See below. They're brazen and not even subtle.
Flagler College has property worth over $120 million.
It pays a pittance -- only some $121,000 (and change) annually to the City of St. Augustine. It should be several millions.
No one else was given a chance at the old FEC buildings -- it was a sweetheart deal that took $25,000 off our tax rolls in the dark of night.
Whenever someone sets up a strawman (about those and them), ask yourself, "Cui bono?"
Who benefits?
Not the people of St. Augustine, who are subsidizing with taxes a radically right-wing school where propaganda reigns, where no professor has tenure, where there are no unions, where everyone fears right-wing Chancellor WILLIAM L. PROCTOR (Republican Lord of all he surveys and our right-wing Representative in the Florida Legislature. Racist statements are made in Flagler College classroom's without professorial rebuttal (sometimes by local law enforcement officers). Flagler College has very few African-American students (subject of a complaint to the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights).
So, Messrs. ABARE and PROCTOR, exactly what is it you claim to do for the City of St. Augustine? Any economic activity (even a nuclear bomb factory), has a multiplier effect. Saying Flagler College has a multiplier effect is as unilluminating as stating that a Superfund site has a multiplier effect.
Any college worthy of the name would be secure enough to grant faculty members tenure and to make Payments in Lieu of Taxex (PILOT) the way Yale does to New Haven.
Until that happens, Flagler College will be a Confederacy of Dunces, exploiting faculty and students and spouting uninformed information from professors afraid of their shadows -- like the one who spends a week on bias in the supposed liberal media (but none on biased in local Florida media).
Thanks to former Count Administrator and County Commissioner Nicholas Meiszner -- on WFOY-AM radio he was asked (and candidly answered) a question about students -- he said the ones he taught at Flagler College couldn't read or write well and had very little to say in their essays.
And that's the way it is when there's no academic and no faculty unions, a fact that many people learn for the first time upon reading this blog (as an increasing number of students and parents across Florida and the USA discover on Internet searches).
So, Flagler College Chancellor WILLIAM L. PROCATOR, tell us why you won't have unions or tenure. Put it on your website. Go ahead, make my day.
Speaking as an outsider, the contempt many locals have for Flagler College puzzles me. I'd venture to say that the founders of Harvard, Yale, etc. would seem pretty conservative by today's standards too. But colleges outlive their founder's dreams. I am sure Flagler will change with the times too. The college is in a competitive market, where it labors with a great disadvantage compared to comparable schools- a great shortage of land and academic facilities... They have had to make up for that by offering a competitive education at a lower price than anyone else. They have done a good job.
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