USF joins presidential hunt — incumbent Rhea Law to step down
University of South Florida. Credit: USF Facebook page
The University of South Florida will soon launch a search to replace President Rhea Law, the school announced Monday.
Law was named the school's president in March 2022 after serving as interim president for seven months. She will step down after the university's trustees find a successor in a national search, expected to launch in the coming days, the school announced in a news release Monday.
An attorney by trade, Law previously served as chair of the university's board of trustees.
'When I was first asked to serve as the University of South Florida's interim president in 2021, I thought it would only be for a few months to provide stability during a time of transition,' Law said in opening her letter to the university community.
'I pledged to create a smooth glidepath for a new president to be well positioned for success. What I never could have imagined is where we would be three-and-a-half years later and all that we would accomplish. Together.'
The university applauded Law's involvement in launching the Office of University Community Partnerships and opening a new honors college building, a new student wellness center, and other housing and athletic projects during her time in office.
'One of the hallmarks of great leadership is knowing when it is time to create space for new ideas and fresh perspectives to build on the momentum we have created,' Law said. 'I am confident in the path ahead and inspired by the potential of what is to come.'
USF will join the University of Florida, Florida A&M University, and Florida International University as state universities searching or recently concluding searches for a president.
Florida Atlantic University named former GOP lawmaker Adam Hasner its president last week after two years without a permanent president. Florida International University started under new leadership Monday — former Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez stepped down from that job to start as the institution's interim president and is expected to be named permanent president following a formal search.
Presidential searches typically take months and involve a search committee and nationwide candidate call, culminating in a shortlist of candidates (in UF's most recent search the list was as short as one candidate) who must be vetted by the State University System's Board of Governors.
'By every measure Rhea has been exceptional in leading our university to unprecedented levels of success,' trustees Chair Will Weatherford said in a news release. 'For more than four decades she has stayed connected to USF and we would not be where we are today without her.'
Law's husband, Wayne Williams, died in September.
'After over 40 years as an employee, student, board member and chair, donor, volunteer and now president, I am filled with gratitude and pride for all we have achieved,' Law said. 'Serving this community as USF's eighth president has been the honor of my lifetime, and I look forward to cheering on the continued success of this incredible university.'
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Trump Tries to Humiliate GOP Senator by Claiming He ‘Snuck' Into White House Picnic
Donald Trump appeared to make a dig at Sen. Rand Paul by suggesting he 'snuck' into Thursday night's congressional picnic—despite having been invited after a war of words with the White House. Addressing the bipartisan crowd on the White House lawn, Trump seemed to allude to a recent dust-up between himself and Paul, who has vocally opposed the GOP's budget and the $45 million military parade for the Army's 250th anniversary on Saturday, which is also Trump's 79th birthday. 'We have so many of our congressmen, and we have some senators in here, I have to tell you,' Trump said from the balcony. 'They snuck in, but that's OK. They wanted to be here.' On Wednesday, Paul said Trump had revoked his family's invitation, and accused the president of being 'incredibly petty.' 'The level of immaturity is beyond words,' Paul said at the time, adding that the move had caused him to 'lose a lot of respect I once had for Donald Trump.' Yet the following morning, Trump took to Truth Social to say that 'of course' Paul and his family could come. 'He's the toughest vote in the history of the U.S. Senate, but why wouldn't he be?' Trump wrote. 'Besides, it gives me more time to get his Vote on the Great, Big, Beautiful Bill, one of the greatest and most important pieces of legislation ever put before our Senators & Congressmen/women. It will help to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! I look forward to seeing Rand. The Party will be Great!' Trump's aside Thursday may also have had to do with Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who has long been a thorn in Trump's side from the right, most recently with his vote against the GOP's budget which passed the House by a single vote. On Thursday morning, Massie claimed the White House had withheld his invitation. 'Incredibly petty & shortsighted of Trump's staff to exclude Republicans from the annual White House picnic while inviting Pelosi and every Democrat,' Massie posted on X, a few hours before Trump cleared the air regarding Paul. 'I always give my few tickets to my staff and their kids, but apparently this year my tickets have been withheld as well. Low class.' It wasn't immediately clear whether Massie ultimately attended the picnic. The White House did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast, nor did Massie's office.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
