What’s a ‘Flagship University’ for anyway?

Writers and editors at the Miami Herald were clutching their pearls upon learning that Florida’s firebrand State Attorney James Uthmeier has a part-time gig as adjunct professor of law at the University of Florida.

For $100,000 a year.

To teach a couple of classes.

Among other things, the Herald reports that:

“The former DeSantis aide’s paycheck makes him the highest-paid adjunct professor at UF’s Levin College of Law in at least a quarter century…”

And:

“His salary is eight times higher than what the median law school adjunct earns, and comes as the DeSantis administration leans on Florida’s 40 public universities and colleges to justify their spending practices.”

“Somebody needs to justify the Florida attorney general getting $100,000 a year to teach,” Joseph DeMaria, a Miami attorney and longtime adjunct professor at the University of Miami School of Law, told The Herald. “It’s a hell of an eye opener.”

Justification? Oh please!

Listen, the Justification is as clear, though not as clean, as the water used to be in this here Free State Of Floriduh.

Justification: The Great DeSanitizer and his sock puppet legislature have turned state colleges and universities into wholly owned subsidiaries of the…well, let’s just call them the DeSantinistas.

And ever since, Job No. 1 at UF – Floriduh’s Flagship University – has been to hand out phony-baloney jobs at inflated salaries to politicians and political hangers-on who are looking to inflate both their worth and their egos.

In that regard, UF lost its academic virginity long ago.

Back when, at lightening speed, it put Joseph Lapado – The Great DeSanitizer’s Surgeon General, vaccine denouncer and leach-bleeding therapy advocate, – on faculty for an astounding $263,000,

Thereby pushing his minimum wage $250,000 Surgeon General paycheck well north of half a million big ones.

Yes, it’s true that many of his fellow UF Health faculty members have denounced Lapado as a charlatan who is dragging the university’s name the the mud.

But listen, how many other Flagship Universities can brag about having on faculty America’s foremost advocate of Miracle Nostrums and Magic Medicine?

And on the plus side, Tigert Hall’s Patronage Is Us policy has put UF high up on the Desantinistas’ Thanks A Bunch list.

(Although, come to think on it, that didn’t stop the powers that be from torpedoing UF’s last serious presidential candidate on the grounds that he was simply too “woke” for Floriduh.)

But never mind that.

Anyway, next year at this time, nobody’s even gonna remember Uthmeier’s sweetheart deal or who the hell Lapado was.

Not after UF appoints The Great DeSanitizer Chair of Political Science for, oh I dunno, maybe a cool million.

I mean, the guy’s gotta have some walking around money while he runs his second Please, America, Make Me President Even Though I’m About As Likable As An Earthworm Campaign.

In the meantime, UF’s hiring of Uthmeier really is something of a coup.

I mean, here’s a prof who can teach future Floriduh lawyers – some of whom will undoubably go on to become politicians, lobbyists and maybe even earthworms – such useful practical skills as:

How to selectively enforce Floriduh laws by unilaterally declaring the ones you don’t like unconstitutional.

How to launder and funnel state funds (he was elbow deep into the Hope Florida mess) into political action committees while dismissing doubts about the legality of it all as a nothing burger.

How to crush your political enemies – drag queens, Planned Parenthood, environmentalists, transgender athletes and the like – with dubious lawsuits that the taxpayers have to pay for anyway, so it’s no skin off his nose.

And my favorite:

How to divert attention from his continual self-righteous rits of fage…oops, I mean fits of rage…by declaring war on whatever sinister SPECTRE-like cabal is tampering with Florida’s weather.

Oh yeah, and how to milk your political status and connections to land a lucrative side gig at Floriduh’s Flagship University.

Hell, I’d sign up for those courses.

What’s a Flagship University for anyway?