The tragicomedy of Florida Poly is the perfect setting for Ilya Shapiro and his fellow grifters
J.D. Alexander's vanity college needed $26M from Polk/Lakeland taxpayers to exist. More than a decade later, it remains tiny, 80% male, and totally disconnected from reality and community.
This one may truncate in email because of images — and because it’s a little long.
After all, it’s the first real effort I’ve ever seen to honestly assess the return on investment Florida Polytechnic University has provided to Polk County/Lakeland taxpayers a decade after J.D. Alexander forced Polk taxpayers to give birth to it.
Click through to the actual site if you need to.
Fifteen-ish years ago, a scheming, incubator-huckster named Marshall Goodman snake-charmed rich and powerful Polk County nepo-baby Sen. J.D. Alexander, R-Inheritance, who would become chairman of the Florida Senate budget committee.
Goodman and Alexander worked together to kill USF Lakeland — our city’s long-sought, full-service, standalone campus of the University of South Florida. They reanimated the corpse of that future campus as a new idea: “USF Polytechnic,” a “STEM”-focused speciality campus that would make Polk County synonymous with innovation.
Shortly thereafter, in 2011, Goodman got himself fired by 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.”
Their extortion argument, which was entirely legal, essentially went like this:
You commissioners and taxpayers have to give this grifter Goodman/inheritance baby J.D. this taxpayer money or their stupid, vainglorious choices won’t produce anything.
How’s that 5,000 students by 2024 looking?
In 2014, Lakeland city commissioners got a dog-and-pony show tour of their $10 million investment on our behalf. Here are key excerpts of the linked article in The Ledger article. Note the parts in bold.
City Manager Doug Thomas said he expects the city to benefit in the coming years because of the school, which sits near the eastern junction of the Polk Parkway and Interstate 4.
"It helps with our economic development efforts," Thomas said. "It's a different type of economic development engine." …
… The school will open Aug. 25 to more than 500 students. It is projected to have about 1,244 students by 2016 and 5,000 by 2024.
How has that worked out for local taxpayers?
Well, 1,600 kids are enrolled in 2023 — 81 percent of whom are young men.
Their only collective connection to Lakeland or Polk County or the outside world is a shuttle bus to the Socrum Loop Publix north of I-4. FPU once had a dedicated transit bus connecting the remote campus, located at I-4 and the Polk Parkway, to downtown Lakeland. But the college killed it for reasons unknown to me.
While he was killing that connection and getting rid of college mental health counselors right before a 2018 suicide, departing FPU President Randy Avent proved quite adept at cashing in on his college’s tiny, insular community.
Avent, whose base pay to manage three buildings is $478,000, is no Richard Corcoran when it comes to the college presidential salary cost-per-student game; but he’s no slouch either.
I put this chart together a while back to mock the “anti-woke” grifter takeover of New College and Richard Corcoran’s hilarious new president’s salary there.
The collective yawn at a similar grifter “takeover” of the Florida Poly board last week is what prompted this entire article. It’s hard to get too worked up at a redundant DeSantis invasion of a campus that is quite sleepy on its wokest day.
But the “takeover” provides as good an occasion as any for trying to honestly assess Florida Poly’s return on my investment, as a Polk County and Lakeland taxpayer — not to mention state taxpayer.
Will new FPU Trustee Ilya Shapiro hunt “lesser” women at his 81% male college?
The headliner of last week’s takeover is a guy named Ilya Shapiro, who is Internet-famous for being Internet-famous for saying a stupid thing in public that embarrassed Georgetown Law School, which had just hired him as executive director of “the Center for the Constitution,” whatever that is.
That’s a well-trod sub-grift of the greater campus “free speech” hustle.
It goes like this: a self-described “conservative free speech activist” gets a job at prestigious mainstream institution eager to prove it has non-lib street cred. Then he or she quits in a public huff after saying something gross and stupid, or complaining that “no one likes me,” in order to launch a lucrative career as a “canceled” social media influencer.