The Assault on Good-for-You TV: C-SPAN and PBS Teeter as Trump Attacks
When money flowed more freely in television, public-service programming was seen as a means of giving back. From educational TV and supporting public broadcasting to cable operators providing C-SPAN, spaces existed where ratings weren't the yardstick — instead, this was TV intended to be good for you. On Thursday, Congress took a major step toward undermining all of that, as the House narrowly approved a rescission bill that would claw back $1.1 billion in funding to the Corp. for Public Broadcasting, which helps support PBS stations, in addition to cuts to other programs. The bill passed by the slimmest of margins, 214 to 212, with a few GOP legislators switching their votes to get it through. The funding was part of a larger $9.4 billion allocation that lawmakers had already approved for foreign aid and public broadcasting. Senate still has to weigh in on the matter, and has five weeks to decide. With PBS and NPR besieged by the political right, with C-SPAN's funding via cable and satellite fees strafed by cord cutting, higher-minded alternatives have been hit by hard times. The whole point of PBS and National Public Radio was that they would be unfettered by commercial demands, allowing them to offer programming — from children's programming like Mr. Rogers and 'Sesame Street,' devoid of toy commercials, to lower-key news, documentaries and public affairs — that didn't have to justify its existence on a balance sheet. Ditto for C-SPAN, which cable operators carried for a small licensing fee simply because of the perceived value in allowing subscribers to see what their elected representatives were doing and saying, unfiltered and unedited. Public broadcasting has found itself swept up in the Trump administration's war against the media, with the perception that any unflattering reporting about the president — whether from PBS' 'NewsHour' or 'Frontline' or NPR's 'All Things Considered' — reveals 'invidious' bias and a liberal agenda, to use FCC chairman Brendan Carr's favorite word. Conservatives have long argued that public broadcasting represents an unnecessary expense given the abundance of choices available to most consumers. But in its latest incarnation, 'Defund PBS' overtly translates into being less about fiscal responsibility than leveraging the government's underwriting role to silence otherwise-independent media voices by labeling them progressive propaganda. On the left, the response was unambiguous. The Writers Guild of America East (WGAE) condemned the House vote as 'a radical right-wing ideology that aims to destroy a non-partisan public service despite all evidence of its wide benefits.' The group quickly turned its attention to pleading with the Senate, which holds a GOP majority but has exhibited a bit more restraint than the House in prosecuting the MAGA agenda. The CEO of PBS, Paula Kerger, remained silent in the wake of Thursday's vote, but she has been lobbying intensively to save PBS, warning that Trump's push to defund public broadcasters would spell the end for a number of local stations, and the service they provide to their communities. In a recent interview with Katie Couric, Kerger contemplated the end of public funding for the network, which only relies on the government for a portion of its funds. 'I think we'll figure out a way, through digital, to make sure there is some PBS content,' she said. 'But there won't be anyone in the community creating local content. There won't be a place for people to come together.' Kerger was referring to the fact that the campaign against PBS and NPR disproportionally harms smaller and more rural communities that voted for Trump (even if many listeners and viewers didn't), which lack the same menu of local-media options as major markets. In a sense, Sesame Workshop — the entity behind 'Sesame Street' — has provided an unlikely poster child for the financial pressures on public TV, having undergone layoffs before losing its streaming deal with Warner Bros. Discovery's Max. Netflix has since stepped into the breach, joining with PBS Kids in providing access Elmo and his pals. As for C-SPAN, its challenges stem primarily from evolving technology, which has dramatically undercut the financial model upon which the network was founded in 1979. With viewers shifting to streaming and dropping cable and satellite subscriptions, the number of homes receiving C-SPAN has sharply dropped to a little over 50 million, meaning the nonprofit enterprise — which costs operators just $7.25 a month, a fraction of what they pay for channels like Fox News and CNN — is running at a significant deficit. One proposed solution would be for entities with streaming subscribers, like YouTube or Hulu's live-TV package, to carry C-SPAN. Indeed, YouTube's 8 to 10 million subscribers alone would provide enough income to offset most of the shortfall in its roughly $60 million annual operating expenses. Thus far, however, those companies have balked, prompting a rare bipartisan push in the Senate on C-SPAN's behalf, with Republican Chuck Grassley and Democrat Amy Klobuchar among those joining in a resolution calling upon streaming services to carry the network. 