C. David Brown, II (JD 78) is heading the search for the 12th President of the University of Florida. (Photo by Marcela Suter)

By Richard Goldstein

C. David Brown, II (JD 78) is looking for a new CEO. It’s a task he’s getting used to. As a member of the CVS/Caremark board, Brown helped select a new CEO last year. Now he’s in the market to find the 12^th President of the University of Florida.

Brown, chairman of the UF Board of Trustees and chairman of the statewide law firm Broad and Cassel, calls the UF presidency the second most important job in Florida.

“It’s a very demanding job,” Brown said in an interview from his law offices overlooking Orlando’s downtown. “They’re running one of the nation’s premiere public universities with some of the top students in the country, a prestigious faculty and a research component that is one of the largest in the country. In addition, they oversee a major health care system, one of the largest in the state of Florida, hugely involved in research and quality of care issues. And not to mention a world-class athletic program they have to manage.”

Brown noted that leading a great academic institution is only half the job. UF is a 150-year-old land-grant university with the state’s largest land-grant agriculture and natural resources program (IFAS).

“In their spare time, the president must maintain relationships with the Legislature and carefully monitor the political environment of the state in order to maintain funding levels, which is a very complicated task,” Brown said. “Not to mention they have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations and keep our 340,000 alumni informed and satisfied as to the progress of their beloved alma mater.

“Now I think that’s a pretty complex job.”

Bernie Machen, who has held the post since 2004, announced in June that he will leave at the end of 2013. The lead time gives Brown, the 23-person search committee that he chairs and the Board of Trustees “a long runway” to find a replacement. Brown hopes to have a new president in place by the summer.

Dianna Morgan, a search committee member and past chairwoman of the UF Board of Trustees, told a group of UF administrators Thursday that a new president could be in place by the end of the calendar year. She expects soon to announce plans for public interviews and forums for five to seven presidential candidates.

The new president must shape a fast-changing higher education environment, says Brown, but he has a traditional idea in mind about where he should take the university: boost its academic rigor.

Admission to the University of Florida “shouldn’t be the peak,” Brown said. “I don’t think in all cases it’s like that but I think in some cases (it is). I just find it amazing how good these students are, and I want to make sure we’re pushing them to achieve what they can achieve.”

A long-time scholar of and active participant in higher education governance agrees that Florida should keep academic improvement in the forefront as it finds a new leader. James V. Koch is president emeritus of Old Dominion University and co-author of a book about the characteristics of successful university presidents.

“The University of Florida needs a president whose vision includes moving UF into the elite ranks of public universities, i.e., Michigan, Virginia, UC-Berkeley,” Koch wrote in an email. “UF should not be satisfied with anything less as its ambition. However, this must be more than simply a goal for the next president. He or she must enunciate credible plans for moving the institution to that position over a 10-to-20-year period.”

Koch and co-author James L. Fisher conclude that university presidents are most likely to succeed when they have held the job of a university president before.

“The evidence … is unmistakable.  It tells us that the best predictor of successful presidential performance is that individual’s previous successful experience as a president,” Koch said.

The presidential search committee headed by Brown has laid down desired traits for a new president. No candidate will have all the characteristics, but academic governance figures prominently.

Brown earned an accounting degree from UF before studying law, in which he specializes in real estate transactions. Brown noted UF Law Professor Fletcher Baldwin, now emeritus and who continues to teach, as an especially effective and influential instructor.

Brown rose to the chairmanship of the 170-lawyer, 8-office law firm of Broad and Cassel, where he has worked since shortly after leaving UF Law. Brown credits no dramatic court or business success with his ascension, but steady work building a stronger organization.

Brown’s family has lived in Florida since the 1860s. As a Florida native, he watched his state grow in population and economic power. In the 1950s, while Brown was in grade school, Florida was a post-war backwater with a population of nearly 3 million. Today, it is a Sun Belt megastate of more than 19 million people.

As the state became more powerful, Brown lent his talents to aid in its growth on more than one occasion.

Brown’s transaction expertise came in handy as he worked with then-Governor Jeb Bush to lure Scripps Research Institute, a bio-medical powerhouse, to Palm Beach County in 2003. He structured the complex public/private transaction that Bush pushed through the Legislature to seal the deal. Bush had previously appointed Brown to the Florida Transportation Commission from 1999 to 2004, and served as its chairman from 2000 to 2003.

Brown was first appointed a member of the UF Board of Trustees from February 2004 to 2008, and was later reappointed in June 2011. He has served as chairman since April 2012. The married father of two grown children doesn’t want to say how much time he’s spending on the most recent public service for his state and alma mater, though he allowed that finding a UF president is eating up much more time than expected.

“If you don’t have a good CEO you’re really hamstrung,” Brown observed. “I’ve had the benefit of having a great CEO to work with. I want to make sure we find a successor who can build on President Machen’s accomplishments.”

For his part, Machen figures Brown is the ideal person to recruit his successor.

“David Brown is a smart guy whose thoughtful, measured leadership style has been great for the University of Florida,” Machen said. “He understands and appreciates the university in all its complexity, and he is well-known and well-liked in Florida’s business, education and political circles. We couldn’t ask for a better person to head up the UF Board of Trustees and the university’s search for its next president.”

For more information about the search for a new UF president go to http://presidentialsearch.ufl.edu/.

