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Now that Amendment 11 has passed, what happens next?
The governor will now appoint a Board of Governors that will oversee
Florida’s 11 public universities. This 17-member group will
comprise 14 gubernatorial appointees, as well as the president
of the Florida Student Association, the chair of the Faculty Senate
Advisory Council and the state Commissioner of Education. Board
of Governor members will serve staggered seven-year terms to ensure
continuity. The enactment date for Amendment 11 is Jan. 7, 2003.
How will this affect students
and employees of FIU?
In the near future, Amendment 11 will have virtually no effect
on the FIU community. Classes will continue as scheduled, the
payroll cycle will remain unchanged, benefits will continue to
be provided and our Faculty/Staff Scholarship program will remain
in place. Over the longer term, administrative changes may be
enacted that affect some of these areas, but none of those are
expected to have any impact on things as basic as, for instance,
the issuing of paychecks or employee insurance coverage.
How will this affect FIU in general?
It will take some time to ascertain the full impact of the Amendment.
The amendment is somewhat general in nature, and some of its fine
points will be up to the Legislature and the governor to implement
how they see fit. The FIU leadership will make the interests of
the University known in that process to ensure that the resulting
governance system works as well as possible for us. It is hoped
that the new Board of Governors, which will be responsible for
all of the state’s public universities, will be as forceful
in its advocacy for FIU as our Trustees have been for the past
16 months.
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