo objected to voting to schedule meetings, saying:

If those committee chairs here could just verbally say, “yeah, I intend to do that, I plan to do that,” that strikes me as a much better solution than setting the precedent that we’re, you know, voting on schedules, for, you know, regular Board meetings, or subcommittee meetings, rather

Other Florida universities schedule committee meetings 6-12 months in advance, including USF (schedule here) and UWF (schedule here).

The motion ultimately failed with a vote of 6 to 4, the four voting in favor being Trustees Karp, Keenan, Reid, and Christaldi (link to meeting recording).

Some summary statistics about how frequently Florida’s universities’ Boards of Trustees have held committee meetings in 2023:

  • The average number of committee meetings in 2023 is 22.

  • The minimum number of committee meetings in 2023 is 11 (New College of Florida).

  • The maximum number of committee meetings in 2023 is 34 (Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University).

  • The median number of committee meetings in 2023 is 19.5.

The number of Board of Trustee committee meetings by university held between January 1, 2023 and November 18, 2023 are as follows:

  • NCF: 11

  • FIU: 16

  • FPOLY: 16

  • USF: 17

  • FGCU: 18

  • UNF: 19

  • UWF: 20

  • FAU: 21

  • UCF: 26

  • FSU: 30

  • UF: 31

  • FAMU: 34

The raw data is available here as a CSV: FLSUS BOT Meetings - Public data.csv.

Brian Cody
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