Bari Weiss did this with the New York Times, in one goofily famous example, and parleyed it into taking dictation from Elon Musk on “the Twitter files.” There are many other variants of this same grift.
In Ilya Shapiro’s case, he didn’t even wait to start his fake job atop “the Center for the Constitution” at Georgetown Law before launching the grift. During the U.S. Supreme Court nomination process that produced Florida Woman Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Shapiro tweeted that his preferred candidate:
alas doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman. Thank heaven for small favors?
A predictable and tiresome bit of “free speech” theater ensued. Shapiro was not fired; but a school official sent a letter saying Georgetown law disapproved of his tweeting about “lesser black woman.” And that was all Shapiro needed to make his move. He strategically quit in a Wall Street Journal spread so he could forever market himself as the “controversial” Ilya Shapiro.
LOL. I couldn’t get ‘em to fire me; but I’m quitting anyway, so Venmo me, grumpy, gullible right wing rich people is pretty funny as a “cancel” grift goes.
On the other hand, quitting Georgetown only landed Shapiro in the fallow cow pastures of 1,600-student Florida Poly, not on Elon’s private jets. So maybe it all hasn’t paid off quite like Shapiro hoped — a bit like Florida Poly itself.
Shapiro has zero background in STEM or apparent connection to Polk County or even Florida. So what, exactly, does he plan to do as a trustee to accomplish that tweet? Will he find and purge the “lesser women” among the 19 percent (about 300 total) of female Florida Poly students?
I can only speak for myself — and I was never the most magnetic ladies’ man; but spending four years cooped up at an interstate interchange with four dudes to every woman would not have appealed to me as part of my college search when I was 18.
Somehow, I doubt it’s terribly attractive to young women, either.
Young men tend to dominate enrollment in specialized STEM programs everywhere. That’s true. But when you attend a real college or university, you are surrounded by the full population of students. If you’re a woman, you’re not stuck in the same confined, isolated space with the same 1300 dudes and 300 women all the time.
What’s your position on Kelli “Lesser ex-politician” Stargel, Trustee Shapiro?
Florida Poly recently hired former GOP state senator Sen. Kelli Stargel of Lakeland to do what appears to be nothing — for $130,000 per year — in a vaguely administrative job perhaps akin to Shapiro’s old gig at Georgetown.
Kelli also has no STEM background, no college degree, no ability to raise money, no residual political clout, and no real record of anything but voting for forced birth and gleefully inflicting any hurtful thing state GOP leaders told her to inflict on her own people while in office.
Kelli’s reward for that last part is a fake gig that makes Jerry Hill’s arrangement with the State Attorney Office look like rigid fiscal rectitude. The money FPU President Randy Avent spent on her would be far better spent on LARPing equipment for Poly students, as we’ll see in a moment.
I am curious if Shapiro will tweet an opinion of Kelli and her work. She isn’t black; so maybe she’s less of a problem for him. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Who knows?
But like Shapiro’s appointment, Kelli’s hire underscores how little any “leader,” including FPU’s president and trustees, cares about Florida Poly’s present or future as anything but a state-run piggybank for grifters.
“Ya’ll hired Kelli” answers and defeats any defense of Florida Poly as a serious institution.
Not an “engine” of anything but grifts of the future past
As someone told me recently, “the most important thing to know about Florida Poly is that it is unnecessary.”
Florida kids can get STEM education and degrees from every real college and university in Florida. In 2021-2022, FPU graduated 91 students in computer science and 102 students in engineering, according to the IPEDS statistical database.
That’s 2.2 percent of the state university system’s roughly 8,500 total graduates in those fields. (That excludes New College, which doesn’t declare majors.)
Florida Poly isn’t a STEM engine; it’s an exhaust fume.
And what about the “economic development engine” part?
