In this episode, Jamie sits down with Ray Rodrigues, Chancellor of the State University System of Florida, to talk about how Florida built and sustained the nation’s top-ranked higher education system. Drawing from his career at General Electric, 17 years at Florida Gulf Coast University, and more than a decade in the Florida Legislature, Ray explains what it takes to make higher education both affordable and high performing. They explore how Florida froze tuition for a decade, the origins of performance-based funding, the debates over intellectual diversity and DEI, and how universities are preparing for a future shaped by AI and new expectations from students and families. Whether you are an educator, policymaker, or simply someone invested in the future of higher education, this conversation will change how you think about the role of public universities.
Florida has been ranked the #1 state university system in America for nine years running. But what does it really take to build and keep an education system at the top?
In this episode, Jamie sits down with Ray Rodrigues, Chancellor of the State University System of Florida, to talk about how Florida became the nation’s model for affordable, high-quality higher education and what it will take to stay there.
Ray brings a uniquely powerful perspective. He started his career at General Electric, spent 17 years at Florida Gulf Coast University, served more than a decade in the Florida Legislature, including as House Majority Leader and State Senator, and now leads a system of 12 institutions and more than 430,000 students. His path through the corporate, academic, and political worlds gives him a rare vantage point on what it takes to reform higher education.
Together, they dig into:
If you are an educator, policymaker, parent, or just someone who wants to understand where the future of higher education is headed and what it will take to keep it strong, this is the episode you cannot afford to miss.
About Ray Rodrigues
Ray Rodrigues is Chancellor of the State University System of Florida.
In this role, Chancellor Rodrigues is the primary liaison between the Board of Governors, the State Legislature, the Executive Branch, Departments, and Agencies throughout the State of Florida. The State University System has been ranked #1 in the nation by U.S. News and World Report since 2017. Additionally, the Chancellor is CEO of the Board of Governors and provides oversight, guidance, and administration by implementing policies and regulations adopted by the Board, which impacts 12 institutions and more than 430,000 students annually.
Chancellor Rodrigues started his career at a corporate component of General Electric, where he managed their U.S. Import Compliance team. Additionally, Ray Rodrigues then worked for 17 years at Florida Gulf Coast University, where he held positions of Director of Interagency Partnerships, Director of Community Relations, and Business Manager for the College of Arts and Sciences.
In addition to his professional career, Chancellor Rodrigues has an extensive career in public service, where he served as the Florida State Senator for District 27 and four terms in the Florida House of Representatives. During his time in the Legislature, Rodrigues served as the Chair of the Senate Reapportionment Committee, Chair of the Senate Government Operations Committee, Chair of the House Health and Human Services Committee, and the House Majority Leader. His ability to listen, build consensus, and be an agent of change led to his unanimous appointment as Chancellor.
Chancellor Rodrigues earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Berry College in Rome, Georgia, and in 2017 earned his Master in Public Administration (MPA ) from Florida Gulf Coast University. Ray is an avid reader, statesman, and storyteller. Ray, his wife Ruth, and son Rhett call Tallahassee home.
Guest Quote
“ The American confidence in higher education has declined significantly. The number one reason why it has declined is the American public believes higher education is too focused on having faculty members push their own political agenda, and that indoctrination is harming the value of the degrees. We're armed to show that that's not what's happening in Florida.”
Time Stamps
00:00 Episode Start
01:45 Chancellor Ray Rodrigues's Background
04:33 Challenges in Higher Education Funding
07:36 Legislative Experience and Policy Making
17:37 Role as Majority Leader
20:41 Transition to Chancellor
22:58 Navigating the Higher Education Ecosystem
41:05 Intellectual Diversity and Free Speech on Campus
45:16 Legislation for Intellectual Freedom
01:02:24 DEI in Higher Education
01:05:54 Legislation to Eliminate DEI Programs
01:13:24 Performance-Based Funding in Florida
01:21:52 Parental Advice Against College
01:22:51 Florida's Unique Higher Education System
01:24:29 Diversity and Success in Florida's Education
01:27:50 Innovations in Higher Education
01:35:18 Engaging with the Public Sector
01:38:36 The Roundup
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[00:00:00] Jamie Grant: When academic environments indoctrinate or teach to the test, any version of education that is not rooted in critical thinking, the biggest disservice is to the student.
[00:00:13] Ray Rodrigues: The American confidence in higher education has declined significantly. The number one reason why it has declined is the American public believes higher education is too focused on having faculty members push their own political agenda.
We are armed to show that that's not what's happening in Florida.
[00:00:42] Jamie Grant: All right, y'all welcome back to another episode of The Ever to Conquer. Uh, as always, really excited to have the guest we have with us here today. Uh, we're gonna dive in and take a look, uh, behind the scenes a little bit in the higher education space with the chancellor of the number one ranked. I think back to back to back to back now, I'm not sure he'll correct me, uh, but the number one state university system in America, how Florida built it, um, and what it looks like moving forward.
Chancellor Ray Rodrigues, uh, man, I'm super excited about this conversation.
[00:01:21] Ray Rodrigues: Well, thank you for having me all, and Jamie, it's great to be here. And for the record, uh, Florida has been the number one state for higher education. For nine consecutive years. Woo. According to us News and World Report. Woo.
[00:01:34] Jamie Grant: I was way, I was like half right.
You were, you were close. It has been the four time champ. It's also been the nine time champ. That's, you can't get the nine without four. Uh, hey, I would love for you, Ray, uh, you know, you and I met in 20 10, 11, 12, somewhere around that timeframe. Um, I wanna make sure, because really the, the kind of the goal of what we're doing with this podcast is trying to bring the entire ecosystem together, largely around public sector innovation from a technology perspective.
You and I have had a lot of conversations around how policy is so restrictive or accelerating to those kind of innovations and policy itself can be a big driver of innovation. But can you kind of start with your story a little bit, because I think you have a really interesting story from pre legislative days, like what you were doing on the front lines of the industry, then your time in the legislature, and obviously now being chancellor, but kind of introduce yourself, if you will, to the, introduce yourself to these folks.
Sure. Uh, of how you got here.
[00:02:43] Ray Rodrigues: When you and I met, it would've been 2011, you were in your freshman term and I was a candidate. My first one, my first freshman term. That's right. Your first freshman term. And I was a candidate running, uh, for the State House down in Lee County. And at the time I worked at Florida Gulf Coast University, which is a regional public university located in Fort Myers.
I had started work there in 2006, so I'd been there for five years when we met and the job I held, and I'd had the entire time up to that point at FGCU was as a budget manager in the College of Arts and Sciences. So FGCU is a member of the state university system of Florida. It's a public university. At the time, it was, if not the newest, one of the newest public universities in the country.
Polytech had not come online yet. There was a public university in California that if they had not come online, they were about to. So somewhere in that period, FGCU was still either the newest or was just coming off being the newest. And as a result of that, during that, uh, five year period that I'd been the budget manager at Florida Gulf Coast University.
We had been the fastest growing public university in the country. And the College of Arts and Sciences, where I served as the budget manager, was the largest college. We got a hundred percent of the students for their general education curriculum. We kept 66% of them in a major in our college. So at the time we met FGC, U'S student population was probably 10 or 11,000.
Two thirds of those students were majors in the college where I served as the budget manager. And so it was an interesting time because at the, in 2011, we had a couple of things going on in Florida. Number one, as you remember, Florida was ground zero for the great recession. We were the first state in, we were the last state out, and that really impacted higher education.
So as a budget manager during a five year run, uh, which was between 2007 and 2012, we saw the appropriations in Florida for higher education go down, uh, 39% over that five year period. That was the second steepest reduction in the country. And during that five year period, uh, for three of those years, the state of Florida had increased tuition.
And during that five year period, our tuition had gone up 86%, which was the highest tuition increase in that period in the entire country. And so I witnessed that as the budget manager at the College of Arts and Sciences. The other thing that Florida was doing at that point was our appropriations for higher education followed a traditional model, which in public, uh, higher education had been the same model forever, which is every university public university would lock in their enrollment.
At the conclusion of the second week of the semester, those numbers would then get reported up to the, uh, Tallahassee to the state capitol. And the following year if the legislature had funds to allocate or appropriate to higher ed, it was based on a formula driven by the population of students that the university reported.
And so that was the, uh, professional environment for higher education. That was the job I held when I made the decision to run for the state legislature. And you and I met, uh, while I was out on the campaign trail meeting members, uh, of the state legislature.
[00:06:36] Jamie Grant: Man, there's, there's a lot there, Ray, that I think is really good.
But not to skip too far ahead, um, I, I don't know that I've ever thought in our conversations about you having been a budget manager through the great recession. Um, 'cause I, I, if I'm not mistaken, my first two legislative sessions were the only two budgets I voted on in a decade that were decreases in states.
That's correct. And those were not fun, right? You run for office and no matter how conservative you are, and no matter how much you think government should shrink, like when you're cutting fundamental health care, education, mental, I mean, we were cutting to the bone on everything. And I never thought about, I always thought your success in the legislature made sense because of the pragmatic experience you had on the front lines.
But it's also kind of that unique time. With FGCU, being new, the great recession, the part of the state you're in. There's just a lot of things there. Talk a little bit about your legislative experience. So you get elected to the house in 2012, uh, successful campaign and you do some time in the house. Give, give people a little flavor of of Ray Rodd in the house and what that looked like.
[00:07:49] Ray Rodrigues: My freshman term, the committee that I was on was that I had the biggest impact was higher education and workforce probably slotted me there because of my professional experience. And then during the second session, I was the vice chair of that committee. The reason that was important was the 13 and 14 sessions, which were my freshman term, were the two sessions where we rolled out performance based funding and preeminent funding.
And then I served on, uh, general government appropriation, sub subcommittee. And sophomore term I was the vice chair of Ways and Means, which was an interesting committee. 'cause the chair of that committee was Matt Gates. And
[00:08:37] Jamie Grant: what does Ways and Means mean? And that is first question for folks who don't know what ways and means is
[00:08:43] Ray Rodrigues: that is the committee that decides, uh, the ways and the means of government funding.
So they have control of the tax current and more importantly, when the Republicans work control. Uh, that committee has the control of putting together the tax cut package, which is what we did during both of the sessions of that term. So that was, uh, my leadership responsibility was serving as vice chair.
I was blessed to be with a chair who really gave me a significant amount of responsibility so that I would be prepared to lead the committee if necessary in his absence and be prepared for the rest of my legislative career. If we,
[00:09:25] Jamie Grant: if, if I interrupted you for a second, 'cause there was a second question, but you also said something about, uh, the interesting experience of having Matt Gaetz as a chairman and when I come across people around the country and they know that we were like, I, you get all those Florida man questions and they can go a lot of different directions, but Matt Gaetz is one of those that people are like, you served with Matt, what's that like?
Um, and that could go a lot of different ways. Fascinating character, but I think he was the best chairman I ever dealt with when it came to delegating responsibility on a committee. I'm curious what your take as a vice chair with him was like, because there's obviously the very public persona of Matt Gaetz and then there's what it's like to be a vice chair when he's the chairman.
[00:10:11] Ray Rodrigues: I would absolutely agree with that assessment of, of Matt. He took full advantage of the talent that was on his committee. In fact, his very first committee. He had contacted everyone before the committee meeting and said, think about the areas of the tax code that you would like us to look at and submit that.
In our first committee, we went through everyone's mission in terms of was it in jurisdiction, out of jurisdiction? Were there opportunities there or not? And it didn't matter if you were a Republican or a Democrat. Everyone on the committee, he solicited their input. And over the course of the two sessions of the term, he worked very closely with his team, which included the vice chair and the ranking member.
Also now a congressman Jared Moskowitz, and I would say more so than many members in the majority party, he worked with the Democrats. Now, part of that is, uh, representative Moskowitz was an easy person to work with because he was very pragmatic in terms of wanting to make sure, uh, that he was not wasting his time in Tallahassee and that he was accomplishing something, uh, particularly for the district.
