What happens to town-gown relations when gown hates town?
Santa Fe College dedicated its new downtown GNV building a few years ago with much pomp and circumstances.
And of course, honored guests were seated in the VIP section right up front.
Meanwhile, GNV’s mayor, city manager, commissioners and other officials stood in a nearby street and watched all the P&C from afar.
GNV representatives were left out in the cold when SFC celebrated its brand spanking new downtown GNV building.
That was no unintentional oversight. The emcee for the dedication was Chuck Clemons, at the time head of the SFC Foundation.
That was his day job. The rest of the time Clemons was a state legislator. A suburban politician who represented GNV in name only.
Mostly he spent his time in Tallahassee working hard to make life even harder for blue GNV and its deep-blue residents.
As the capstone of his career, Chuckles engineered the state’s hijacking of the city-owned Regional Utilities. An act that has spurred seemingly endless litigation, and deprived GRU’s real owners – city residents – of millions of dollars that would otherwise go to support police, fire, parks and other vital city public services.
GRU is the only municipal owned utility in Florida controlled by the state and isolated from even the tiniest smidge of City input. In fact, its Great DeSanitizer-appointed governors have gone out of their way to marginalize any benefit the City might derive from the public utility it owns.
By his actions, Clemons clearly hates GNV. Which might not matter now that he’s out of office. Except that…
…the University of Florida has now made Clemons its Vice President for Government and Community Relations.
Yes, the one official in Tigert Hall most responsible for maintaining a good relationship with the host community…has a history of hostility toward the host community.
If you think UF’s recent decision to reduce its support for RTS – so that its students can get around town without the necessity of having a car – was a corrosion of long standing town-gown relations, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that Clemons will put aside his years-long animosity toward all things GNV and, as a UF representative, endeavor to deal with the city in an even-handed, professional and cooperative manner.
In which case he will surely deserve the honor of being named Grand Marshal of this year’s Flying Pigs parade.
The slippery slope of UF’s “institutional neutrality”
In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border”…Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class.
After he wrote (on X) in late March that Jews must be “abolished by any means necessary,” the university suspended him, barred him from campus and stepped up police patrols around the law school.
Let’s face it, in this here Free State of Floriduh it’s much more politically correct to be racist than anti-semitic. By state law, professors can be fired for uttering the phrase ”institutional racism.” But march on campus because you feel sorry for Palestinians and you risk expulsion.
Still, the Times’ account of UF law student Preston Damsky winning a coveted award – on the nomination of a Trump-appointed judge and guest UF law professor – for his paper championing white power…only to be suspended for social media posts calling for the ‘abolition’ of Jews, speaks volumes about how low UF ethical standards have deteriorated under the iron thumb of The Great DeSanitizer.
Racism: Yes. Anti-semitism: Not so much.
Is it any wonder that African-Americans make up less than 6 percent of UF’s student population?
FreeGNV 