More than a decade after the Lakeland city commissioners took their tour, FPU is finally boasting about its first on-campus corporate partner: International Flavor and Fragrances. The company is opening a “citrus innovation center.” It’s not clear to me what that actually means. See if you can figure it out. Excerpt here:
Florida Poly President Randy K. Avent and Karel Coosemans, Global Innovation Program Director, Re-Master Citrus at IFF, hosted a fireside chat at the event. IFF is building its Global Citrus Innovation on campus.
“If you study the citrus industry – the whole ecosystem that exists – you always end up in Central Florida, in Polk County,” Coosemans said.
Coosemans said IFF’s plan at Florida Poly has five main functions: research innovation, training, customer experience, acceleration as a member of an ecosystem, and bringing innovation into its portfolio.
I hate to break this to Avent and Coosemans; but if you study — or pay any attention at all — to the citrus industry in Polk County and Florida, you know the most consequential recent innovation of grove capital owners is to replace diseased trees with houses.
On the other hand, I bet every public school in Polk County will get a cool field trip out of the flavor center. So there is that.
Florida Poly’s other big public-facing marketing effort has been its proximity to the SunTrax test track for autonomous vehicles. Five-to-seven years ago, self-driving cars were minutes away from pushing human drivers off I-4, according to Elon and all the cool kids.
Now, well, it’s kind of, uh, nevermind. See you in 2035, maybe?
It’s not clear to me what gets actively tested in any given week at SunTrax, which is a government project (Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise) that you can read about here. It’s not clear to me that any technology or gadget ever developed at Florida Poly has ever been walked over to the adjacent track for testing. The college is welcome to tell me otherwise. Maybe it’s Kelli’s job to tote stuff from FPU to SunTrax. She has the time.
In short, I would wager that Florida Poly depends more abjectly on government and the taxpayer in all forms for its existence than any public university or college in America, except for maybe the newly mutilated New College.
It’s not an engine; it’s a gravity well of public resources.
A rigorous haven/island for a small, niche group of kids
It’s useless to sort through FPU’s various press releases and vacuous self-congratulation if you want to honestly assess for yourself the return on your $26 million Polk/Lakeland investment.
Instead, if you care, I’d recommend spending some time with FPU posters on Reddit and elsewhere. These student discussions paint a consistent picture of Florida Poly, which isn’t all negative, from the point-of-view of the kids.
The passage that follows is an excerpt from a pretty good defense of the Florida Poly student experience from one student to another student. It’s a little dated — coming from 2019. But it’s articulate and passionate, if a little profane, and it seems applicable today as well. Read the whole thing at the link:
Grow the fuck up. You've attended the school for 2 months and have the audacity to come here and call it a "place for losers" while making baseless claims and ignorant attacks on the student body and administrative environment.
Florida Polytechnic is a stem school. People in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields have always been associated with an antisocial stigma, and you should've been prepared for that type of environment before enrollment. You have all the resources necessary to get a better education than other large colleges where you're sitting in a lecture hall with 70 students and your existence is negligible.
The second paragraph states the apparent core appeal of the school to students and faculty. Individual students and individual professors seem to create some strong and rigorous academic interactions, almost independent of the institution and its leaders.
Here’s a much more recent exchange, from earlier this year. I’ve underlined some particularly noteworthy statements. The remark about “one lockheed martin” suggests there aren’t many Lakeland-area opportunities for students to apply the engineering they’re learning in applied engineering.
And here’s a sad, but thoughtful, back-and-forth from 2018 following an article in Tampa Bay Times laying out how little the school did to prevent a campus suicide.
Eighty percent male then; eighty percent now. Isolated then; isolated now. Not much seems to have changed.
The school did build quite a fancy and expensive swimming pool in the shape of a phoenix, the FPU mascot. I’m told it’s barely used — while LARPing equipment for cosplaying young people has to be regularly replaced because it gets worn out from activity.
Florida Poly students are not “tech bros” on the whole.
These are kids who have generally endured — and probably still endure — far more cutting slurs, often from towel-snapping tech bros.