So he was very, uh, eager to be a contributor rather than someone that sat in the back and just threw bombs. And Matt took full advantage of his committee delegated to us. The other thing I would say that I think made Matt unique among the committee chairs that I observed during the decade I was in Tallahassee.
Is Matt never worked with a script. Uh, and most of the committees, the staff would prepare a script for the chair and have it there on the desk. Uh, I think they did that in the first committee. And Matt goes, no, I, I don't need this. And literally, you know, threw it away. And the remaining two years, there was never a script when he was running his committees.
And that made him unique among, uh, many of our committee chairs in the Florida house. And I would probably venture to guess the Florida Senate at that time.
[00:12:24] Jamie Grant: Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, anytime somebody rises to the national profile, they have to kind of play in that ecosystem a bit. Uh, and, and you kind of understand that for what it is, I think.
But, you know, I always found, and, and you and I have talked about this a bit, like getting policy reforms across the aisle in a bipartisan fashion isn't hard if both people are committed to the same outcome. My, my deal as a chairman was always to tell, you know, it could be a super progressive liberal member bringing me a bill.
I'd never vote for our agenda. But if we could level set on the problem they were trying to solve, as long as they were good with me and my staff rewriting it with principles that I was good with, we could get there. And I think Jared is, is definitely in that. I don't, I don't know that I could name one more so than Jared.
I also think, uh, districts kind of follow a flavor, and you and I have talked about this, but Kristen was his successor, if I have that right. District to district. And she was another one that was great to deal with that, you know, there were a lot of things we didn't agree on, but, but did a lot of work together.
Um, I wanna touch specifically for a second before we get to the chancellor part of your story, because you mentioned that you got placed in higher ed likely because of your experience in the real world. And I always found it interesting with speakers where some speakers wanted that and then other speakers didn't want the threat of that.
Right? Like, I don't know if I want Ray Rod there 'cause he knows too much. Um, but you are somebody who took, I mean, like you tackled a lot of big reforms and there was absolutely an education theme to some of that. But then I think about, um, you know, when the chamber needed somebody to, to deal with the medical marijuana amendment, you're the guy all of a sudden carrying that football.
And I think from the outside on the policy side, people don't understand enough that you don't necessarily have to have subject matter deep expertise in something to make good policy. But there are some other requirements and I think you have all of these requirements. Why would you say, or how would you say your approach to policymaking and leadership and just the, the, the process situated you to navigate.
Really effectively such a difficult issue that to my knowledge, I don't think you had any industry experience with historically.
[00:14:49] Ray Rodrigues: No, that's absolutely correct. I, I'd had zero experience on that subject matter. I think what the speaker valued in terms of assigning me that responsibility was a belief that I would meet with everyone who had an interest in it.
And I did, uh, my calendar of that session was dominated by people that wanted to talk about that bill. But go, you can go back and look, everyone who asked for a meeting to discuss that Bill got a meeting with me and I listened to them. And many of the thoughts were incorporated. Not all of them, but many of them were.
And I think that was, you know, the starting point was a belief that I would bring some legitimacy to it. One, because I didn't come in with a known agenda in terms of having worked on the issue or opposed the issue in the past. I just wasn't involved with that particular issue at all. And two, I built a, a reputation of being someone who listens to everyone, seeks to build consensus, and then works towards a, a policy end, uh, that upholds our principles, uh, but does so in a way that is inclusive of the process.
And so if I had to, to guess, that's, that's why I got assigned. The implementation of that constitutional amendment,
[00:16:12] Jamie Grant: which in fairness wasn't the question I asked, but I love it. I think the ques, I didn't ask why you got assigned it. I asked why you think you were effective and you answered both to be clear.
I think Ray, you'd, you, um, if somebody, if somebody put a gun to my head and said, name somebody that best per personifies kind, but not weak. I think that's Ray Rodriguez. Well, that's how priest like, thank you. Like you're, you're really good at listening everything you just described. But I think the back half of it that maybe the public doesn't see is you're not a pushover either.
Like in, so a lot of our peers would take infinite meetings and really it became who's the last one to lobby them or who was the most persuasive or who was the, uh, and I think, I think I've never thought about this until you were answering that, but I was like, man, if there's anybody that I would aspire to model kindness and not weakness after it's you.
I think that's also a part of the reason I won't speculate for, uh, the speaker. But then you become majority leader and so what does that mean? And uh, how did you earn the responsibility to have to lasso the bumblebees on, on the house floor and the majority caucus, but, but what does that look like? And then we'll kind of transition to the chancellor's side, but I, because I think all this stuff builds on why you're the perfect guy to lead the institution and why you've hit the ground running so fast in that executive role.
[00:17:37] Ray Rodrigues: The role of majority leader is to manage the floor in terms of ensuring that the speaker's agenda moves. And that means the bills that are designated as priorities by the speaker and the leadership team are being agenda in the right committees, that they're being heard in the committees and that they're making their way through the process.
And that requires, uh, many meetings with members to address concerns that they may have, answer questions that they have. A lot of those are questions that are brought to them by their constituents, making sure that they've got the data to go back to their constituents, uh, on why a particular policy proposal is indeed good policy and is the right thing to do for the state of Florida.
And then counting votes. Because what you do not want to do as a majority leader is have a bill come up that's a leadership priority, and then watch that bill fail either in committee or on the floor. And that's the nightmare scenario. Uh, but shockingly, uh, it does happen. We managed to get through my two sessions without it happening, but that included a couple of votes literally passed by a one vote margin, but we counted the votes correctly and, and we got loose three.
And the other part to that is when people would ask me, are you, how do you think you're doing as majority Leader, do you think you're being successful or not? I would say, well, the job can be graded on on two scales. The first is, have we passed the speaker's priorities? That's very evident because, uh, the speaker that I was the majority leader under was very transparent about what his agenda was in the very, from beginning day one of session all the way through.
And so he didn't play hide the ball, he was very direct, this is what I want to get done. And we either produced that or we did not. And, uh, I'm blessed to say that we did produce the votes that were necessary, uh, working our way through the process to pass that agenda. The second measurement of I think a successful majority leader is at the end of the day, do you retain the majority?
Because if the elections come, uh, and you do not retain the majority, then that means as a majority leader, you have failed to give your members the information that they needed to take home to their constituents and communicate the why behind the votes they were taking. And you don't get that result until after you finished the work As Majority Leader.
Uh, we were once again blessed in that we maintained our majority from the two years where I served as Majority Leader to where I handed it off to, uh, person who served as my majority Wealth. That then became Majority Leader. Correct? Correct me.
[00:20:26] Jamie Grant: You were Richard's majority. That's correct. Right. Yeah. Um.
And then Dane came. Yep. Behind. Right. Okay. So I just make sure I had that right.
[00:20:34] Ray Rodrigues: Dane Eagle was the whip. Yeah. And then I handed it off to him under speaker. Oliva Dane was the majority leader for him, Dane Eagle.
[00:20:41] Jamie Grant: And I think what I would describe the majority, if I, if I boil that down, the majority office, I think, and, and I think there's a direct parallel to your role now as chancellor.
Uh, I, I don't know if you've ever thought about it that way, but to me, I felt like a great majority leader is listening to the members. And then to your point, I'll, I'll say it a little bit more bluntly, like distilling down the shills from the legitimate concerns, right? There's, there's kind of the industry driven chaos that might not be as intellectually honest, that a member may say, Hey, I don't like this.
And really what they're saying is, this lobbyist told me I don't like this and I'm kinda getting pressured versus some legitimate concerns. So the ability to listen to one side, the membership and go, okay, what are the legitimate concerns? Do we need to make the work product better? Or is there a misunderstanding about your concerns?
And then to your point, listening to the constituents, um, because I think a lot of times, I think Tallahassee is a, a really interesting place, and I think Florida has a really unique challenge because Tallah Tallahassee is so difficult to get to on a regular basis. There, there's just a, a reach of miscommunication or misinformation that can happen that I found a lot of times when I went back to my district and somebody would, you know, be screaming at a town hall like you're, you know, all these things.
If I just stepped back and said, okay, like what is your specific concern with that bill? At least 50% of the time the bill didn't even do that. And then in another, I don't know, 20, 30% of the time, it was like, okay, well would your, would your opinion change if you had this data? And, and you could kind of walk 'em through.
And I think the worst majority leaders forget about that second, well, both parts of that. They just, they just go, did I get the speaker's agenda through? And I don't care about the members and I don't care about the constituents. I, I think there's a part of your job as chancellor that is kind of that, right?
The institutions maybe are coming to you going, Hey, we got this problem, or managing the Board of Governors and, and, and what that all looks like. Obviously the legislative experience helped prepare you to be chancellor from a policy and budget perspective. Obviously, the time at FGCU prepared you on the grounds of like actually how the operation works with these dollars.
Do you feel like the majority office was like a unique thing that also helped prepare you to be chancellor in that dynamic of having to kind of navigate a similar but different dynamic?
[00:23:08] Ray Rodrigues: I do. And one other thing I would add to that and something I did as majority leader, I'm not sure if anyone after me has done it or not, but as you remember as a candidate, once we get to the general election, the party does mailers on behalf of the candidates to help them get elected and those mailers.
During the time period that we were in the legislature were primarily issue-based mailers. They would say, here's the issue, here's candidate's position on the issues. Right after I was appointed majority leader, I asked for a copy of every mailer that had been done on behalf of a candidate who was elected to the Florida House of Representatives, and I put 'em together in a binder.
And then when we went through session, when those issues came up, if I had members that started getting squishy on an issue, I would bring them in and we would talk about the issue and why that they were having concerns about the issue. And the end of those meetings were, I would bring out the mailers they sent out and say, this is what you communicated to voters.
This is what voters are expecting of you, or you prepared now to go back to the district and tell them that you no longer believe this. Are you prepared to put a spot on the radio tomorrow? We're announcing it. And if they weren't ready to do that, then they needed to remember what they promised the voters they were going to do and stick to that.
That's also, I think something that's a helped me in my role as chancellor, because Florida more so than any other state, I believe is very transparent in the commitments that we make to our students. And that's because of the performance based funding model that we have where we have specific goals.
Identified and we are very transparent about how we have done in achieving those goals and what our path is if we have failed to achieve those goals and students and parents look at that before they enroll in our system. And so that accountability is something that I really took out of the majority office and has proven to be very helpful in how we run our state university system.
[00:25:24] Jamie Grant: Is there one issue before we get to, uh, di diving deeper into higher ed, having kind of set the table, is there one particular bill that, or two that you remember most in your time as majority leader, that you're like, man, this is the one that really tested the ways I said I wanted to operate as a majority leader.
That that like really pressure tested your, like when you look in the mirror and go like, all right, this is the kind of leader I want to be and this is the way I say I wanna run the majority office. Were there any issues that you felt like really kind of made you look in the mirror hard and go, do I still believe it now?
[00:26:03] Ray Rodrigues: I'll say this. The most difficult bill I think we did in the two years I was majority leader was the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas bill, because that truly was a bill that was bipartisan, that involved compromise because it was very important that our response not be a partisan response. Uh, and both sides had to give up something that they wanted in order to get something else that they really wanted.
And that Bill did that. And in the end, that was one of the bills that it passed. But it passed with a, a substantial portion of our, our party voting. No, but we had a majority of our party and a majority of the minority party that together put together a majority of the chamber. Uh, that was difficult just because of the subject matter.
Mm-hmm. The emotional aspect of that bill coming on the heels of so many high school children being murdered and the emotional aspect of so many of their parents, uh, walking the halls in Tallahassee, uh, lobbying for the passage of that bill and asking members to pass it, that was difficult because there were competing priorities.
