A quick update on events in Tallahassee:

1) Former Florida House Speaker Ray Sansom and Northwest Florida Stat College President Bob Richburg have been indicted by a Leon County grand jury on charges of official misconduct over Sansom's shuttling millions in PEC construction funds to what used to be Okaloosa-Walton Community College. In addition, Richburg has been indicted for perjury. The St Pete Times story is here and here a clause from the grand jury's report that stuck out: "The present system has the potential to breed corruption." 

2) The state Senate approved its budget bill on a unanimous vote a few days ago, and the House will follow suit today. As is common, the senate is more generous to education (story here), by about half a billion dollars for K-12 and higher ed put together, and the conference committee meetings next week will be crucial. The K-12 and higher-education budgets are tied up with a bunch of other matters: the federal stimulus aid to stabilize state budgets, state gambling policies/compacts with the Seminoles, the Senate's proposal to boost cigarette taxes by $1/pack, and a few other items. 

3) One additional item related to higher ed -- the differential tuition bill -- still looks like it's sailing through both chambers, if more slowly than I think some expected (one paragraph in this story). This will help stabilize funding for universities in the long term, but not in the next few years and not for community colleges.

The Senate budget bill gives universities the chance to get on a glide path rather than crash. If the final state budget is closer to the House than to the Senate proposal, I expect to see many stakeholders start to question not only a whole range of state university initiatives that looked entrepreneurial and feasible in better times but the core programs of universities. FSU President T.K. Weatherall has already identified several of those non-mission-critical pro grams, in part to make a point to legislators who often look after their districts' local interests: he said FSU would shutter its Panama City campus and would at least temporarily close the Ringling Museum in Sarasota. But Weatherall and UF President Bernie Machen also pointed to potential program closures -- anthropology at FSU and geology at UF. And what is worse, the announcements were done in a way that were sudden and without the type of consultation with department chairs that you would expect -- at least a few department chairs at FSU were completely blindsided.