I’m pleased that at least some of them can find a community of peers at Florida Poly. It’s the best part of my investment. And I’m sure Florida PolyCon is fun if you’re into LARPing. I say that with no hint of a sneer. I want young people to be happy. Too many of them, everywhere, aren’t.
In short, if you’re a young man who loves computers, struggles with socialization, doesn’t have a lot of money, and is comfortable in campus isolation or living at home, Florida Poly offers you small classes and a heads-down, insular haven from the outside world and the raw overwhelming scale of other universities.
It offers you that the same thing if you’re a young woman; but it also surrounds you with four men for every one of you who are generally “a bit awkward and nerdy.”
Again, I do not discount the importance of kids like that finding each other, even if the isolation can become dangerous if they don’t. If it works for you, you can learn quite a bit in that setting. It can prepare you well for being a lifelong IT technician answering to more socialized bosses. Perhaps Elon Musk will abuse you one day as a mid-level coder or engineer at whatever government-backed enterprise he gets his hands on next.
I think that setting does much less to spawn “dynamic tech entrepreneurs” — but I’m also not sure we really need many more of those. Their record of disruptive benefit on society as a whole is … debatable. And I say that as somebody who benefits tangibly more than most people from a very tech-enabled work and personal life.
Florida Poly: the STEM version of the pre-grift New College
In many ways, Florida Poly is a weird funhouse mirror image of New College before DeSantis/Corcoran/Rufo destroyed it. Both schools enroll fewer than 1700 students.
Before the grift, New College was a well-regarded, female-oriented and LGBT-friendly humanities school with sky-high acceptance rates to prestigious grad schools. In 2021, before the purge, the former New College had about 1300 students and awarded 60 percent of its degrees to women.
DeSantis, Corcoran, Rufo etc. have now turned New College into a wannabe factory for mediocre college athletes not good enough to start at Bob Jones or Southeastern some other small private religious college. A transient athlete-driven, short-term enrollment increase is the most immediate path to paying Corcoran’s massive salary.
(If you want a preview of what’s going to happen to New College over the next few years, watch what’s happening to Lakeland’s Southeastern, which is deteriorating under the weight of its own leadership grift and unaffordable football program.)
At New College, DeSantis/Corcoran/Rufo took great perverse pleasure in destroying the welcoming and supportive culture of a college that largely served women and libs, who were also, perhaps, also a bit on the fringes of “normal” college and young adult life — more from a “theater kid” than “math nerd” angle, to be overly reductive.
DeSantis/Corcoran/Rufo are terrible people who get off in inflicting pain and cruelty on people who have found comfort and peace in an unusual community. So they enjoyed tweeting about “lib tears” and “woke mobs,” not unlike Shapiro tweets.
Inflicting that pain on the vulnerable is the only real point of the New College grift other than Cocoran’s payday.
They would love to do the same thing to Florida Poly; but I’m not sure how they can manage it. Unlike New College, there’s no campus culture to de-wokify and destroy.
Unlike New College, Florida Poly’s only discernible student culture is insularity and isolation from wider world — born of personality, location, and student life choices made by the school leadership, the state, and J.D. Alexander back in the day. I don’t know how you grift that more than it’s already been grifted. But they’ll probably try. Maybe they’ll take away the LARP gear and make them play lacrosse or football.
Still … Suck it, dorks. or “Nerd tears.” … just doesn’t have quite the same ring on Xitter.
“We have concerns with how liberal and indoctrinating these faculty are … ” LOL, sure J.D.
The likeliest target of a cruelty-for-fun anti-woke grift at Florida Poly is the anecdotally large number of foreign students and professors. (I don’t have actual data. I’ve been looking for it unsuccessfully.)
For example, here is nepo-baby J.D. Alexander welcoming Ilya Shapiro and the other new anti-woke trustees to Poly in a recent article because of …
…. Hamas?
