Shut down Florida Poly. Start over as something useful to our community and state
The 2011 USF Lakeland had 4,000 mostly Polk students before J.D. Alexander killed it with Florida Poly, which has *grown* to 1,700 students, mostly not from Polk. Let's cut our pathetic losses.
In just 15 years, within one of America’s fastest growing counties, Polk County’s incompetent, nepo-strangled legislators and “leaders” have magically converted 4,000 (and expanding) USF Lakeland general purpose university students into 1,700 (mostly not local, almost all male, and mostly not graduating) students at Florida Polytechnic University.
On top of that pure negative ROI on public investment, Florida Poly has created a barren “college life” in which: the tiny handful of women warn each other not to engage the aggressively weird, maladjusted stalkers with whom they share dorms and otherwise empty pools on a desolate campus where there have been suicide problems and the emergency phones don’t always work — and many of the men need basic formal training in acting like humans.
Those two paragraphs are not exaggerations.
Read this amazing passage from Ledger reporter Gary White’s stories about what it’s like for the few women who live at Florida’s worst graduation rate university — in their own words. (Somebody better look out for these woman, moving ahead. The college won’t.)
Yankow and Lopez described examples of troubling behavior by some male students.
“I was surprised that, literally, within three days of me moving into the dorms, I was already approached by senior women that are like, ‘You don't talk to these people,’” Lopez said. “‘You don't talk to these people. These people have all the Title IXs on them.’”
Title IX is a federal civil rights law that bars sex-based discrimination, including sexual harassment, stalking and sexual violence, in any school that receives federal funding.
Lopez used the words “terrifying” and “horrific” to describe some of her experiences with male students. She complained that emergency phones on campus are sometimes inoperable, which is one reason she carries a brass-handled cane when walking at night.
The university did have some problems with emergency phones and recently completed a system upgrade, spokesperson Lydia Guzman said. There are now 20 new blue towers equipped with emergency phones on campus, monitored 24 hours a day and answered by a contractor, Kings III Emergency Dispatch Center, she said.
Lopez described encounters with male students that she considered stalking.
“I was neighbors with a guy who was stalking people,” she said. “Every time I walked out of my door, he would walk out of his door and be, like, ‘Hi!’ And I’d be, like, ‘Oh my god, yeah, hello,’ and then immediately start speed-walking down the hallway to wherever I was going so that I didn't get followed.”
Lopez said that a male student once tried to open the locked door of her dorm room when she was in bed with the lights off. On another occasion, she was floating alone in the campus pool when a male student gradually moved so close to her that she texted friends to come and ensure her safety.
Lopez said she has talked to Florida Poly’s Title IX coordinator but has never made a formal complaint.
Both Lopez and Yankow talked of having male students take their photos without asking permission.
Yankow, who attended an all-girls high school in Ohio, described incidents of “hovering” behavior from male students. She acknowledged that her appearance — on a recent day, hair dyed in purple and other colors, a septum ring, a long, black dress and lace-up black boots — draws notice but lamented that some male students cross a line into giving her unwanted attention.
Yankow said that many “STEM guys” fit into one of two categories.
“You get the ones that have never seen a woman in their life, and they're like, ‘Ah, woman, woman, woman, what, what?’” she said. “Or you get the ones that are just like, ‘Oh, you're a woman. Go sit and make the slide show look pretty’ — which I have had said to me before.”
Yankow added that some male students are “normal and they're fun to talk to and fun to hang out with.”
Like all universities receiving federal funding, Florida Poly employs a Title IX coordinator to lead investigations of any misconduct complaints. The school prominently displays information on campus and online about the office and how to file complaints, said Bryan Brooks, Florida Poly’s vice president of student affairs, enrollment management and strategic communications.
Brooks said that the office, led by Title IX Coordinator Michelle Disson, does “a fantastic job” in informing students about their rights.
“I do know for a fact that in 2023-2024, that academic year, we had zero complaints,” Brooks said.
Informed of descriptions from women students about awkward or inappropriate behavior by male students, Brooks said that Florida Poly last fall started a pilot program of Dale Carnegie training. Provided by a company named for the author of the 1936 classic “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” the developmental training emphasizes social skills.
Hoping to attract 15 or 20 students, Brooks said he was pleased that more than 100 signed up.
“We do training in terms of etiquette — say, at the dinner table — or coming up with vision statements, just being leaders on the campus,” said Brooks, hired by Florida Poly President Devin Stephenson in August. “Everywhere I've been, I've had programs like this start, and we've been hugely successful in that area.”
How it started, how it’s going
To very briefly recap the 4,000-to-1,700 USF Lakeland-to-Florida Poly devolution, let’s start with this darkly hilarious 2011 article from The Ledger. It was so full of promise — and credulity:
Note the bold:
USF Poly has about 4,000 students and is Florida's first and only public polytechnic. Its focus is multidisciplinary, applied learning and research. USF Polytechnic leaders and supporters rejoiced in May when Gov. Rick Scott approved a $35 million allotment toward construction of its new campus.
For many years, the students at the Lakeland branch of the University of South Florida shared a non-residential campus with the Lakeland branch of Polk State College. Lakeland civic and economic leaders like David Touchton and Gene Engle sought to expand the Lakeland branch of the University of South Florida to a new, full-service, standalone USF Lakeland campus for those 4,000 students — and more — in our fast growing county.
USF Lakeland boosters found a site at I-4 and the Polk Parkway. They had visions of 10,000-plus (mostly) Polk students being able to attend.
