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The University of Florida will now allow professors who recently asked to serve as expert witnesses in litigation against the state to do so, President W. Kent Fuchs said on Friday.
The reversal followed a week of turmoil on the campus spurred by administrators’ decisions to bar faculty members in political science and medicine from testifying against state agencies in litigation this year.
Fuchs wrote in a letter on Friday that he had asked the campus‘s conflict-of-interest office to reverse those decisions, “regardless of personal compensation, assuming the activity is on their own time without using university resources.”
A task force will review the conflict-of-interest policy — and how the university should respond if professors seek to testify against the state — and issue recommendations by November 29, the president wrote.
Fuchs had previously said political-science faculty members would be able to participate in litigation if they were not compensated for the activity. But a pediatrician at the university, Jeffrey L. Goldhagen, told The Chronicle that he would not have been paid for his testimony — advocating for mask mandates in schools — and his requests had been rejected nonetheless.
Goldhagen said that changing the outcome in his case would not erase other university steps that he characterized as politically motivated, including Florida’s refusal to enact a campus mask mandate and its hiring of Joseph Ladapo, a skeptic of mask and vaccination mandates, as a professor of medicine.
“This is not about a few faculty members,” Goldhagen said. “This is fundamentally about academic freedom, First Amendment rights, the sanctity of institutions in the state, and the sanctity of institutions in the country. If in fact that sanctity of academic institutions is violated, we’re in the process of dismantling a critical institution that has always been a bulwark of democracy.”
Fuchs’s announcement followed fierce criticism of his administration from entities on and off campus. Florida’s accreditor said on Monday it would investigate the decision about the faculty testimony. The faculty union urged alumni to stop donating and peer campuses to downgrade their assessment of the university on surveys circulated by U.S. News & World Report for its college rankings.
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