“Honestly, when you see all these colleges erupting with support for terrorist groups like Hamas, we have concerns with how liberal and indoctrinating these faculty are,” Alexander said. “Work on teaching reading, writing and arithmetic and not all this woke ideology so popular in Washington. I know Gov. DeSantis. He’s a good leader for our state and I’m sure he’s made good appointments.”
LOL. “Work on teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic” at a supposedly cutting edge technology college. Double LOL. The nepos are not sending us their best.
I’m sure when and if J.D. strolls the halls of his Santiago Calatrava grift palace he sees professors and students who look like what he imagines a member of Hamas might look like. And I certainly don’t think the anti-woke grifters are above attacking the only aspect of Florida Poly one might call successful, based on student feedback.
If you run through Shapiro’s Twitter feed, you’ll see that he definitely considers Palestinians — not just Hamas — lesser. (I’m inclined to offer as much grace as I can to everyone I can — especially to the dead and the suffering — in the horrible ongoing aftermaths of the Hamas war crime against Israel and humanity and in the horrible ongoing aftermaths of Israel’s brutal self-defense and reprisals, which kill children that Hamas bunkers itself within. If I had any answer beyond that, I’d give it to you.)
But in the case of Shapiro, just trolling his Twitter feed, I think he’s spoiling for some vengeance along with his grift. So many of you openly sneer and sneered at “Hussein” in Barack Hussein Obama’s name. Would it surprise you to learn that the star faculty member of Florida Poly is named Dr. Muhammad Rashid? He’s probably done more for Florida Poly than anyone else. He just gave $500,000 to endow a chair. I bet Ilya Shapiro, angry grifter of his “lessers,” knows that name already.
As New College shows, these people are happy to destroy what’s good about an institution for fun. DeSantis has already banned Palestinan sympathy as officially akin to supporting Hamas and terrorism. You think he has any problem expanding that to “people named Muhammad,” wherever they’re from? (I have no idea where Dr. Rashid was born; and I don’t care.)
However, quietly-professoring-and/or-nerding-while-looking-Middle Eastern seems a tough thing to persecute, even for J.D. and DeSantis and Shapiro. We’ll see. But if I were a student or even a star professor easily othered by my identity or nationality, I’d be paying pretty close attention to J.D.’s “Hamas” smack and whatever dumb thing Ilya Shapiro and crew say about who is “lesser.”
What was it about then, J.D.?
Also, take a moment to compare the grumpy and delusional nepo-baby J.D. Alexander of 2023, seeing Hamas in every non-existent campus coffee shop, with this triumphant, “visionary” J.D. Alexander from 2012, celebrating the death of USF Lakeland and the creation of Poly. The whole article is pretty hilarious to read now, looking back.
"At the end of the day, it's not about me," Alexander, R-Lake Wales, said Friday night. "It's about an opportunity for Florida and the region to have a focused institution unlike any other."
Sorry, bro, it was about you.
And what exists in 2023, despite the best efforts of Dr. Rashid, is nothing like the snake oil you and Goodman sold to the gullible and weak-minded. I’m sorry that makes you grumpy. (So many nepo-babies seem grumpy, especially when they get what they want. Why is that? Nothing is ever enough for an empty soul.)
Florida Poly is an institution “unlike any other” only in its isolation from any community and its concentration of narrowly smart young men who like to LARP and play video games.
Whatever benefits those individual kids get from Florida Poly as an institution today — which I think are real — aren’t remotely worth the $26 million Polk and Lakeland taxpayers coughed up in good faith 15~ish years ago to fluff your ego, J.D.
We’ve received basically zero return on our investment. But we did give Kelli Stargel a fat “working” pension to “serve” kids she undoubtedly mocks in private. So there’s that, at least.
Can Barnett Poly succeed where J.D. Poly has failed?
On a mildly positive note, J.D. seems to be passing the baton of FPU private control to a different, and, better, I think, breed of inherited wealth.