Then, 15-ish years ago, a scheming, “silicon valley” incubator-huckster named Marshall Goodman became USF Lakeland “regional chancellor.” He snake-charmed rich and powerful Polk County inheritance-baby Sen. J.D. Alexander, R-Lake Wales, who would become chairman of the Florida Senate budget committee. Together, Goodman and Alexander hijacked, then killed, the community’s long sought expansion of USF Lakeland.
They reanimated the corpse of USF Lakeland as a new idea: “USF Polytechnic,” a “STEM”-focused speciality campus that would supposedly make Polk County synonymous with innovation.
Just after the 2011 story I quoted, Goodman got himself fired by then-USF President Judy Genshaft for being a bad boss and a bad employee at the same time.
Alexander then helped Goodman rise again by killing USF Polytechnic altogether — and strong-arming weak and gullible Polk/Lakeland/state leaders into creating Florida Polytechnic as a standalone “university,” which today has less than half as many students as the old USF Lakeland.
Goodman and Alexander also got local Lakeland and Polk taxpayers to cough up $26 million for the privilege of destroying thousands of local college opportunities for their kids (often replaced by foreign students, who Poly has aggressively recruited) and building a giant pool nobody but stalkers seems to swim in. And also so Kelli Stargel, J.D. Alexander’s Senate replacement, could have a $220,000 pretend job to retire to.
I would like to claw that $26M back somehow. Alas, it is probably lost to us. Thanks, leaders.
Maybe Poly/state of Florida would gift the site back to Lakeland/Polk County. Maybe we locals could all get a Poly dividend from that $26M of waste — or maybe we could start something new: how about Florida I-4 University (FI4U)? Those ideas are no more unrealistic than this:
LAKELAND - Marshall Goodman looks out at the 174-acre parcel of land that sports heavy equipment, a temporary construction office and the occasional cow, and sees a hotbed of learning, a vibrant community of thinkers, a thriving swarm of jobs in the making.
Never mind that others may see scrubby bushes, muck and flying grasshoppers. Goodman has a vision, and it's coming true.
The University of South Florida Polytechnic's expansive new campus is being built on the foundation of aspirations, and its existence is a direct result of requests that came from the community. Goodman, who hails from Silicon Valley, said USF recruited him to build a university to focus on high tech.
LOL.
And we’re stuck with Poly.
If you can’t shut Poly down and start over, at least shut down the residential part
Today, the Florida Poly we’re stuck with is eating its own tail. At least half of the kids it enrolls don’t graduate — much less give money as alumni — in large part because of the campus life.
This analysis from a woman who is a Poly graduate student describes a dynamic that doesn’t just repel women. Why would any “normal” dude come to Poly either, if they have other options?
“Part of the issue is that I feel like the school has a reputation of the student body being strange, because the students that go here are weird — and, to be clear, I’m including the women. There's a character to this school that I think, if you're a woman trying to get into STEM, I feel like there's other options that you have.”
I have great sympathy for “weird” kids. I’m a bit of a weird guy myself. But I’m not sure that corralling them in an isolated hamlet even serves them — much less anyone else.
I see no way to save or grow Poly as it is; if you read Gary’s stories, its limited appeal revolves precisely around how small and weird it is, which is also its number one growth inhibitor. (And spare me your bleating about “studies” showing the tiny fraction of kids who graduate with “high-paying” jobs. Instead, send me the actual study so I can pick apart the methodology and show you how it’s lying.)
I also know that we’re deep deep deep into sunk cost fallacy here.
So if we can’t remake Poly as something useful, I think existing Poly would be better off shutting down residential life at the campus entirely. They wouldn’t have to pretend to worry about stalkers and emergency phones anymore. Turn it into a glorified high school … or back into the old, pre-new campus USF Lakeland, which was far more useful to Lakeland and Polk County and probably Florida. Make Poly a commuter school again.
I’m told there’s already a literal car line of parents picking up kids every weekend anyway. (I haven’t seen it. Send me a picture if you have one.) I know of one young Polk woman who lives at home and seems to do well treating Poly as a day school. That’s maybe a sustainable model that would benefit local kids. It’s basically the old USF Lakeland model.
Indeed, I think the #1 hurdle for most kids attending college isn’t tuition or even the course work. It’s having to move somewhere, find a place to live that doesn’t break you, and sustain that for 2 or 4 years. The residential part of college is what makes it inaccessible to kids without capital. It’s more expensive to live and much harder to work your way through college than it was in my day.
USF Lakeland could have offered help on both.
Hell, a Florida I-4 University (FI4U) might even follow a similar growth path as Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, which now has 14,600 students. It went from zero to 14,600 in 35 years.
Poly has gone from 4,000 students to 1700 in 15 years. At that rate … well, you don’t have to be STEM stalker to do the math. You may, however, need a special calculus degree to figure out how constant headlines about surging growth in admissions still translate into … 1,700 students.
I mean, this Google sequence is, again, darkly hilarious. Take a second to look at the dates:
Generally, Poly is a general cautionary tale on how dictatorships of mediocrity (or worse) mooch their communities and destroy good things that exist — and the possibility of good things in the future.
Specifically, Poly is object lesson #1 of how Polk’s leaders are thoroughly squandering our window of organic, cost-arbitrage, location-based growth. They can’t even be bothered to notice. That’s how little people care about this “college.”
Previous Poly coverage here:
Everytime I see FI4U I read it as Florida Institute 4 You, and that would really be a great place to send your kid 😂
Amazingly, Poly is still accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) which shows you how useless SACSCOC is. The only schools that are unaccredited by SACSCOC are HBUCs.