Uh, and so, and most of the bills that we did, it was very clear cut and black and white. That bill had some shades of gray in it for sure. Uh, and so I think that was the most difficult one in the entire two years.
[00:27:25] Jamie Grant: I'm gonna throw you on the spot with this one. 'cause I, the, uh, in managing members, when we were going through the Parkland situation, Margie Snowman Douglas, uh, I remember, I remember.
Um, and, and for folks like I, my house in Tallahassee was literally across the street from the house that Ray stayed at and That's right. Uh, the, the parlor. And we, we spent a lot of time talking at the end of the nights, just with, with a group of, of. Friends and colleagues, but I remember getting the, uh, in fact the majority office like tweeted something and I remember thinking like, I'm not okay with a couple things in that bill.
Like I, I can't get to yes on these things. And I remember texting Jose Oliva and saying, Hey, like, I just wanna make sure, 'cause when we've talked about it, like I, I'm a quick and easy no on this. Um, my experience going through that bill as a no subject to a couple things that just, you could have never done.
You could have never accomplished what you just described a second ago and met my concerns, if that makes sense. Like, so to put you on the spot, uh, 'cause I, I, I stipulate you could have never gotten the majority of Democrats needed. There was a big block of Democrats that were down for other provision. I mean, like the work you did to pass that bill is remarkable 'cause it was like six dimensional chess.
How much, this sounds like I'm asking for a compliment, but I'm really asking for self-awareness. How much did I help you by saying straight out I'm a no versus how much would you have preferred me going? Can you work with us a little bit?
[00:29:05] Ray Rodrigues: It was always my preference as a majority leader to know where the member was going to be.
And while I was always willing to listen to suggestions and to try to incorporate suggestions. If members are making suggestions that even if they're incorporated at the end of the day, they're not going to vote for the bill. That's more harmful than helpful. Yeah, because I need to be addressing members who can, I can get to a yes if we can address a concern that they have.
So from my perspective, I much prefer to have members who were not going to vote for the bill for deeply ill principle reasons like you expressed. Be upfront about that than either say, please incorporate this when you knew even if we incorporated it, you weren't gonna vote for it. Or, I'm thinking about it, let me work on it and see if I can get there.
'cause we had members that said that that knew they were never going to get there. And I'm not gonna name those members, but, but we know who some of them are. The important thing I think that you said was you went to Jose. Jose Oliva was the speaker designate. He was also the sponsor of that bill. And that's the most important thing was you went to the bill sponsor and communicated with the bill sponsor exactly what your concerns were because the bill sponsor knows what can be incorporated in the bill, uh, to get to the goals of the leadership team.
And more importantly, what can get through not just our chamber, but the other chamber versus what may kill a bill in the other chamber, even though it passes in ours. So your direct communications with the bill sponsor were. As equally important is your communications with the majority leader.
[00:30:52] Jamie Grant: Yeah. I think one of the things I learned and matured, and it was actually, uh, a, a good mutual friend of ours that pulled me aside.
It was after the wall bill, uh, my, my return as a red shirt freshman. I showed up in like week eight or nine of session, and the only thing we were debating was liquor walls, right? And I'm thinking, man, I've had to go through this whole special election. I've been out of office for seven months and this is what I come back to be.
This is your reward. This is like the nuclear issue to come back to. And, uh, somebody pulled me aside in the rotunda and he said, you know, he, he said, look, I, you know, I love you. My take is that you're too deliberative in this process and you gotta start making decisions faster. And I think me coming from a, a lawyer and software background where it's highly, constantly iterative, I think if, if Parkland had happened at the beginning of my career, I probably would've lit myself on fire by like wanting to get to Yes.
Rather than just kind of going like, look guys, there's a couple non-starters for me in here, and this is why I think they're gonna have some constitutional challenges. Here's ways I think you could address that. But like, I'll see myself out unless invited back in. I don't think I could have known to do that without hitting some landmines in my, my first run through the legislature.
Let's take it now because I, I think one of the things that fascinates me about your journey, right? Um, and this comes up a lot of times for me in the public sector, technology vertical. I think you're the only person I can think of, um, that has been an executive in a university that has been a member of the House and the Senate, both uniquely relevant.
We kind of glossed over your Senate stent, um, and, and we can go back to that. Uh, but you've been a leader in both the House and the Senate before then becoming the executive responsible for an entire function. And I'm curious if you agree with this in education, I'll die on the hill, that it's true of technology people.
So overcomplicate the public sector because there's these different stakeholder islands, I like to think of it that are all critical but also siloed and foreign to each other where somebody might be an like a, an expert in the operation of a university, but be completely foreign to how the legislature works or completely foreign to how the state university system and the board of governors operate.
And I think you're one of the only people I can think of that has been around the entire ecosystem operating at like the industry, company, university level, operating at a board policy reform budget, finance level in the legislative. Now being kind of the chief executive of the state university system, I'm curious if you agree and do you think that is, uh uh, how important do you think that is in your day to day leading Florida State University system?
[00:34:01] Ray Rodrigues: I do agree with that assessment. I would say on the university side, when I was elected in 2012, I would've agreed 100% with your assessment that it was not only likely, but probable that the person running or individual universities may have been experts at running a university, but would've been lost in the capitol in terms of knowing who to talk to, when to talk to them and how to talk to them.
I think we've gotten much better as a system, particularly through the DeSantis administration. I think the overwhelming majority of, uh, presidents within our system now have the skills and ability to go walk the halls of the capitol and be effective advocates for both their institution and our system.
And that's part of the reason I think we have continued to see such success in our system. In terms of our relationship with the legislature, I believe, obviously as a former member, I play a small role in that 'cause. I understand how it works and I've got connections with many members, but it's not just me.
If it were just me, we would not be nearly as successful as we had been. What helps is having so many presidents that can go into the capitol who also have relationships, who also know how the process works and who can then go be effective advocates for, as I said earlier, their institutions in our system.
[00:35:38] Jamie Grant: You know what I never thought about till you just said that is my dealing when I was the state CIO, my dealing with agency heads, uh, Richard Dane Halsey, down the list of former members, Jared, uh, at DEM, we shared a building, it was radically different to deal with a member, uh, to deal with an agency head who also had that experience on the inside.
And I never thought about how you as the chancellor and then having university presidents that understand that, and I'd stress like these aren't just former members. I mean, these are really heavy hitters that were really successful in the legislature. Uh, because I think you and I both served with a lot of members that we probably wouldn't necessarily want running our organization.
Um, maybe they were, but like, you know, when you take Jeanette and Richard and Manny and you, you just start stacking up, um, some of those folks, like you're, you're dealing not just with former members, you're dealing with former leaders. Who had to really understand and who were all tremendously successful in their own right in that space.
I'm wondering if you feel sometimes like your role is translator in chief, like when you have these, 'cause I, I, I like on the technology side, I, I, I joke that, uh, I feel like a human API sometimes, which is the application program interface, but really just human translation, right? Like, here's what they said, here's what you heard.
That's also different than what was trying to be communicated. And I'm wondering how much you feel like translator in chief is, is a lot of your role.
[00:37:17] Ray Rodrigues: I, I would agree. I think translator in chief is a significant percentage of, uh, my responsibility. I would add to that. If you go back to the constitutional amendment that created the Board of Governors, the genesis for that was a then sitting Senator Bob Graham, who had been a former governor who believed Florida had made the wrong decision when it legislatively repealed the predecessor to the Board of Governors, which was the Board of Regents, and instead went down the road of just having each university managed by a local board of trustees.
And the reason Governor Graham, Senator Graham believed that was a mistake is the natural tendency in higher education is for a university particularly, to try to be all things to all people. Mm-hmm. And. If you have 12 of those across the state, although at the time he did the amendment, it would've been 11, not 12.
'cause polytech, I can come on. You run the risk of inefficiencies, duplications, and potential waste. So the reason he supported the creation of a board of governors, and it truly was a grassroots constitutional amendment without any money interest behind it, was he believed there was a role for an entity that would view the entire field and make sure that we didn't have that duplication or that waste and that we were as efficient of a system as we could be.
So part of my job as translator in chief between the legislature, the board, and the universities, and then a big part of my role is, uh, making sure that I'm looking at the entire field to make sure we're being as efficient as possible in the steps that we're taking. And then the third part is the BOG is a regulatory agency.
And so we're to take what the legislature has produced, what our board, its statutes, what our board has produced as regulations, and ensure that the universities are honoring the letter and the spirit of both the law and our regulations in their implementation and deployment.
[00:39:31] Jamie Grant: Yeah, it's um, gosh, as you say that.
It's, uh, the, the parallels I've never thought about in any of our other conversations, but the parallels to being a state CIO when zero state agencies had ever coordinated on cybersecurity at the state level, ever trying to get them to come on board was, was not easy. And mm-hmm to your point, took translator in chief kind of as a function, but also like charting the vision to go like, here's where we're going.
I also think it's interesting, uh, you know, you had us come in towards the end of my tenure, uh, in ways that it, to explore ways that the university system and the state could combine forces while also maintaining privacy, sovereignty, all those things. So I, I've personally watched you live it, um, which has been cool to see.
Let's, let's, let's take a turn now, because you set this up, I think beautifully in talking about the field and what the field looks like. Let's take up first, I think just like your time at FGCU was a really interesting point in time experience because of the Great Recession and being in Florida. I think the combination of your legislative experience and then becoming chancellor with what was happening in, and still to some extent, I think in, in other places around the country that haven't caught up.
Looking back at the last, I don't know, five or so years of higher ed. It wasn't long ago that we were having really rigorous debate on this controversial topic of intellectual honesty and freedom of thought on campus and maintaining free speech and exposing our students to critical thinking. I know you've worked on some of those policies in the legislative world, but if you were to look at some of these big rocks that were kind of on the field over the last few years, let's start with kind of the intellectual diversity front.
I'm specifically interested in some of the data, and I know you have it, uh, 'cause it's you, but like when we started looking, when you were leading the charge for us to look at like how bad is it on campus around these campuses and this radical notion of universities being idea laboratories and places of free and robust debate, how did that issue unfold in your mind?
Because I feel like now in Florida that's kind of a dead issue because of your leadership and others, but it, it wasn't long ago, it wasn't a dead issue. No.
[00:42:13] Ray Rodrigues: Uh, and, and this was an issue which I think bolded up nationally first. And so what we were seeing across the country was a shift, a hard shift to the left in terms of.
How our faculty identify. And the researcher who's done the most work on this is a political science professor at Sarah Lawrence College up in New York. He's also a, uh, senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute and served on the Board of Directors of Fire Foundation for individual rights and Education.
His name's Sam Abrams, and he did a, a study and produced a study, uh, that looked at faculty responses, and I think he used the higher, the California Higher Education Research Institute, triannual Survey. Don't quote me on that, but I think that's where he drew his data. So this was data that came from the faculty members.
Uh, they used to do that every three years. They stopped during COVID, and then the results have become skewing so far to the left that they just never picked it back up because the narrative wasn't supportive. The facts didn't support their narrative, and so that, that survey kind of went away. But he looked at what is the political affiliation of the American public?
What is the political affiliation of students when they enroll into higher education? What is the political affiliation of faculty members and what is the political affiliation of administrators? And what he learned was students that enrolled are very close to the national mean in terms of political identity.
Which isn't surprising. Most students adopt the political identity of their parents. And that would account for the fact that as freshmen, they come in middle of the road very much, uh, if left of center, just barely left of center. But the faculty members over time had been moving further and further and further to the left so that the faculty members had no, uh, connection to mainstream America in terms of their political affiliation.
And then when he looked at the administrators, they were even farther to the left than the faculty were. And what we began to see were reports coming out of indoctrination in courses where, uh, faculty members were pushing a political ideology and students who attempted to push back on that were punished for it.