The Publix Barnetts just kicked in a “transformational” $10 million gift for the “Barnett Applied Research Center,” with Wesley doing the talking:
“We are exceptionally enthusiastic about our partnership with Florida Polytechnic University and its role in propelling Central Florida to national prominence as a technology hub over the next half-century,” said Wesley Barnett, a founding partner at TampaBay.Ventures and a longtime community advocate. “We firmly believe that the Barnett Applied Research Center will be an engine for innovation, a beacon for top-tier talent, and a driving force in the region's development.”
In fairness to Kelli Stargel, about the only thing I found on her work calendar was a dinner meeting with Wesley’s dad Barney back in the spring. I wonder if she’ll take credit for winning that Barnett check. On the other hand, I feel certain Florida Poly could produce an AI Bot smart enough to identify and execute “ask Barney Barnett for money” as a development strategy.
At least Wesley and the Barnetts have put Lakeland’s impressive Bonnet Springs Park on the scoreboard. It’s perhaps the first large, ambitious act of inherited capital around here — public or private — to actually deliver the beneficial result it said it would. The Barnetts have a much better delivery record than J.D. — see CSX, also.
But “transformational?” LOL. Over the next half-century? LOL. That’s quite a timeline.
When we Polk taxpayers coughed up the existential $26 million under J.D.’s implicit blackmail, a 2073 payoff wasn’t actually what we had in mind. I wonder if Publix managers get 50-year grace periods to make their business decisions pay off.
As a parent, I dearly wish all college age kids had access to a full-service, Lakeland-based campus of a real university right now — rather than just the brief glimpse of Calatrava’s breaking-down, ironically-vaginal architecture as they drive northeast to UCF from Lakeland on I-4.
We could have had that real USF campus. Functioning now. Useful. Today.
But J.D. Alexander — a spoiled, grumpy nepo-baby who must get his way — didn’t want your kids to have it. And everybody “important,” except Paula Dockery and maybe David Touchton, crumbled before his Big Nepo Energy.
Remember, indulgent capital doesn’t want usefulness for its community subjects. It wants monuments to itself.
But Florida Poly is no monument. It’s a metaphor for everything that has failed and corrupted itself in both Florida government and wastrel, mediocre private capital. It’s a monument to the shiny banality of grift and inheritance.
Why should anyone care? Poly doesn’t.
I have many, many times said publicly how little I care what happens to Florida Poly. And yet, this article, today, is the most serious consideration of the university ever published.
What an indictment.
I don’t care at all about Florida Poly; and I still care more about it than anybody else in public life around here. That’s because I care about this community — and how badly and selfishly it’s been led by civic leaders and capital owners like Kelli Stargel and J.D. Alexander for a generation.
I guess I sort of agree with Wesley Barnett’s implicit admission that FPU needs to start over from scratch with a 50-year plan to build something real — which also somehow manages to include the interests of women this time. Doing so seriously will likely entail wiping out completely what little culture the college has built until now. Growth militates against FPU’s only current appeal.
On the other hand, maybe actually building an FPU growth plan around an explicit appeal to women in STEM is a way to differentiate yourself as a tech-focused college and actually create a “focused institution unlike any other." What do you think, Ilya?
Outside of something creative like that, I have zero interest in helping rebirth Florida Poly. I have no interest in helping fix J.D.’s putrid legacy for him.
Lakeland is doing fine for now — better than a lot of Florida — without a functioning Florida Poly. The multiple community problems I care far more about addressing have no relation to Florida Poly because Florida Poly has no real relation to this community beyond what we paid for it.
Thus, I will vigorously and publicly oppose any expenditure of local tax money beyond what we’ve wasted already on Florida Poly to flatter the vanity of undeserving, unearned wealth. Let DeSantis or the Barnetts bail out J.D.’s self-worth and Ilya Shapiro’s grifting.
And if they’re feeling particularly generous with checks, I might just ask for my money back.