Hap Shashy (JD 73), chief counsel to the IRS from 1990 to 1993 and now Partner in Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP, explains the debt and deficit to UF Law students and faculty during the Ellen Bellet Gelberg Tax Policy Lecture on Friday, Sept. 30. Watching are Eric Solomon, assistant secretary for tax policy in the U.S. Treasury from 2006 to 2009, now director of Ernst & Young LLP's National Tax Department; and Lindy Paull (JD 79, LLM 80), former Senate Republican Finance Committee staff director and chief counsel, now principal at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. (Photo by Kimberly Burroughs)

The federal debt and deficit are rising to never-before-seen heights, and this reality is driving Congress and the president to get serious about deficit reduction. Despite a newfound determination from the political class to deal with the problem, the way forward for federal taxes and budgets remain uncertain, according to three experts who spoke at the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

Students, faculty and staff filled the Chesterfield Smith Ceremonial Classroom, HOL 180, for the second Ellen Bellet Gelberg Tax Policy Lecture on Friday, Sept. 30, when three experienced Washington hands laid out their insights on tax and budget policy.

Click here for a webcast of the lecture.

Annual spending exceeding government revenue – what’s known as the deficit – has been customary since World War II, explained Hap Shashy (JD 73), chief counsel to the IRS from 1990 to 1993 and now Partner in Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP.

Shashy pointed to two line graphs showing the deficit bouncing along with a small gap between spending and revenue through most of the post-war period. Until, that is, came an economic shock to the system.

“The deficit transcends time, it transcends political parties … and it also transcends different versions of the tax system,” said Shashy, who sits on the Levin College of Law Board of Trustees. “And then the meltdown hits and the Great Recession hits and that’s when the deficit – the gap – became very big, unsustainable, and got everybody’s attention and people started thinking seriously about what needs to be done with it.”

Three years since the economic meltdown of 2008 and the national debt has grown rapidly, equal to about 100 percent of the economy’s yearly output. Even after the economy recovers from its current doldrums, rapidly expanding health care costs and interest on the national debt will keep deficits high, Shashy noted.

This rapid increase in the debt and deficit has spurred on initiatives such as the House-Senate supercommitee, charged with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction through 2021, said Lindy Paull (JD 79, LLM 80). Paull was Republican staff director and chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Finance Committee from 1986 to 1998 and is now principal at PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP where she guides clients through the governmental tax and regulatory thicket.

“The debt is something a lot of people have started to seize on – the growth of the debt, the size of the debt relative to the size of the economy,” Paull said. “And that’s why I think you see a lot of alarm bells going off with policymakers, while you really didn’t see that in the early days of deficits.”

Shashy said solving the problem is likely to include a combination of spending cuts, tax increases and growth for the economy.

How much of any of these elements will contribute to solving the debt-and-deficit problem remains uncertain because of political deadlock over whether to raise taxes; upcoming elections that could alter the political landscape; the knotty issue of tax reform; and the confusing nature of budget deficit and debt projections.

One way to slice through this problem could be a value added tax.

“There has been testimony before Congress that all roads lead to a VAT,” Paull said. “Economists believe they don’t impact economic growth the way income taxes do.”

A VAT, which 140 other countries employ, is similar to a national sales tax but the tax is applied at each level of production. It could raise $3 trillion to $7 trillion in 10 years and that money could be used to lower income tax rates, to lower the deficit or be directed toward health care costs, which many other countries use VAT revenues for, Paull said.

Following other countries in using a VAT for health care costs could make sense in the American context because Medicare and Medicaid represent the largest drivers of the debt, Paull noted.

And then there is the option of comprehensive tax reform. Comprehensive tax reform is often used as shorthand for eliminating deductions for individuals and corporations to simplify the system. Deductions tend to encourage behavior that isn’t optimally productive so the more deductions, the less efficient the economy.

Though it is only 10 percent of the nation’s tax revenue, corporate taxation policy takes up a seemingly much larger percentage of the tax policy debate, said Eric Solomon, assistant secretary for tax policy in the U.S. Treasury from 2006 to 2009, and now director of Ernst & Young LLP’s National Tax Department.

He said the corporate tax system is widely blamed for encouraging American companies to keep overseas profits overseas because companies are taxed if those profits are brought home. Converting to a territorial tax system, which other major economies use, might help solve that problem. The repatriating of American companies profits could create jobs, increase economic growth and thus restrain the deficit.

While altering the tax system might goose economic growth, it almost certainly would redistribute the tax burden. But it might not raise much more revenue for the government as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product.

Another of Shashy’s graphs showed that taxes raised by the government as a percentage of GDP have stayed constant at about 18 to 19 percent of GDP. Sashay, the former IRS counsel, notes that every change in the tax regime since World War II has prompted a change in the behavior of taxpayers so that roughly the same percentage of national income goes to the taxman.

“That’s the business you’re going to be in pretty soon: Responding to tax changes, helping tax payers figure out some way to navigate this morass we call the U.S. tax system,” Shashy told UF Law students.

Gelberg (LLM 77), who sponsors the lectures, was a practicing tax attorney and partner in the firm of Lamont Neiman Interian & Bellet, P.A., which has offices in both Miami and Boca Raton. She is a member of the Levin College of Law’s Board of Trustees.

The lecture series examines tax policy and how its implementation affects the economy and people’s lives as well as the underlying policy considerations that lead to the tax rules, which tax professionals deal with everyday. Gelberg holds a J.D. and an LL.M. in taxation from the college of law.