And that became something that was being captured in the national narrative. So the question was, is this happening in Florida? And we didn't know you can get stories, you know, and odes of, of individual students sharing their experience, but the best way to find the cell is to systemically measure. And so I filed legislation, uh, to do an intellectual freedom, uh, and a viewpoint freedom and intell, I'm sorry, viewpoint diversity.
That was it. An intellectual freedom assessment and it took, uh, multiple years to I was, I was just
[00:45:33] Jamie Grant: about to ask, like, this is such a kitchen table thing that it would be hard to argue with. We just wanna know what our students are walking into. And I feel that was, I was gonna guess it
[00:45:42] Ray Rodrigues: was three years or four.
Like it was four. Okay. Right. The first year I proposed, it was the second session of my junior term when I was majority leader. Then both sessions my senior term, and we passed it in the house all three years. We couldn't get it through the Senate. So then I got elected to the Senate and I carried it in the Senate.
And the Senate had changed the primary obstacles to the bill had termed out of the Senate. And, uh, as a newcomer working with a different group of senators, I was able to get it through the Senate and we passed it. And so this year is the second year we have done the survey. We have one year, well, third year, let me walk through this.
So we did it the first year and the implementation of the survey was not compliant with statute. The statute as w we drafted it required that the survey be statistically valid, objective, and non-partisan. And the, the challenge was, and this was, it was deployed my last year in the legislature for the first time.
They didn't know they'd be in the Board of Governors in the Florida College system how to do this. And so they opened it up. They said, we're gonna send it to every student. We're gonna do it for a week, and we're gonna do it during this week in April. And the week they chose, uh, was the week of finance, which is probably the worst week you could choose to do a survey.
That, or spring break. So the response, yeah, well, spring break would be the absolute worst. Finals week would be the second worst. And so the response rate was like 3%, which is not statistically valid. Right. And, uh, they realized they had a low response rate. There were a lot of, uh, derision from those on the left who would oppose us.
And then I get, uh, appointed chancellor. I went to the legislature, requested a one year pause because I wanted to consult with an expert. And I did, I consulted with Dr. Abels, who is the expert, uh, who and who has helped devise the fire surveys that are done on an annual basis. And so we did a one year pause, which allowed, uh, Dr.
S to consult with the Florida system. And he did it pro bono. He's a big fan of Florida. His, uh, in-laws live in Florida. He comes down every year, loves Florida, loves what we're doing, wanted to help us. So he did this outta the goodness of his heart, helped us divide the survey. Then we deployed it, and the response we got.
Was statistically valid, I believe in the type of survey where you send it to everyone. The rule of thumb is you need to cross, uh, 15% in a response rate to be statistically valid. So that would've been five times higher than the first time it was done. We did that, uh, and we got a response rate, I wanna say it was like 17%, that 17% of 420,000 students ended up being, according to Dr.
Abrams, the largest response participation in a survey done in the United States in higher education. Even the national surveys that fire due, uh, do every year that they conduct every year did not get as many responses as our survey did from our system when we hit 17%. And so now we've got real data. We know the survey's objective.
We've had an expert put it together. We know it's statistically valid. We've hit the numbers. And I was pleasantly surprised at what we found, uh, when we got the results in. Statistically, if you look at the national average, 30% of students are identified as democrat. 13% identify as Republican. So it's almost a three to one margin of Democrats and Republicans.
In Florida, it's almost one-to-one, 25%. Identify as, uh, Democrat, 22% identify as Republican. So in Florida, our student body skews more conservative and Republican than the national average does.
[00:49:55] Jamie Grant: Let me ask you a question though, because I think for somebody who doesn't know Ray and Ray's heart and Ray's philosophy, they could hear what you're describing as an agenda or an objective to combat by skewing way the other way.
[00:50:16] Ray Rodrigues: That's definitely not the intent,
[00:50:18] Jamie Grant: and that's why I wanted you. Yeah, I, I want you to double click on the reason for the bill because you and I served with people that would espouse conservative beliefs and then want to use government to get to where they wanted people to get. I, if I were to, if I were to just steal man this listening from the outside and not knowing Ray Rod and, and philosophy and, and and his heart, I could hear we're making progress.
'cause we want to have red universities and I'd love for you to define what you think success looks like when you drafted the bill and as you're working on it now.
[00:50:55] Ray Rodrigues: Yeah. Well let me give you the results from year one and then let's come back and answer that question because when I get to the other answers, I think you'll find the pieces of the puzzle come together.
So number one, in Florida we have a student body population, uh, that is fairly evenly distributed between Democrats and Republicans, which is different than the national norm. Then we asked the question, uh, are you tolerant of ideas and beliefs? And in Florida we had a much higher percentage that said that they were, that their students' experience was, their university was tolerant of their individual ideas and beliefs compared to the national average.
That's important because that's what promotes viewpoint diversity. And then you get to the heart of it, which is does your university encourage a wide variety of viewpoints and perspectives? The reason that question is important is because this is the opposite of indoctrination. Yeah. In campuses across the country where indoctrination is occurring, the answer to that question is very low.
And the reason is they're not getting viewpoint diversity. They're getting one side, which is the side their professors are pushing, which we know from their political identification is way left of center compared to the average American public or their students when they arrive. And Florida, 78% of our students said they believe they either strongly or agree with the statement that they are encouraged to consider a wide variety of viewpoints and perspectives.
Did you say 70? 78%. Whew. We have viewpoint diversity within our system. The second question, and this is equally important, my university campus provides an environment for free expression of ideas, opinions, and beliefs. Now, this is important because this question is beyond the classroom. This includes the classroom, but it includes students talking in the student union.
It includes students walking across campus who attending events on their campus. Do they have an environment for the free expression of ideas, opinions, and beliefs? In Florida, 81% of our students said, yes, we agree with that statement, which sets to support from other states where indoctrination is occurring.
And so success in my mind is what we are receiving here, that we have a, uh, situation where our students believe they have the ability to participate in free expression. And where our students believe they are exposed to a diversity of viewpoints. And that's particularly important in Florida compared to other states because our students are more evenly distributed than other states.
So the goal isn't to turn the system red, the goal is to get politics out of it all together so that we're back to a classical education that does not involve faculty members pushing one set of beliefs. As their personal agenda. And I think in Florida what we've seen, at least from the first year is that that's not occurring.
We've just completed the second year. That is going through the process of the statistical waiting and the analysis, we'll have those results out and get them over to the legislature, uh, by December 1st is I think what the statutory requirement is. But our participation rate this year went up again. So this will be yet another record Florida sets in terms of number of students who are participating voluntarily in a survey, in a response rate.
And so we're proud of that and that was the motivation behind us doing this. And I don't know if you saw me present the bill. I know you were in the legislature, uh, multiple times when you think I wasn't on the
[00:55:05] Jamie Grant: floor. Like I was just, that'd be so outta character.
[00:55:10] Ray Rodrigues: Well, in committee as well. I don't know if you were on the committees that heard this, but a common question I would get from those who have posted it was, what are you going to do with this data?
Because the faculty union had convinced them, the point of this survey was to identify who's not a Republican in faculty and fired them. Mm-hmm. And they operated from a premise that the results from these questions would be negative. And my answer was consistent. I can't answer the question of what we're going to do until we see the data.
You're presupposing the data will say one thing or another. I've come in with no, uh, presuppositions. I wanna see what the students say and then based upon what they say, that will guide any policy proposals that come out of this. And so I'm very proud that we've implemented this. To my knowledge, we're the only state that does this on a consistent basis, and this is a valuable tool for us to answer the charge.
That is very valid in higher education today. That higher education is too focused on indoctrination. I know you've seen the reports from Gallup, the Gallup organization that has showed the American confidence in higher education has declined significantly. The number one reason why it has declined is the American public believes higher education is too focused on pushing on having faculty members push their own political agenda.
And that indoctrination is harming the value of the degrees we are armed to show that that's not what's happening in Florida. That's the advantage of us doing the survey,
[00:56:47] Jamie Grant: you know, as we get to the next big rock. 'cause I think they're actually the exact same in one regard. I can't help but think in some of our conversations around AI and just what's happening.
I think you're doing more on the AI front than you even realize. And in listening to you talk through that Ray, um. And, and certainly not taking us down an AI track, but just one of the thoughts that hit me.
[00:57:15] Ray Rodrigues: Yes.
[00:57:16] Jamie Grant: And when we look, you know, for me, kind of living in the landscape of, of what AI is doing all over the place, like one of the things I've been pretty vocal about is the early stages of AI are nothing more than really good critical thinking.
I think it's why lawyers with like classical training and cross examination and direct examination, not the closing and open closing argument, opening statement piece as much, but like if you know how to cross examinee a witness in committee or in a trial, it becomes pretty natural to go through the thought process of what do I want this machine to give me as an output, rather than what's the answer to the question?
And I think what you're, the reason I really wanted to double click is I didn't want anybody to walk away misguided. 'cause I, I do remember when you carried that bill and I remember spending a lot of time in the trenches with you on it, just like really frustrated that it was even a radical notion that we wanted kids to be exposed.
Like I, I would, if I had kids one day, I would want them to read mind conf, but we're gonna talk about it. They're gonna read baat for sure. And we're gonna talk a lot about that. And I absolutely have a philosophy, but I'm not interested in my kids or anybody I'm mentoring or, or teaching, getting to my answer.
I'm interested in them taking in these different viewpoints. Distilling those down and pressure testing them to say, well, if that's true, then what? And if that's right, then how, and I think just the intellectual diversity piece alone is helping transform Florida's higher education system. But I think we're gonna see that pay massive dividends for the students who are coming out of it in ways that'll almost be tough to map to it, but just arming kids with critical thinking, different viewpoints, and the ability to think, I, I feel like the biggest thing that the market right now is missing on all fronts.
And I don't care if it's voters that are yelling at each other at town halls or if it's the academic environment, is the lack of critical thought. And I think the work you've been doing around this space is breeding, hopefully generations of different viewpoints, lots of debate, and a lot of critical thinking rather than engineering the outcomes.
I know that's a statement more than a question, but, so then if we transition to maybe the, the next big block, you also kind of lived through the DEI, uh, en environment. And this issue, both of these issues really bothered me as a, as a zealous believer in free speech even when it's uncomfortable. Two, I'm a zealous believer that the best teams are first a meritocracy and second diverse.
I don't think great teams can be a monolithic meritocracy. They certainly can't be a diverse team devoid of talent. The, the value that's driven by a meritocracy that also brings diverse life experiences and talents and skills together. So I, I don't wanna speak for you, but I feel like the DEI issue was another one of those issues that the way it was vocalized by advocates kind of put somebody with my belief system in a frustrating position because it was kind of like, if you don't support this, then you don't like diversity.
And I was like, no, no. I think it's a both. And I think that we should have diversity on the teams from all kinds of diversity, by the way, not just the way it got labeled, because I think there's a, a ton of different types of diversity that matter, but I also think it was really cruel to some of the people that got put in jobs that they were just fundamentally ill-equipped for and put there more so to check a diversity box than to add value to the team.
And I just think it's a, I I, I mean, I, this is more to ask you where you're coming from than, than to give my viewpoints. I just, it was really frustrating and I'm curious what it was like. Because while we saw it in the corporate world a lot, I'm not sure it was as evident anywhere as higher ed, and I might be wrong, but that's just kind of how it felt.
What was your experience going through that and how are you trying to continue building the most talented team to lead the state university system? Also, our experience is wildly different because I think you would technically be diverse, uh, and people are looking at you like you hate diversity, where my situation was probably a little harder.
Uh, but talk to me about what that big rock was like. And then I want to transition to kind of where the future of higher ed in this inflection point is because I think, you know, performance-based funding preeminence, I'd like to touch on those real quick, but I know we've, we've gone a little long too, and I wanna be respectful of your time.
[01:02:21] Ray Rodrigues: Um, let's, let's start with DEI.
[01:02:23] Jamie Grant: Yeah.
