Broward (FL) College president abruptly resigns after DeSantis shakes up his board

Gregory Adam Haile, president, Broward College (Ft. Lauderdale) abruptly resigned from his position Wednesday evening, one month after Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed three new conservative members to his five member Board of Trustees.  The resignation caught the college Board off guard and they  held off accepting his resignation at an emergency board meeting Thursday morning until they could find out what led to his decision.
 
Haile,45, a Columbia University trained lawyer who has taught at Harvard University, as well as Broward College and Miami-Dade College has served as Broward College president since 2018.  DeSantis appointed him to an education advisory committee and to the Re-Open Florida Task Force. 
 
Haile is the first ever public college president to serve as deputy chair of the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank.
 
At the emergency session, board members said they were shocked to learn of Haile’s resignation and needed to understand more about his decision before determining what action they should take. The trustees agreed they wanted to see if the issue was fixable. 
 
Some members, though, including Chairperson Alexis Yarbrough, whom Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to the board in February along with two others, acknowledged an agreement may not be up to them.
 
For his part, Haile, who remains in the position, did not attend or participate in the emergency board meeting.
 
Changes at other colleges 

Since the beginning of the year, DeSantis has been appointing new, more conservative members to state college and university boards. In January, he appointed six new trustees to the board at New College, a state school in Sarasota that prided itself on its liberal arts education. At the time, New College President Patricia Okker called the board changes a “hostile takeover.” The new board fired her.
 
The board of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton held a heated board meeting in August amid a contentious presidential search, with some board members slamming the process while others defended it, the Sun-Sentinel reported. The search committee had named three finalists; the list did not include Florida House Rep. Randy Fine, a Republican from Brevard County whom DeSantis supported. The state’s Board of Governors froze the search in July, citing “anomalies” in the search process.