'For tens of millions of Americans who have cut the cord and get their content from streaming services, they should not be cut off from the civic content made available by C-SPAN,' the senators stated. It's a welcome development for C-SPAN CEO Sam Feist, who joined the network a little over a year ago from CNN. Feist noted that 'cord cutting' doesn't accurately characterize what's transpired — since old cable subscribers have generally moved to new delivery systems — meaning the case for carrying the network remains as simple as the public-service ideal that inspired its launch. 'We're the only network that provides what we provide, which is this unfiltered view of American government,' Feist told TheWrap, adding in regard to the streamers, 'It is good for the country for their customers to have access to our product.' The campaign regarding C-SPAN carriage has seemingly gained some momentum over the last year, with former Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler and the Washington Post's Karen Tumulty among those joining the aforementioned senators in taking up the cause. Wheeler called YouTube's decision not to carry C-SPAN 'baffling and anti-democratic,' writing in The Hill that the company is depriving viewers of 'an unfiltered window into the goings-on in Congress, the White House and other parts of the government.' As Sen. Ron Wyden told Tumulty, carrying the network would only cost YouTube about $6 million a year — 'crumbs,' he suggested, for a streamer that rakes in billions in ad revenue. YouTube has stated that its subscribers 'have not shown sufficient interest in adding C-SPAN to the YouTube TV lineup to justify the increased cost' to their monthly bills, although as Wyden noted, that would amount to a relative pittance of 87 cents a year per household. The two situations aren't completely analogous, especially with the fate of PBS and NPR having become embroiled in politics, as opposed to corporate stubbornness. More fundamentally, though, both situations speak to the question of civic responsibility, and whether the government and private interests acknowledge such obligations. Because even if C-SPAN and PBS reach smaller audiences in a fragmented world, certain things are worth keeping around not because everybody watches them, but rather for what they offer, symbolically as well as tangibly, thanks to the staid sobriety they provide by being available to the people that do. The post The Assault on Good-for-You TV: C-SPAN and PBS Teeter as Trump Attacks appeared first on TheWrap.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Senate GOP Strips Provision From Tax Bill That Would Let Trump Rule As A King
WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans have quietly removed a provision from the House GOP's massive tax-and-spending bill that would have allowed President Donald Trump to circumvent the courts and essentially serve as a king. Late Thursday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released the panel's proposed text for the GOP's so-called Big Beautiful Bill. The House passed its version of the bill last month, so now the Senate is making its changes. Each committee is tasked with putting together language for its relevant section in the legislation. The text that Grassley released for the bill's judicial section doesn't include this jarring, one-sentence provision that House Republicans buried in their 1,116-page bill: Translated, this provision would restrict the ability of any court, including the Supreme Court, to enforce compliance with its orders by holding people in contempt. Contempt citations are an essential tool for the courts; they allow judges to threaten fines, sanctions or even jail if people disobey their orders. The provision in the House GOP's bill also would apply retroactively to all temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions, leaving courts with no real way of enforcing orders they've already handed those orders? The 184 court rulings that have temporarily halted unlawful actions taken by the Trump administration. And Trump has already been ignoring orders from judges to stop deporting migrants without giving them due process. Every House Republican voted for this provision when they voted to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Even if they didn't know it. Senate Democrats had been pressuring their GOP colleagues to take this language out of the bill when they unveiled their version of it. Not only does this provision appear to violate the constitutional separation of powers, it also violates Senate rules. Republicans are relying on a fast-track legislative process known as budget reconciliation to move the bill, which means everything in it must be related to budget matters. Restricting judges' abilities to hand down contempt orders has nothing to do with budgets. Senate Republicans almost certainly knew this when they stripped it from the bill. Leaving it in could lead to problems for passing the broader bill, which is Trump's signature domestic policy legislation ― a package that slashes nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and food assistance programs to pay for a massive tax cut for rich people. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told HuffPost last week that he knew some GOP senators were 'very uncomfortable' with this contempt provision, and said Democrats planned to use every procedural tool possible to remove it. 'This is a naked attempt to shield members of the Trump administration from court orders,' Schumer said.