[01:02:24] Ray Rodrigues: When I got the job is Chancellor, one of the things that was on my radar was we had this practice spreading across the field of higher education, where in order to get hired, faculty members had to sign diversity statements. In some institutions, uh, they had to sign a diversity statement in order to be promoted.
[01:02:51] Jamie Grant: What does that mean? What is a diversity statement? Like, what am I signing if I got, put that in front of me?
[01:02:55] Ray Rodrigues: You're citing what would depend on the institution, but what they all had in common was a pledge that you would use your position to increase diversity in the institution, and that you supported the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda.
That was what was common across all institutions. Each of them had their own variant of how the statement would be drafted. And so what we were seeing across the country were faculty members had to sign the statement to get hired, and some institutions, they had to sign it to be eligible for promotion.
And in other institutions, they had to sign it for hiring promotion and to be considered for tenure that if they didn't sign it, they weren't eligible for tenure. And here was the thing that I found interesting in surveys that fire had done, what the they found were conservatives who identified as, I'm sorry, faculty members who identified as conservative, which are a small minority in higher ed as a group, hated diversity statements.
They didn't support the agenda. They didn't think it was the business of the university to tell them to sign a statement. But among those faculty who identified as left of center, those who supported diversity statements were only 50%. 50% said, yes, we support the agenda and we think. Uh, you should have to identify public support for the agenda in order to get hired or promoted or tenured.
But 50% of faculty members who identified as left of center said, I don't like diversity statements.
[01:04:36] Jamie Grant: So they, they weren't just silent, they were actually opposed.
[01:04:40] Ray Rodrigues: They were silent, but in surveys would say they were That's what I mean. Yeah.
[01:04:43] Jamie Grant: Yeah. It wasn't like we didn't have an answer from them. They, they weren't publicly speaking up.
But no, they
[01:04:48] Ray Rodrigues: identified opposition in an anonymous survey. And the reason in the anonymous survey they would identify opposition was they would often say, I support DEI, but I'm a classical liberal and I don't believe it is the role of government to compel speech. So I object to it on these premises. So think about this, you had diversity statements becoming common across the country, uh, where, and I, and one of the think tanks took a look at all postings in higher ed, and I wanna say between a third and 40% of all postings, public postings required a DEI statement.
So this is, and it's climate rapidly climate,
you have faculty members, conservatives who hate it publicly and on the left, which is the majority of them, half of them don't like it, but are intimidated to say they don't like it. For fear they're going to be branded or racist. And so that was one of the key components of the legislation in 2023, Senate Bill 2 66 where we eliminated DEI programs, which were the programs being done in by the administration in our universities for employees.
We prohibited the use of DEI statements. And then another bill that was run by then, Senator Perry and Representative Roach, eliminated any pledge political pledge as a condition of employment in higher education in the state of Florida. So Florida really led on this issue of coming out and saying, no, we don't think this is right.
And that was critically important because all it took was one state to do that. And then other states then had the courage to follow. And so now the DEI statements, debt, like even the Ivy Leagues where this originated, have walked away from diversity statements. Now, president Trump's made them illegal, but before he made them illegal with his executive order, uh, between 2023 when Florida took its stand publicly and 2024 when the election occurred.
So during this period, we still had President Biden with a Department of Education at the federal level pushing DEI. Institutions across the country were walking away from the diversity statements, including. Ivy League institutions who started them all in the first place. I think that's important because government shouldn't compel speech of any kind.
The other thing that came out at 2 6 6, which I think was the most important item in the bill, was addressing general education in the legislature, affirming general education, is to accomplish these items. And we'd already put in statute years ahead before each of the areas of gen ed and what their purpose was.
So communications, literature, mathematics, legisla went in and said concepts that, uh, do not provide a braille, a broad foundational knowledge and do not promote the constitutional republic are incompatible with general education provisions and ought to be offered either at an upper level or as an elected.
But we ended indoctrination in our general education courses through Senate Bill 2 6 6, removing those out of required general education courses.
[01:08:30] Jamie Grant: And what's so interesting about both of, I, I wasn't around the policy world for DEI, but, but for the, uh, viewpoint diversity fight and some others, it was amazing how like babies were gonna die and churches were gonna burn if we, if we pass these legislation, these legislative reforms.
And I think what you're telling me is in each of these situations, the state university system has gotten much stronger. If stronger is calculated by experience for the student and experience for the faculty.
[01:09:08] Ray Rodrigues: I would agree with that, that that's the result of this has not been the fire brimstone that was predicted by those who oppose these efforts.
The result has been a more classical general education curriculum that our students are benefiting from.
[01:09:26] Jamie Grant: I mean, is there any downturn in faculty retention? Is there any downturn in applicant submission? Like is there anything that your critic could point to and go, well, it's starting to trend this way?
Or what are you seeing on those fronts?
[01:09:42] Ray Rodrigues: So it's something to keep in mind. It's that as a sector, higher education is a transient industry. And the reason for that is faculty members are chasing tenured lines. And so they will go to an institution where there's an opportunity to earn tenure or they will leave an institution if there, if there's an opportunity for promotion.
And I think you see more of that, uh, transient nature in higher ed than you see in other industries. So I, I wanna preface it with that. Yeah. There's always turnover in higher ed, you could go back five years before we did. DEI. Before we did post-tenure review, before, we did viewpoint diversity and intellectual freedom.
And Florida had turnover in higher education. Florida has turnover in higher education today. Statistically, there's no significance between what our turnover was before we did these initiatives and what our turnover is today. And the thing I would say that's most important is that because in Florida we continue to receive appropriations from our legislature being championed by our governor.
Every year we are hiring more faculty than those who leave because we're replacing those who leave and we're hiring new lines because we're continuing to grow our system. So the question is, are we losing faculty as, uh, faculty abandoned Florida because of these initiatives? The answer to that would be no.
Though our faculty who have left, they would've left regardless of what we had done. Some may have stuck around, but if they chose to leave, we have easily replaced them.
[01:11:22] Jamie Grant: I was about to say, even if they left because of those things, the net influx, like the net seems clearly to be supporting
[01:11:28] Ray Rodrigues: the net is clearly positive in terms of us gaining more faculty members than we are losing.
[01:11:35] Jamie Grant: So let's take you to the inflection point that higher Ed seems to be at. You touched on earlier, um, with. Faith in academia, higher education, trolling closer to Congress or the big banks in 2010 than, you know, free mortgage payments on a popularity index. I think, and you would correct me or, or at least re reposition me.
I think a lot of it has been the stuff you've been going to war against, um, where, you know, I think people have been frustrated by the indoctrination. I think people have been frustrated by what seems to be manufactured outcomes rather than elite academic environments. But then simultaneously we're watching what's happening.
Just, I mean, AI is the biggest industrial revolution that I think we've seen in generations, and that's always gonna bring uncertainty and the market's gonna do different things. But how do you look at accessing cost? When you think of, in a lot of states, tuition continues to outpace inflation. I don't believe that's true in Florida.
I think you're the number one state university system in America. Nine consecutive years having been corrected and. One of the few. How many others have kept tuition or kept tuition? Like walk, walk through what you've done on the value delivery of benefit and price. 'cause we've talked about the reforms that are focused on the benefit of the education.
Now let's talk about cost to the Florida family or the the person attending the university.
[01:13:22] Ray Rodrigues: Well, that's a great question. Remember I told you during the five years of the great recession, 2007 to 2012, Florida raised tuition 86%. Mm-hmm. That was the largest increase in tuition of any state in the nation.
During that five year period, 2013, which was your third session of your first time around my, my first session, that was the first budget. Florida increased since the great recession began. And that was important because now Florida has more money to spend. There was a question, how's Florida going to reinvest in programs that have been cut?
And the governor at that time, Rick Scott said, I wanna reinvest in higher ed, but we are going to abandon the traditional model that I mentioned earlier where you lock in your enrollment the second week of the semester and that's what you're paid on. He goes, I want to define our goals and then align the incentives to support the goals.
And that was the creation of performance based funding. And Ritz Scott said, I'm going to give you three graduation rate. Retention rate, and then do they get a job when they graduate? You guys can figure out what the other seven metrics should be, but those three are non-negotiable and that was the genius of, of Governor Scott was he then left it to the university, the board of governors and the legislature to consult together and to identify these are the metrics that are appropriate in a performance-based funding system.
The reason that's important is we knew with performance-based funding that we were going to get accountability. The unintended consequence, which has been the huge benefit to the system, was it took a system, which across the country is a black box states fund, higher ed, but they have no idea what they're getting out of it and it energetic, complete transparency.
So every year we submit to the legislature, here are the 10 metrics, here's how each university is done, those who have not improved, here's their improvement plan. And then we go to the university and say, based upon these results, I'm sorry, we go to the legislature and say, based upon these results, do you feel like this is a worthy investment for the state of Florida?
Since the implementation of performance based funding in 2013, Florida has not increased, increased in state tuition. For our students, either undergraduates or graduates. No other state in the nation can say that, and here's why that's important. If you look at what's happening in higher ed, and I mentioned the Gallup survey earlier about America's losing confidence in higher ed, the number one reasons, the belief of indoctrination.
One of the other large reasons why America's lost confidence in higher ed is because the increased cost. It is the second highest inflation of any sector of the economy over the last 25 years, except for hospital services. I was
[01:16:39] Jamie Grant: gonna ask, what's number one? I had two guesses.
[01:16:41] Ray Rodrigues: Wow. Hospital services, number one.
Number two has been higher education. And during that period, student loan debt, according to the Federal Reserve, has increased from 300 billion in 2000 to 1.6 trillion today. The third piece of this puzzle is at the turn of the century, at a typical public four year university, 70% of the app of the revenue came from a state appropriation.
30% of the revenue came from net tuition. When the great recession hit, all states cut their appropriations. I mentioned earlier, Florida had the second highest cut in appropriation reduction. That number got down to a 45%. Distribution. 45% of revenues came from state appropriations. 55% came from net tuition.
So here's the perfect storm. States have stopped investing in higher ed while costs have gone through the roof, and how's that being paid for through loans? That's a big part of why the American public has lost confidence in higher ed,
[01:17:56] Jamie Grant: which by the way, are the only loan type I'm aware of that is not dischargeable in bankruptcy.
[01:18:02] Ray Rodrigues: That is correct. I,
[01:18:03] Jamie Grant: I think one thing that Congress could do, if Congress ever got back to passing legislation, if you simply made student loan debt dischargeable in bankruptcy, I think that entire industry would be injected with so much good stuff that benefits, most importantly the student, the academic institution.
Secondarily, and maybe the taxpayer actually secondarily, but like the fact that it's not dischargeable and bankruptcy allowed these kids in the perfect storm to be told 'cause fo by the way, the other part of the perfect storm, if we go back in time, I think you'd agree, is that you had to have a college degree to be competitive.
Yes, you're gonna get me going down my occupational licensure and, and d reg rant here. Uh, but like there were so many, 67% of Americans when we were working on D Reg had a job that had an occupational license tied to it, which effectively almost always meant you had to have some sort of degree. Not always four year, but a lot of them four year.
And so that perfect storm, like you're describing, basically left somebody going like, well, gosh, if I wanna have a future, I have to take this loan. It's not dischargeable in, in bankruptcy. And so the lending institutions doing little to nothing, to, to like think about the solvency of the applicant. And I don't mean solvency of like backing it, but like, are they ever gonna be able to repay this?
Yeah. And then I think you look at what's happening, and I don't wanna make this overly political, but with our backgrounds, it's hard not to Like, you look at what's happening in New York with the mayoral election. It's not surprising. Like you have a generation of people who are saddled with debt. They don't feel like they can pay off.
They got a degree that they're not watching the dividends from, they can't afford a house, they're renting in perpetuity. And then we're surprised that they're, they're like skewing towards, well, give me from the system because the system's been working for these other people and now it's time, it works for me.
