Following pressure from its faculty union and a major donor, UF has closed its investigation into whether six College of Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty “interfered” with the curriculum development of the Hamilton Center, the university’s state-mandated civic center which has been fast-tracked to become a college.
David Richardson, the now-former College of Liberal Arts and Sciences dean, notified the six faculty March 4 and 5 they were subject to a “Management Directed Investigation” (MDI). The notice, provided by the union, said Richardson initiated the investigation to determine if the faculty violated university policies against interference with students’ ability to participate in academic programs or faculty members’ ability to teach and advise students in those programs.
Violation of said policy is punishable up to termination.
The United Faculty of Florida’s UF chapter filed a chapter grievance May 2, which asked for the identity of the original complainant and alleged the university violated the collective bargaining agreement by using “institutional censorship or discipline to circumvent academic freedom.”
The union previously issued two cease and desist orders with similar demands.
Afterward, the university ultimately notified those targeted in a May 24 email that it closed the investigation.
UF declared the chapter grievance moot July 1 and wrote the investigation won’t be used in future evaluations of the six professors, according to a document provided by the union. The document also said the MDI doesn’t name its original complainants because it was initiated by a “unit administrator.”
In the wake of the investigation’s closure, questions remain about who the original complainant was and whether it played a role in Richardson’s resignation from his deanship, which was announced May 7 in a UF news release.
Hamilton Center’s involvement
Nothing in the initial letters sent to those targeted in the investigation indicate it was related to the Hamilton Center. The center’s involvement was later confirmed by Brook Mercier, assistant vice president for human resources, in a March 10 email, sent to the union in response to its first cease and desist notice.
“The MDI was requested by Dean Richardson due to his concern that the action or inaction of individuals may have disrupted or interfered with the academic freedom of students to affiliate with the Hamilton Center, or may have interfered with the Hamilton Center's ability to establish or have curriculum approved or otherwise fulfill its mission,” Mercier wrote in the email, provided by the union.
Mercier’s email didn’t identify the original complainant and the union filed its second cease and desist notice March 25 asking the university to affirm its demands.
Meera Sitharam, president of United Faculty of Florida’s UF chapter, wrote in a July 3 email correspondence that faculty had known the complaints originated from the Hamilton Center and were “widely conjectured” to be related to the center’s push for curricular development.
“What many faculty were unclear about and the union wished to make clear was that the investigation, ordered by the CLAS dean, was an infringement of faculty's academic freedom and shared governance responsibilities, contributed at least in part to the Dean's resignation, and that the MDIs were not going forward (thanks in part to the union's efforts),” Sitharam wrote.
The Hamilton Center has been subject to controversy since its approval by the state’s Republican-majority legislature in 2022. The Council on Public University Reform, an obscure organization, hired Adrian Lukis, Gov. Ron Desantis’ former chief of staff, to lobby to advocate for the center’s creation.
The center received $27 million from this year’s state budget and hired 21 new faculty in May after receiving more than 1,200 applications.
“The Hamilton Center did not open or initiate any MDIs,” wrote Hamilton Center Director William Inboden in an email to The Alligator. “As members of UF’s faculty — and as part of the faculty union bargaining unit — we at the Hamilton Center are focused on working collaboratively with our faculty colleagues across all of the university’s colleges.”
Inboden, a longtime friend and political donor to UF President Ben Sasse, was announced as the center’s director in June 2023. Sasse has touted the center as “important part of UF’s interdisciplinary commitment to rigorous scholarship” and taught a course at the center, “The American Idea,” with Inboden in the Spring semester.
‘Egregious actions’
In a March 21 email to faculty, Sasse wrote he and Provost Scott Angle met with Richardson to “discuss some concerning issues in CLAS,” and Richardson “acknowledged some egregious actions by others in the college and is working to get to the bottom of it.”
UF Human Resources conducted its sole interview in the investigation March 12 with Sid Dobrin, English department chair and one of the six professors targeted in the investigation. Churchill Roberts, the union’s grievance committee chair who sat in on the interview, said “nothing rose to the level of egregious.”
“It was a fishing expedition,” Roberts said. “They really didn't know what they were looking for. They just hoped to find something, and it served basically as a way of intimidating faculty to get in line.”
UF told individual faculty March 18 the rest of the interviews were going to be postponed. UF Human Resources didn’t conduct any more interviews before the investigation’s closure.
Dobrin and four of the faculty targeted in the investigation declined to comment or didn’t respond to emails. One faculty responded to confirm they were targeted in the investigation but didn’t provide further comment.
On March 2, two days before faculty received the MDI notice, Richardson sent a draft letter to Dobrin asking to affirm the English department’s support for the Hamilton Center and two of its degree proposals: Great Books and Ideas; and Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law. An unspecified number of other CLAS department chairs received the draft letter, according to a union email.
