Strengthening the Roots of American Order
Also: Drama, Protests at the Board of Governors Meeting
Greetings from Tallahassee, where I am enjoying my first weekend at home in about a month. We are still unpacking boxes from our move, but making progress.
On June 12, I took an early flight to Grand Rapids, MI, met a couple of students at the airport, and drove a rental car to the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in Mecosta. Over the following three days, I led the intensive, onsite component of a topical seminar on Kirk’s Roots of American Order for Faulkner’s doctoral program in the humanities.
This was the third time I have taken graduate students to the Kirk Center. (The other times were in 2019 and 2023.) This particular seminar used Roots as an anchor text and most of the various primary sources Kirk discusses in the book as additional readings. I had already discussed selections from the Old Testament, Plutarch, Aristotle, Virgil, and Cicero in video conferences prior to our trip to Michigan. On site at the Kirk Center, we discussed the Nicene Creed, Augustine, the Magna Carta, John Calvin, John Bunyan, the English Bill of Rights, Alexis de Tocqueville, Jonathan Edwards, William Blackstone, Edmund Burke, Montesquieu, the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution.
We had a total of six 90-minute formal discussions as well as more informal conversations during the three dinners and two lunches we shared with the Kirk Center’s staff. I also met with each student in the seminar individually to discuss term paper ideas and suggest bibliographic resources housed at the Kirk Center.
It was a fulfilling but exhausting three days. As always, the Kirk Center’s staff—led by Kirk’s widow, Annette; his daughter, Cecilia Nelson; and her husband, Jeff Nelson—were fabulous hosts.
I had to leave Mecosta at 3:00 a.m. last Sunday to catch my flight from Grand Rapids and returned to Tallahassee in time to spend the afternoon of Father’s Day with my family. After one day back in the office, I had to pick up a rental car early on June 17 and drive to Boca Raton for my third in-person meeting of the Board of Governors (BOG). Counting brief stops for bathroom breaks and lunch, it was about a seven-hour trip. I was told after I arrived that the distance between Tallahassee and Boca Raton is great enough that I would have been eligible to fly like most of my colleagues did. Lesson learned.
I attended the usual dinner for the provosts the evening before the main meeting, and I was pleased to discover that I remembered the names and affiliations of more than half of the people around the long table. The filet mignon was excellent as well.
The BOG meeting the following day was a bit of a marathon. There were several major items on the agenda, including the following:
Presentation of every university’s annual accountability plan
Approval of an emergency regulation to allow universities to issue up to $22.5 million in payments to athletes in the wake of the NCAA class-action settlement
Approval of a resolution to allow universities to raise tuition on out-of-state students by up to 15% by Fall 2026
Discussion of an audit of FAMU that included several major findings
Confirmation of two presidents (FIU and FAMU) and one interim president (UWF)
Discussion on the tuition resolution nearly got derailed when one of the governors, on the basis of data the other governors had not seen, attempted to add amendments that would have constrained some of the schools in unexpected ways. The other governors seemed opposed to the idea, and in the end the chair squelched them.
The most drama occurred at the outset of the full BOG meeting in the mid-afternoon; the preceding time had been taken up with committee meetings. During the public comment period, fifteen people (the maximum allowed) came to the microphone. Almost all of them (apparently) had been bussed in from FAMU to speak against the confirmation of Marva Johnson as president. Afterwards, when the vice-chair of FAMU’s Board of Trustees was presenting Johnson for confirmation, these same people began heckling from the gallery until the chair restored order. Once the BOG voted to confirm Johnson, the protestors began chanting and marched out of the room. They continued to chant outside the building for a while, but not loudly enough to disrupt the ongoing meeting.
The meeting had started at 8:00 a.m., and we went until almost 5:00 p.m., more than an hour later than our scheduled end time. Everyone was ready to leave by that time, myself included. Most of my colleagues had planned to stay another night in Boca and return to Tallahassee the following day, but I got on the road immediately (in rush-hour traffic). The silver lining of my having to make the trip by car was that I was able to stop in St. Cloud to see my old friend Tom Woods (of podcasting and Liberty Classroom fame) and have dinner with him. Although we do webinars together a few times a year, I don’t think we had seen each other face to face since his wedding a few years ago.
I only stopped to visit for about an hour, but the late meeting and the traffic had the GPS telling me I would not get home until about 1:30 a.m. So I caved and pulled over in Gainesville to crash at a roadside hotel about 11:30 to grab a few hours sleep. I was up at 5:00 a.m. Thursday to finish the drive, and I managed to return the rental car on schedule at 8:00 a.m.
I have spent about half of the past two weeks on the road and failed to get a post up last weekend. I have also misplaced the Hirsch book here at the house, but I am sure it will turn up very soon. I expect to be back on track after this update. I hope everyone has a good week.