And that's what I love so much about the work you're doing and have done for, for a, a career. I guess it, I mean, I don't wanna call it a career, but like you, you have been doing this a while in the trenches of like, no, no, there's a better way to do this that says we can increase the benefit without raising the cost.
We can keep the student or the patient the priority healthcare education and the providers aren't gonna go outta business. Like the, the, the sky is not falling. Um, and I think that's a, a, a really interesting point that you made when you think about that perfect storm, because I, I think you're just so spot on.
And now 15 year, you said on a phone call, do you remember, it was a couple weeks ago, a few weeks ago, you said something about data on encouraging kids to go to college based on whether or not they were first generation college graduates. Does that ring a bell? It does.
[01:21:03] Ray Rodrigues: So let me draw, let me continue drawing out the perfect storm.
The cost explosion began in 2000, which coincides with when states began reducing their investment. Yep. When the tent bubble burst was the first step was then when the great recession hit, the bottom fell out at its naar state support for public universities fell down to 45% and the other revenue came 55% from students paying tuition, largely student through student loans.
Fast forward to today. We're 25 years in and I had someone who runs a focus group at a conference I attended, tell us that for the first time in the two decades they've been doing the focus group. They now have high school seniors who are telling them, I'm not going to go to college because my parents have advised me against it.
They enrolled at the turn of the century, financed it through death with student loans, did not get a degree. Remember, 40% of folks who in higher education across the country never graduate. And they left with debt that they can't discharge and no credential to increase their earnings. And they lost during the years that they were in college, not in the economy.
Mm-hmm. Uh, working and building up the benefit that would come from working in the private sector. So for the first time, we had parents actively telling children based on their experience, don't go to college. It's a bad deal and it will set you back. Those are the, the currents that we're swimming against in higher education.
But just to differentiate Florida, as I said, since we've implemented performance-based funding and we've gained accountability and transparency, we have not increased our in-state undergraduate or graduate tuition. We have the lowest in-state tuition. We're 50% lower than the national average, and 77% of our students are enrolled with no student loan.
We are practically the inverse of every other state where they have the majority of their students enrolled with debt. Uh, we do not. They have significantly higher in-state tuition, and it's something that is going up in Florida. That is not the case. According to the most recent data in Florida, 88% of our revenue comes from a state appropriation.
12% comes from net tuition. Florida is the only system in the country where you can leave at the conclusion of the spring semester, work a part-time job during the summer period, 40 hours a week minimum wage, and at the conclusion of summer before fall semester begins, have earned enough to pay for your both upcoming fall and spring tuition and fees, meaning we're the last system you can work your way through.
That's what sets us apart from the, in addition to the accountability and the transparency and our focus on education and not indoctrination, the accessibility and affordability, and we touched on DEI earlier. One of the things I didn't say that I should have is. You'll recall this, Florida got rid of preferences in admissions under Governor Jeb Bush before the turn of the century.
So we've not had preferences in admissions for 25 years yet, despite the fact we have not been given preferential treatment in admissions in the last three years. Half of our undergraduate bachelor's degrees have been awarded to students who identify as either black or Hispanic. We're one of the most diverse systems in the country, not just in enrollment, but in success, which is even more important than the enrollment or four year graduation rate for students who identify as black, number one in the country.
Our four year graduation rate for students who identify as Hispanic number three in the country and our graduation rate for students who are on a pill grant is number one in the country. Florida is proving you don't have to give preferential treatment for success. You just have to focus on merit and give everyone a level playing field.
[01:25:39] Jamie Grant: Yeah, I, you know, it's the Pell Grant Stat
[01:25:43] Ray Rodrigues: Floors
[01:25:43] Jamie Grant: me, um, because I don't know how many people, and admittedly for me it was more through sports, uh, that I experienced that in college. Um, I, you know, I'd heard the term Pell Grant, but I didn't know what it meant and I didn't know, um, you know, some of the backgrounds that a Pell Grant recipient might come from that are a lot different than.
You're, you know, let's say stereotypical, uh, admitted college student, um, man to be number one in Pell Grant success. I think Ray is just an amazing thing because that, uh, when you, when I hear you talk, I hear you talk about the equality of opportunity. I hear you talk about the dignity of the individual.
I hear you talk about breaking down a monolith of thought in order for your system to be doing what it's doing with kids that maybe grew up with my background the same way it's doing For somebody that came from a Pell Grant, that's a remarkable thing that you should be really proud of because I think it's really easy, and we saw a lot of this in the legislature, it's really easy to pick up a microphone and yell and scream about different objectives.
It's a different thing to roll your sleeves up and to do the hard work that it takes to actually make reforms happen. And, um, gosh, I think you, more than anybody appreciates catching me speechless, doesn't happen. But to be number one in Pell Grant, something I didn't know, success, uh, of, of Pell Grant re uh, recipients.
That's remarkable, buddy.
[01:27:23] Ray Rodrigues: Well, it may surprise you, but at the time the US Supreme Court issued their decision, I submitted op-eds to, uh, the Chronicle of Higher Education. Just to tell the Florida story and let them know this isn't the end of the world. And, uh, couldn't get it published. It wasn't newsworthy.
[01:27:41] Jamie Grant: That's the surprising part. I was like, there's no, there's no surprising part about you submitting a well-written, well sourced op-ed. I thought that was sarcasm. Then we got to the punchline. All right, so I want to take us one last place and then get into what we call the roundup, which is kind of our chance for folks to get to know you a little bit.
But as we segue to this last big rock, I was admittedly excited about doing this for a couple reasons. Number one, uh, I don't get to see you as much or nearly enough. Uh, so just the opportunity to get together is, is, is a treat. Number two, um, I thought you'd bring a lot to the table with respect to this ecosystem and, and how to make change happen.
But as I've listened to this conversation on unfold, Ray, I can't help but realize you have a lot to add to people agnostic of healthcare, education, technology, public safety, whatever the vertical is that somebody's trying to engage with the public sector to drive change and drive outcomes. Um, I feel like this whole conversation is like you operating on those different islands, going like, here's how I can contribute from this island to success, and then here's how I can contribute from this island and contribute to success.
And I say that as, uh, background for this last Big rock you're watching, I, I know I mentioned it to you and, and there's others, but the big Palantir announcement was a big deal in the tech industry where they just said, Hey, rather than go to college, if you are an elite student, come apply for a limited number of fellowships where we'll have you work for us for a year.
So make money rather than take loan. Um, and then if you succeed in that, we'll just place you in a job. So you're watching industry kind of simultaneously go, look, we think there's a role for higher education. We know it's important. They're kind of figuring that stuff out. Not everybody's where Florida is.
And so you're watching the marketplace go, well, we need elite talent. Let's get 'em faster. How do you see the role of higher education moving and being maybe more agile or more flexible where it seems like historically, and let me ask this question first. Historically, it feels like the product was one s skew a four year degree.
And there were different types of it, but it was like, come to us, get your four year degree, and that was the product. I get the sense that that's rapidly changing. Do you agree that it was the product first? 'cause if you don't, I'd love for you to correct me and educate me. And then secondarily, do you think that's changing or is this just kind of a flash in the pan right now with some of the stuff going on?
[01:30:30] Ray Rodrigues: I do agree that was the product. I think it remains the main product, but I absolutely believe you're going to see diversification within our system in particular, in higher education in general. I think within our system, uh, we have pilot projects going on where we have regional universities who are very connected to their local economy, working with their largest employers to create micro, micro-credential programs mm-hmm.
That benefit the employer, but benefit the student that completes the curriculum to obtain the microcredential. We're seeing that already, uh, in our system. We also, across the country, have seen the concept of a three year degree, which is actually the norm in Europe. In Europe, it's not a four year degree, it's a three year degree in the United States.
Accreditors have opposed, uh, allowing that why? So it is gone nowhere. I wanna know why it is gone nowhere, but there is momentum behind the three year degree now, and believe it or not, traditional institutional accreditors have come to the table and have said this is worthy of pursuing. So I think at a minimum you're going to see multiple paths for a degree to include the traditional bachelor's degree.
At 120 credit hours, a modified bachelor's degree. It may be called something different, I don't know. But it'll be a 90 credit hour degree. And I think you're going to see micro-credentials, which are specifically tied to the job market of the institution, where they they're located. I think all of that is going to be standard offerings.
If I were to project 10 years into the future, what university products would be.
[01:32:30] Jamie Grant: And if I know you, when you say I project this 10 years, I think that means you're already looking at the field and making moves with the Board of Governors and the institutions to say, how do we prepare for this?
[01:32:43] Ray Rodrigues: We're having, yes, we're actively doing the microcredentials, we're looking at the three year degrees and having those conversations.
Now, uh, part of that is, you know, that dictated largely by your accreditor. And in Florida, we're in a journey on our accreditor. So, you know, we'll get that wrapped up. And then, you know what, we'll go from there.
[01:33:04] Jamie Grant: When you talked about that, it takes me back to something I used to say, and we used to talk a lot about, or I, I talk about when association con, like the most powerful force in the capital is the rule of association.
Because a lot of those associations aren't interested in good policy or intellectual honesty. They're interested in the things that rile up their members to pay dues. Yeah. And, and I always found it was special to get to work with some associations that would come to the table and be honest brokers and there, and there definitely were exceptions on that.
But like, whether it's the Florida Board of Bar examiners that has a monopoly of controlling who's allowed to be a lawyer and open a law school. Uh, I can say things on the outside that you can't, it was just always offensive. It was like, if there were two then you'd see like one is a monopoly, two is competition.
That would, would bring some stuff to that. So I don't wanna put you in the hot seat 'cause I know that accreditation is a journey and it just, it's offensive to me that like if we had this conversation around the dinner table with anybody and everybody, they'd kind of a agree with it. Do you know, by the way, uh, not to age.
My old man, and I have this right, in one or two scenarios, he was either the last class in college that only needed three years of higher ed to get law school. So it used to be that after your junior year, if you knew you were going to law school, you didn't have to pay for that fourth year you got into law school and you went that way.
And you can imagine the people who didn't like that scenario.
[01:34:33] Ray Rodrigues: Yes.
[01:34:33] Jamie Grant: Uh, and so they reformed it and actually required a full four year degree. At that time you also took the bar exam on the floor of the floor to senate. You are dating your dad now it's good news. He doesn't watch this. He'll never see it.
We won't attribute it to you. But yeah, there's just like some of those fascinating things that you go back in history and it's why I love picking his brain on so much because he just lived in that, that era where so much was unfolding. Um, and they got a lot right. And a lot of, they got some stuff wrong that I like to remind 'em of, but alright, let's land here Rick.
We do something we call the Roundup and I'm excited for you. These are kind of unscripted rapid fire. Uh, just give chance for people to know you. Before we get to that though, I have one last question.
[01:35:17] Ray Rodrigues: Mm-hmm.
[01:35:18] Jamie Grant: Impromptu, if you were to give, we talked about, um, engaging with the public sector. So, um, real, real quick context.
In the sales world, there's these sales methodologies. Med pick would be one of the most, uh, common and the e stands for economic buyer. When you're selling to somebody in the commercial world, you're like, your, your sales team's supposed to find the economic buyer. Like who's the person that can say yes.
And, and one of our team's big beliefs in the public sector is there's no such thing as an economic buyer. But there is this army of people that can kill your deal. Like you have to go account for all the different people that can stop it. There's not really one person that can make it happen. Even a governor can't make it happen by construct of a legislative body, right?
Like, you have to kind of navigate that. If you were to say, here's two or three things that. You would tell somebody who wants to engage with the university, the state university system, they're aligned to the mission, they have something that would be great, and they're, they're trying to get people to pay attention and break through and they feel like they're just talking to a wall.
What are a couple of things you would tell them as they like, make the decision to engage with the public sector? Here's the things you gotta make sure you do and or here's the things you gotta make sure you don't do.
