As you’ve no doubt seen if you’ve been following this issue, The Tribune editorial page, in a big Sunday piece, roughed up the movement to build the new USF campus at I-4 and the Polk Parkway. (Here’s a literally parenthetical note: Editorial and news pages are separate. They think and write under different mandates.  The editorial folks will occasionally ask me factual questions if they’re writing a piece about something I’ve coverered. And reporters will occasionally sit in on editorial meetings with newsmakers. But editorial writers follow their own instincts and opinions. I didn’t know this piece was being written, and I wasn’t consulted. And that is entirely appropriate. It would be inappropriate if it were otherwise. By the way, as a subscriber, I find our editorial page well-written, engaging and ideologically unpredictable. All of that is good.)

Anyway, a few days before the Trib piece, the St. Pete Times wrote a story that was equally critical. I had a blog response here. And I would basically reiterate what I wrote at that time. The resource and enrollment demand debates are real and entirely valid. But the Lakeland campus has been debated and vetted and master-planned and otherwise worked over in a highly public process for many years now. It also, as of right now, consists of one building. Nothing else is budgeted. No $200 million, fully-constructed, 16,000-student campus is going to spring to life in the next two years. The recent coverage I’ve read leaves the impression, I think, that such a fully-formed campus was suddenly snuck into the budget this year without any real opportunity for input. And that’s just not correct.

For a more detailed rebuttal of The Trib’s editorial, check out Chuck at Lakeland Local. (Chuck’s wife works for the now USF Polytechnic, a fact he routinely notes in his writing about the campus.)

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