Between March 5 and 7, Dobrin and four other department chairs sent back responses approving the majors, according to files from the Faculty Senate website.
Stan Kaye, a professor emeritus in the College of the Arts and volunteer on the union’s grievance team, said receiving the MDI “felt like the FBI knocking at your door.”
“I would describe this as a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ mentality,” he said. “To make a change in curriculum, it typically takes a year and that’s because there's a lot of review at every level and feedback that makes the curriculum stronger and better. We don’t rush through curriculum changes; that’s when you make mistakes.”
Pressure from multi-million dollar donor
Kaye said while he “operated in the trenches with the troops” as a union volunteer, there was “a major UF donor” concurrently working to stop the investigation.
The donor Kaye referred to, Ken McGurn, began looking into the MDI after Sasse’s March 21 email to faculty about “egregious actions” by CLAS faculty. McGurn and his wife, Linda McGurn, are UF alumni and have led efforts to redevelop downtown Gainesville. McGurn said he and his wife have donated over $5 million to the university.
“As a long time supporter of UF, I felt it important to find out what was happening,” McGurn said.
After reviewing publicly available information on the MDI and speaking with Richardson, people involved in the investigation and the faculty union, McGurn said the investigation was “serious business.”
“Everybody I talked to was scared,” McGurn said. “They feared retribution. They say their emails are being monitored. Several insisted on verbal communications out of concern an email would be used against them.”
According to McGurn’s conversations with people close to the investigation, they believe but aren’t sure that a graduate student studying history made the initial complaint after he asked a CLAS graduate coordinator for a Hamilton Center professor to chair their graduate committee.
Having a professor chair a committee outside their graduate student’s department is against university policy, but people outside the department can still serve on the committee. The student complained to an unknown party and that complaint was passed up to Richardson and Sasse, according to McGurn.
Richardson subsequently met with the graduate coordinator, who explained it was against university policy, which Richardson agreed with. Sasse then allegedly directed Richardson to investigate the issue and other unspecified activity.
Richardson initiated the MDI several days later. It remains unclear whether the student’s alleged complaint led to the initiation of the investigation.
The Alligator submitted a public records request for correspondence between the graduate student and CLAS graduate coordinators, but the request wasn’t fulfilled before publication.
McGurn said Richardson and Sasse ignored an email he sent to them several weeks after the MDI was launched asking them to clarify whether his findings were accurate. On May 6, McGurn sent a revised email to Richardson and Sasse that he shared with The Alligator.
“It appears that UF subjected these people to emotional trauma, questioned their professional and competence to the world, wrongly accused them of egregious actions, unduly delayed resolution extending their suffering and pressured them to, if not violate long-standing policies to amend them,” McGurn wrote. “I have no idea how to repair the damage to their reputations. These are good people. They did not deserve this. The university does not deserve this. Please make this go away.”
Richardson announced his resignation from his deanship a day after McGurn sent the email. In his letter of resignation, obtained by The Alligator from a public records request, Richardson didn’t explain why he stepped down.
He had one year left in his five-year contract as dean before he resigned, according to documents in his personnel file. He will remain as a professor and researcher for the college’s chemistry department, where he has taught for over 40 years, according to a UF news release.
Richardson didn’t respond to multiple calls and emails requesting comment.
Roberts, the union’s grievance committee chair, said the six faculty are due a “sincere apology” from UF.
“To this day, I couldn't tell you: Did Dean Richardson do this, did Provost Angle do this or did President Sasse order this? I absolutely do not know,” Roberts said.
University spokesperson Steve Orlando wrote in an email that Richardson made the decision to open the MDI, and it was not initiated by President Sasse or Provost Angle. He wrote that UF does not comment on personnel matters.
Sasse and Angle didn’t respond for comment.
“I think that Dean Richardson just got trapped, and that he was feeling an enormous pressure from the president and the provost... He is the one who initiated it, but it might not have been his suggestion,” Roberts said. “He was, in a sense, the sacrificial lamb and maybe that's a way of showing McGurn, ‘You see, we took care of this.’”
Contact Timothy Wang and Garrett Shanley at twang@alligator.org and gshanley@alligator.org. Follow them on X @timothyw_g and @garrettshanley.
Timothy Wang is a junior journalism student and the Fall 2024 Santa Fe College Reporter. He was the University Administration reporter for Summer 2024. His hobbies include gaming or reading manga.
Garrett Shanley is a fourth-year journalism major and the Summer 2024 university editor for The Alligator. Outside of the newsroom, you can find him watching Wong Kar-Wai movies and talking to his house plants.