[01:36:39] Ray Rodrigues: I would say there's a tendency to try to get in to see the highest ranking person that can get an appointment with, and I'm not denigrating me at the system or my presidents at their institutions, but I think it would be a more effective strategy if you could get into the boots on the ground who are actually going to be utilizing the product and show them how the product benefits the institution.
Because if those people are one over and then they're carrying the message up, you're going to find, I think that is a more effective path to getting the attention of the person at the top of the institution than them receiving a pitch from an outside vendor who has an idea. Why the university should buy their product.
[01:37:35] Jamie Grant: Follow on. Would you agree that there's two distinct tracks? There's the executive track that goes to the U or the president or the provost, whatever it is. And those folks are more inclined to care about the business outcomes, the scorecard, what it does, but they're not gonna get in the weeds. And then there's this technical track or the program track that's saying like, okay, how does it work?
Would I want it, does it help me? 'cause I, I feel like we've seen around the country, uh, people kind of bounce one or the other. And I'm starting to think it's a both and like the lower levels maybe don't know how to make budget or don't know how to go take risk or to go approach the U sometimes. That's fair.
Okay. No, that's very fair. But I love where you're going 'cause I would get that as CIO. People would get offended when I was trying to help them by taking them to where they needed to go. And they're like, yes, they would lose the, okay. Is there anything else you'd add? Because that's a great answer.
[01:38:32] Ray Rodrigues: No, that, that, that would be my contribution to that
[01:38:34] Jamie Grant: question.
Perfect. All right. Now let's take you to the roundup. These are fun. First though, what's one piece of advice that has shaped your career most and who would you attribute it to? Like if there's something you just go back to?
[01:38:51] Ray Rodrigues: The most critical piece of advice I think I got was from my first boss in my first job out of college.
I worked for a, uh, partnership that was a husband and wife owned half the business, and then a wife of one of the doctors owned the other half and it was practice management. And the husband, his name was Hugh Legett. Uh, I remember plain as day him telling me as you're starting out, it's important to make sure you're there when they need you.
And so in my generation, uh, there was very much, I think generation X, so think this is early 1990s. There was very much a tendency to view that the workday fell within a set of parameters of eight to five. And what Hugh was telling me is sometimes what needs to be done happens before eight or after five.
And those who are in charge are gonna remember who was there and contributing and not grumbling or disappeared. And so I've taken that with me and, and tried to, uh, keep that in mind in, in every position I've had. And I've found more often than not That's true. Uh, they, people remember who's there when you, when they needed you.
[01:40:12] Jamie Grant: You know, I'm gonna give you a second compliment 'cause I just thought about this. But one of my little one-liners was, has always, has been for a long time that reliability is the most important ability because it's the intersection of, uh, like availability. And talent. Like I can trust you're gonna do the job and I can trust that you're gonna be there to do the job.
I also think you're one of the most reliable colleagues I ever served with that, you know, like when you had to go run to the capitol at 10:00 PM because a meeting was happening, I never once heard you grumble. And I was excited to hear what happened when you came back. 'cause it was usually something good,
[01:40:48] Ray Rodrigues: usually something interesting.
If nothing else,
[01:40:51] Jamie Grant: if somebody was leaving that house at 10:00 PM we were gonna get a good story on the way back. Whoever was leaving, whoever was coming back. True. Um, it's a shame there's not a documentary about the parlor. Uh, probably good too. But, um, that was the, the amount of public policy and change and outcome that happened in one little room over a decade is mind blowing if you truly is, if you stack it all up.
Um, what is something you do to unplug? Like when you're trying to shut your brain off, what is something that the chancellor says, all right, this is where the world kind of stands still for me,
[01:41:28] Ray Rodrigues: I do a couple of things. Uh, if I haven't gotten my exercise in, I go for a walk, throw my headphones and listen to a podcast.
If I have gotten my exercise in for the day, I go relax and read a book. And in both those situations, I'm checked out from whatever else is going on.
[01:41:47] Jamie Grant: That's fantastic. I'm so excited to ask you this next one because you were there for the genesis. But this has become great at like, dinner parties, get to know people.
You stay at a friend's house. You don't get to ask 'em the next morning,
what are you laughing at? Yeah, I know where this is
[01:42:10] Ray Rodrigues: going. Do you strip the sheets or make the bed? I strip the sheets and leave everything in a file by the door unless I know where the linger room is, and then I take it to the lingerie.
[01:42:24] Jamie Grant: So we injected that question into the, the roundup a while back. We asked every guest in a dawn on me, when you were coming on, I was like, man, if anybody had any idea how violent the debate was around that in the parlor, uh, they would, they would think we're crazy.
Um, all right. The, the only debate more violent was Peter Pan or Chip. You couldn't have set me up better. You're gonna have to wait for that one. That story still is my favorite. The long arc of that playing out is still one of my favorites. And the only reason that one wasn't as violent, it was really just you and Jose and then the rest of us that are on your team on this.
But, uh, the way that played out and the blind taste test is still one of the greatest things I've ever seen. Um, alright. A book, a band or a show that you're convinced the world needs to know about that might not know enough about.
[01:43:21] Ray Rodrigues: Well, I'm definitely not good on a show because by the time I watch something, it's old.
But I will tell you the, the show I have enjoyed the most and I've just finished watching it because I finally got access to Apple TV was Ted Lasso. If you have not seen Ted Lasso and because you don't subscribe to Apple tv, bite the bullet, get the subscription, Ted Lasso alone is worth the subscription.
[01:43:49] Jamie Grant: You know, I, I totally agree with you, and I'd say that show is one of a very small number of shows that actually had a final episode that like did the rest of the show Justice.
[01:44:00] Ray Rodrigues: Yes.
[01:44:01] Jamie Grant: So good. My, I in fact, my last Halloween, uh, while I was still on the inside and things were crazy, as you know, and we're like running around all over, I realized that I hadn't, the team had decided to do like a Halloween Halloween's just never been a big thing for me, not a huge fan of it.
And I realized the team was doing this thing and I was like, holy crap, I didn't think about it's tomorrow. And I went to the like one H Halloween pop-up store right there on Monroe by Hooters, RIP, and all they had was a Ted Lasso. Giddy up. And so I'll send you the picture, but I literally shaved my beard off for the mustache at lunch in my office and came walking out in, uh, in Lasso Tire for them.
'cause they all had bet that I'd forgotten when I showed up that day. Um,
[01:44:49] Ray Rodrigues: all you send the photo, I wanna see that
[01:44:51] Jamie Grant: I will and liberty to use. Um, what is your hottest take, the most controversial take you have that you're convinced shouldn't be a hot take?
[01:45:03] Ray Rodrigues: Hmm. Now that's, that's a deep question there. I'd say, uh, I actually, I don't know what my hottest take is.
Okay,
[01:45:13] Jamie Grant: we'll move on. It's a fair, you, you ha It's funny because I think so many of your supposed hot takes, like go into your reforms. They're not hot takes at all, which is why. All right. I think that's a funny one. Let's, let's change this one. If the Board of Governors could play your walkup song for every Board of Governor's meeting, what are you picking Beautiful Day by YouTube?
Okay. That, that actually, you know what's funny about that question is like you learn about people and that is super on brand for you,
[01:45:51] Ray Rodrigues: almost as old brand is Cracker Barrel.
[01:45:57] Jamie Grant: The only shame I have is that Cracker Barrel didn't ask us to record this at Cracker Barrel. Uh, but maybe, maybe one day. Maybe one day. All right, now I have a would you rather for you, and this one has never been in the roundup before this one was curated specifically for the one and only Ray Rod. But you have to pick one of these two things, okay?
Would you rather be forced to give up your parlor jacket and never be able to wear it again or be forced to eat gif peanut butter every time you eat peanut butter for the next three years?
[01:46:33] Ray Rodrigues: That's a no brainer. I'm giving up the jacket and you'll get my Peter Pan when you pry from my Kohl's dead singers.
[01:46:43] Jamie Grant: So for those who have no idea about this inside joke, we're not gonna tell the whole story here, but suffice to say, Ray Rod has this very elegant, awesome parlor jacket that is a masterpiece. And for how many sessions did you and Manny end up in the background? I know the parlor jacket made it into that at least once.
But in budget conference, the press kept picking these pictures of you and Manny like deliberating over the spreadsheet when really you were just there to capture the picture as like a joke on the process.
[01:47:13] Ray Rodrigues: Four sessions.
[01:47:14] Jamie Grant: Four, okay. And was the parlor always? The parlor jacket wasn't always in it, but it did make it at least once.
If I'm one, it
[01:47:20] Ray Rodrigues: made it. We did one conference on a weekend. At night. And so in that scenario, I felt it appropriate, uh, that I could wear the Farlow jacket into the capitol
[01:47:32] Jamie Grant: and nobody was better. Like I could have never pulled off that prank. I had a place I always sat for, I had plenty of pranks as everybody knew, but like I could have never pulled that one off 'cause they would've thought I was up to something I loved.
'cause that was front page above the fold, at least one session where the caption is like, you know, chairman Diaz and majority leader Ray Rodriguez discussed the budget. And I'm like, man, if y'all had any idea,
[01:47:56] Ray Rodrigues: that is true. That was a color photo above the fold that we then obtained the print and hung in the parlor.
[01:48:04] Jamie Grant: You know, by the way, side note, I was at, uh, one of my best friend's places in Orange Beach, uh, a couple weekends ago. Uh, and Dr. Herrick and he, uh, Jer came over and visited 'cause we're right down the road from Jar. And so we'd been hanging out that day and somehow David starts asking questions about legislative world.
Jer says something about me on the floor, and David's like, can you see any of that on tv? And I'm like, no, it turns out you can't. And Jerry's like, no, no. The Florida channel exists. And now David's just like scrolling through the Florida channel. It's the most uncomfortable thing I've ever seen. But one of the things we made sure to show him, uh, do you remember when the specialty license plate reform got done?
And we did the, I did the dolphin thing for Jose. I don't know if you remember, but we had a joke in there about the Jif caucus, uh, to, to roast Jose on that, for everybody paying attention. Jose Oliva loves his peanut butter, was a roommate of Ray Rodd loves his peanut butter. The problem was both were as zealous.
I don't know that anybody's more a zealous GIF fan than Jose or a zealous righteous zealot than Ray Rodd on the Peter Pan side, but it played out over like six years and then in a blind taste test, Jose got it wrong and we were all vindicated. Uh, which now he's on your Board of Governors. I'm, I just wanna see like crackers and peanut butter at the table on one of those.
Uh, that would be awesome. I feel it would be perfect. Alright, we're gonna land here. We like to, uh, I found out recently we didn't originate this, uh, somebody else does it too. So we were calling it our signature. Uh, but we also like this concept apparently. Um, love it. Every guest gets to leave a question for the next guest, so you don't know who the next guest is, although there is a good chance it's somebody we mentioned on this call 'cause we're doing an education theme, so it may be somebody you actually know.
Um, but as you're thinking about the question you would wanna leave for the next guest, our last episode was with, um, somebody who is an absolute rockstar. She's a JD PhD that was like trained at the FBI has done all sorts of incredible work across pedophilia, homicide, like some of the grossest stuff in the world.
Like really trying to take that one is too many mentality and do that work. Um, she now is doing a ton of work in the, um, screen addiction space, really focused on AI and social media and what it's doing to a generation of kids and parents and educators. Lisa Stroman is her name. She's awesome. She left.
One of my favorite questions, and I think it's perfectly tailored for you because I think a lot of people would shy from this question and I think you're gonna lean into it. Her question was, what is the most humbling experience that you've had in the professional sense and what did you learn from it in your space?
