Board member wants to put pressure on USF Poly accreditors

Posted Jan 19, 2012 by Lindsay Peterson

Updated Jan 19, 2012 at 05:53 PM

After scolding USF President Judy Genshaft last month for replacing USF Polytechnic’s chancellor with Lakeland CPA David Touchton, Mori Hosseini lavished her with praise today.

Hosseini leads the university Board of Governors committee riding herd on the effort to turn Poly into an independent university.

“We had a little bit of a blip,” he noted at the board meeting in Tallahassee, referring to his heartburn over Touchton, who had opposed the independence proposal.

But, Hosseini continued, “we have received the total commitment, total commitment, from University of South Florida Board of Trustees….that they are going to see this thing through. I have received a total commitment from President Genshaft.”

Could he be sending a message to state Sen. JD Alexander? The senator didn’t want USF overseeing the transition and some people expect him to try to slip UF into that role before the end of the legislative session.

Hosseini went on to tell the board that everyone needed to link arms with USF to put some pressure on the group with the heaviest hand in this process, Atlanta-based accrediting agency SACS.Without accreditation, there would be no federal student aid for Poly, no federal grants and a lot of questions about its legitimacy.

Poly is covered by USF’s accreditation now, but it needs to be separately accredited as a campus before it can win university accreditation.

Board member Patricia Frost urged caution. You don’t exactly push SACS around.

But Florida officials can gently ask the reviewers to put Poly’s application on the top of their priority list, Genshaft said. “I’m not trying to short cut any process. I don’t think they would allow us to shortcut any process.”

USF Poly has a long list of criteria to meet before it can be free. But accreditation is probably the biggest reach.

Even under the best of circumstances, campus accreditation will likely take until 2015.

One wonders how SACS would react if six weeks from now, at the end of the legislative session, UF suddenly entered the picture as Poly’s parent institution.

They could probably kiss the 2015 target date goodbye.