[01:50:47] Ray Rodrigues: The most humbling experience occurred right after I got elected to the State House of Representatives. I'm doing office hours in my district office and I get a phone call and it's a constituent from Bonita Springs and the constituent is complaining because their trash has it been picked up. And so I take the complaint and I say, well ma'am, your state legislature's really not who you should call to address that.
She goes, what do you mean? And I said, well, the contract for your sanitation is managed by your municipality. So in this case that would be the Bonita Springs City government. She goes, well, who should I call? And I said, well, I'm sure Mayor Nelson could get this handle for you. And she goes, the mayor is just dead silence.
And I'm waiting. I'm like, I know she's gonna say something. And she comes back with, I didn't want to start that high.
So right off the bat, my constituents were keeping me humble.
[01:52:00] Jamie Grant: How have I never heard that? How many people is Bonita Springs? 20,050? Uh, yeah,
[01:52:07] Ray Rodrigues: that's probably accurate. 20 to 25,000.
[01:52:09] Jamie Grant: And your house district at the time was probably 180 5?
[01:52:12] Ray Rodrigues: Yes. 156,000. Actually, I remember the number. My house district was 156,000.
[01:52:20] Jamie Grant: Of course you remember the number also. That's one of the better.
I think we all had some version of getting humbled pretty quickly getting elected. But the mayor, you think I'm gonna bug the mayor? That's why I'm here with you.
Yes, ma'am. I'd be, I tell you what, I'll come pick up the track myself. I'll not just, I'll, I'll hop in the truck and, all right. Leave me a question for our next guest.
[01:52:47] Ray Rodrigues: My question would be this, if you were king for a day, what public policy would you enact and why?
[01:52:59] Jamie Grant: You'd only get to pick one. You only get one.
I love that. That's a great one. What's gonna be, that's a great one. Ray Rodd, chancellor, Senator, chairman, leader. You've had a lot of titles. Uh, my favorite is Friend. Um, I can't thank you enough for doing this. Uh, I told the team, I promise, uh, not that they were objecting, but I was like, hear me out. Like there's very few people that understand this ecosystem of public policy and operations and outcomes and have a subject matter domain expertise that is as great as the kindness and humility and, and commitment to the mission.
And uh, like I said, man, this is our last episode in South Carolina. So you're sending me outta Greenville. Uh, and I can't imagine a better way to wrap up what's been a really special year for me personally, um, than to spend some time with you doing this. And I know you have so many other things. You're obviously on the road.
Um, so brother, thank you. Uh, I really enjoyed it and I hope you had some fun. And I hope that people understand how much work and effort and commitment has gone into building the number one system in America, and how much dedication and humility and perseverance are behind the keeping of that title.
Because I've described you as a lot of things, complacent is never gonna be one.
[01:54:28] Ray Rodrigues: Well, thank you for having me on. Uh, and I do look forward to you getting back in Tallahassee for a visit so we can make a Cracker Barrel ride.
[01:54:38] Jamie Grant: I always laughed when people were like trying to find us and they would've never searched like the Hooters Al Monroe or Cracker Barrel or like we were in hiding in plain sight a lot of times.
Uh, that's right. I, I promise you this Cracker Barrel run in September. Sounds good. All right, brother. It's good to see you. See you, brother. Thank you, man. All right. We're gonna do something that we haven't done before. Um, and it's both to accommodate our guest and also, uh, to complete the roundup. And because Ray Rodd is Ray Rodd, he texted me the day after we recorded and said, dang it, man, I thought about my hot take.
Is it too late to do it? And so, uh, I said, absolutely not. Um, so without further ado, Ray Rod's hot take being added to the roundup. Alright. If you have a hot take, like your hottest take that you're convinced shouldn't be hot at all, what is it?
[01:55:35] Ray Rodrigues: Conventional wisdom is that the reason recent college graduates are struggling to find employment is because of the effect of artificial intelligence on the marketplace.
My hot take is that it is not artificial intelligence. It is the indoctrinating concepts recent college graduates have been exposed to that are now producing a generation of social justice activists. Who small businesses don't wanna hire. I love that.
[01:56:11] Jamie Grant: In essence, we're we're, you're, you're saying that where obviously the impact of AI and efficiencies and throughput, that, that some people could look at this data data lazily and suggest that the problem is innovation making jobs not necessary.
And what you're saying is No. No, the jobs are actually more necessary than ever. We just haven't historically been producing the kind of talent that the market wants to hire.
[01:56:40] Ray Rodrigues: Absolutely. That's what I'm saying.
[01:56:42] Jamie Grant: That's fantastic. That's a great hot take. And it's not, that's actually an ice cold. Like we love the question because we wanna get to things that are like actually ice cold that maybe are provocative.
But if people will come to the table with an open mind and go like, wait a minute, what is the marketplace actually telling us? We get there
[01:56:58] Ray Rodrigues: and I've got data to support my hot tech.
[01:57:01] Jamie Grant: Can I get that data? 'cause I am not shocked. You have the data.
[01:57:04] Ray Rodrigues: Yes. So AI is a recent phenomenon. The data shows that the decline in recent college graduate employment is actually a three year trend that has continued to get worse.
That's from the Department of Labor. Also data from the Federal Reserve. So the problem with getting employment for recent college graduates predates the mass deployment of ai. That's number one. Number two, if you look at surveys that have been done in 2023, at the end of the year, there was a joint project that was done by Red Balloon, which is a job recruiting service.
And the public square, they surveyed 70,000 small businesses, and they ask them this question, are you more or less likely to hire a job seeker with a four year degree from a major college or university? The responses were four times more likely to say, no, I will not be more likely to hire a recent college graduate than they were to answer in the affirmative.
Yes, I will. They were later asked, why? Why are you less likely to hire a recent college graduate? And the number one answer was recent. College graduates typically have an incompatible ideology with my business culture. So here's what we know. These divisive concepts like critical race theory, critical gender theory, intersectionality, colonialism, have been embedded in general education courses that students are required to take.
So as a freshman, they show up, they're told You have to take these courses and remember. College freshmen have spent the previous 13 years being conditioned to go into a classroom, see the teacher at the front of the classroom and accept his truth. What that teacher is providing them as knowledge. Now they're in their, uh, first semester of college in a general education class that they're required to take, and they're being presented these divisive concepts from the faculty member, and they're treating it like they've treated everything else as they've gone through school, as this is the truth.
We also know nationally that the typical college graduate, if they graduate, take six years to earn their degree. Now in Florida, four years is the norm, but nationally it is six. So we should not be surprised that students who have spent six years being indoctrinated into these concepts that have their roots in Marxism leave the university with an ideology that is rooted to be opposed to small businesses in a capitalist economy.
And so then they arrive and it's incompatible with the business culture. The other answer that came out of the survey is that these recent college graduates are too easily offended. Now, let me translate that for you. These recent college graduates spend all their time identifying microaggressions.
Instead of actually doing the job that they're being hired to do. So what we have seen is by allowing indoctrination to occur nationally in higher education, we are producing graduates who are incompatible with the job market. And it is expensive to terminate employees. It is expensive to deal with turnover.
It is easier for these small business owners and the people who run their small businesses to just say, we're not gonna hire these individuals and we're gonna look for more mature individuals who have experience.
[02:01:04] Jamie Grant: I love that. There's two things I'd say to land that. One, we talked about reliability being the most important ability when you talked about, you know, you gotta show up, right.
Two, uh, one of my favorite quotes, and I don't know where it comes from, but I do believe this is true, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Um, three, no single individual can make an organization a success, but one single cancer in the locker room can kill the entire operation.
[02:01:32] Ray Rodrigues: Yes.
[02:01:32] Jamie Grant: And then I think lastly, Ray, that you touched on beautifully that I never thought about before.
Um, when you tie both the indoctrinate like, like I think you said it really well. I, I, I also think there's something that you touched on that's really interesting of the type of indoctrination, because at the end of the day, payroll doesn't make itself revenue doesn't drop out of trees. The small business owners that are the backbone of the American economy are fighting every single day to figure out how to stay in business first and foremost, to be able to make that's right payroll.
And so it becomes maybe easy for us in some of the circles we run in at times to talk about it, a theory like job place, market performance, like these big things. But I think you just really touched on the really heart, the heart of it, the core of it that's like, man, I can't bring people into my organization that are gonna be a cancer 'cause cancer's spread.
And two, I'm not necessarily looking when I hire somebody to be ideologically aligned to me, but I am looking for them to buy into our mission statement and understand that we collectively as a team have to contribute to that team payroll to stick. Um,
[02:02:47] Ray Rodrigues: we are reaping what has been sown, which has been a generation of faculty members who do not believe their, their mission is to educate, but have accepted their mission as producing social justice activists.
[02:03:02] Jamie Grant: Man, I could take us on a whole nother thread here, but, um, I remember when, when I was gonna law school, my, my dad said to me, he said, look, you go to a lot of law schools that'll teach you the law, probably better than Stetson, but no other school in the country. I'll teach you how to be a lawyer better than Stetson.
And he talked about, and my brother's experience 14 years ahead of me, all three of us graduated from Stetson and. One of the things I found to be true was that when I clerked with Ivy League kids or kids that were at better schools, like I was way more prepared to actually do the thing. They were maybe smarter and scored better on the LSAT and maybe knew the black letter of the law better.
But if you really mapped it back, one of the things that was really interesting about Stetson is that the faculty was made up largely of practitioners who were then teaching.
[02:03:46] Ray Rodrigues: Mm-hmm.
[02:03:47] Jamie Grant: And I think if we go all the way upstream, um, I would be curious how much you've done or know on what percentage of our faculty have ever had a job that required a p and l or payroll that wasn't just in academia.
Because academia can lend itself if, if that's all you've done. Kind of like we had people we served with in office that all they'd ever done was been elected. And sure there's valuable experience there, but I don't think you can understate the value of the experience in the private sector where it is, you know, produce or go out of business or produce or go broke.
[02:04:25] Ray Rodrigues: I think your point is spot on. I don't know what the data is in terms of the percentage of our faculty that had that experience, but I do know this in Florida where we have, under the leadership of Governor Deus eliminated indoctrination and turn our focus to education. We're not having the problem with our graduates being unable to find employment.
Our graduates are getting jobs. 'cause our graduates haven't been indoctrinated into these Marxist concepts and our degrees are aligned with the needs of the marketplace. That's the second piece of this, is that in education, higher education across the country, a number of degrees were created because the faculty wanted to teach it.
And it had no connection to the mark, the job marketplace or the major employers in the regional area where they've done this. And so now you have social justice activists who have been indoctrinated, that have these degrees, that have no connection to the economy, and they're not equipped to go work in a small business.
[02:05:31] Jamie Grant: You know, gosh, you just keep pulling threads that are so good. Uh, if reliability is the most important ability. I think that also applies to, I can think of, um, I I, it was very interesting when I, when I was looking for my clerkship and you talked about working in higher ed during the middle of the great recession, I was coming outta law school in the middle of the great recession.
And so, uh, you know, you're competing for clerkships and kind of a tryout job at a big firm. And, and you're, you're going down that path. Um, I coincidentally was the first person that steps in to lose my big Glo job. And everybody's like, sucks to be you. And then the waterfall had everybody. Um, but I say that to say, one of the things that was really interesting is the firms that were recruiting at Stetson would say, Hey, we only recruit Ivy League, UF and Stetson, or Ivy League, FSU, and Stetson.
I always found it interesting. I'd ask him, I'd say, Hey, why is Stetson on that list? And to a t every firm around the country said some version of, we hired one and we knew we wanted more of that. And I think to your point, the job you're doing as the chancellor and working with the team and leading, um, is creating a reliability that people can go, Florida institutions are producing what I need, and they're gonna want more of that, and they're gonna want less of what they're getting in other places.
[02:06:46] Ray Rodrigues: Absolutely. That is our goal.
[02:06:48] Jamie Grant: Ah, that's a great hot take. That's not hot at all. It's also the most in-depth hot take we've had on the show.