How UF’s law dean is defending Uthmeier’s $100k teaching job behind closed doors

The dean of University of Florida’s law school defended her decision to hire Attorney General James Uthmeier as a highly paid adjunct professor during a closed-door faculty meeting on Tuesday, telling skeptical colleagues that the move was in the law school’s “best interest” despite internal backlash over his salary and political profile.

Merritt McAlister, the longtime interim dean of UF’s Levin College of Law, stressed that she faced no political pressure to hire the attorney general. Any such directive, she went on, would have been “an impermissible intervention.”

“I want to make it very clear that this was my decision,” McAlister said, according to a 20-minute recording reviewed by the Herald/Times. “I thought it was a decision that was in the best interest of the law school for a variety of reasons, and I continue to feel that way.”

The thorny politics of higher education in the age of Donald Trump loomed in the not-so-distant background of McAlister’s remarks. Bringing Uthmeier to Florida’s flagship law school, the dean said, was just one plank in her broader mission to “protect and preserve” her faculty’s academic independence — a nod to Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis’ aggressive campaign to reshape college campuses.

“That is foremost in my mind at all times,” McAlister said. “I have red lines in my mind about what those lines are… From my perspective, this was consistent with our overall obligations. It was also part of furthering our objectives to increase and expand intellectual diversity — to connect us more deeply with the state government.”

The dean’s private address to faculty marked her first known response to mounting bipartisan blowback that followed the Herald/Times’ report on Uthmeier’s $100,000-a-year part-time contract. The meeting also revealed questions among rank-and-file law professors over Uthmeier’s compensation and whether the attorney general followed the law school’s hiring and curricular approval protocols.

Uthmeier is the highest-paid adjunct instructor at UF’s law school in at least a quarter century, the Herald/Times reported, and his compensation amounts to roughly eight times more than the median adjunct law instructor’s salary. Combined with his attorney general paycheck, Uthmeier’s teaching stipend pushes his total state-funded compensation to $240,000 annually.

McAlister took responsibility on Tuesday for procedural missteps and acknowledged concerns about pay and political optics. But she stood by the arrangement, saying Uthmeier has delivered outsized value to students and acted as a political “connector” who attends events, offers feedback and helps connect the school to Tallahassee power brokers.

McAlister said she intends to renew Uthmeier’s one-year contract if scheduling allows. His employment agreement has him working 20% the hours of a full-time employee, which could equate to roughly $400 per hour.

The pay, McAlister conceded, is “a large number” and “obviously the issue that has caught many people’s attention.” In hindsight, the dean said she might have created a new designation — such as “governmental scholar in residence” — to reflect that his duties go beyond those of a typical adjunct instructor.

Most adjuncts, McAlister noted, are practicing attorneys who donate their services. Uthmeier’s situation is “different,” she said, because of the access and engagement he offers.

Still, the dean acknowledged broader salary equity concerns, particularly between tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty. She told faculty that she has asked the university for additional resources to address those disparities if funding becomes available.

“It doesn’t address the fact that I think, on its own terms, from my perspective, he has provided significant value above and beyond what an ordinary adjunct provides,” she said.

Reached through a UF spokesperson, McAlister declined to comment. At the Tuesday meeting, she promised to continue answering faculty questions about Uthmeier but said she did not plan to publicly address his employment moving forward.

The attorney general’s office did not respond to the Herald/Times’ questions about what McAlister said. Uthmeier has previously defended his compensation, pointing to the roughly $60,000 pay cut he took when DeSantis tapped him as attorney general last year.

‘A screw up on our part’

Despite internal fanfare among leadership, the law school didn’t promote Uthmeier’s hire until five months after his start date and just days after the Herald/Times began asking university officials about the attorney general’s employment. McAlister told faculty on Wednesday that she “should have announced it in a more robust way at the beginning” and admitted to being “shy because we were coming off of bad news from The New York Times.”

That story revolved around a federal judge teaching an originalism course, who issued a book award to a self-proclaimed antisemitic student for a capstone essay arguing that some constitutional rights only applied to white people.

Responding to faculty inquiries about Uthmeier’s hiring process, McAlister said he passed through proper law school channels, vis-à-vis its Adjunct Teaching Committee, but acknowledged “some irregularity with respect to the Curriculum Committee.” She did not detail those issues, though his syllabi have drawn scrutiny for omitting a full list of course materials and comprehensive lesson plans.

“That was a screw-up on our part,” she said.

One professor questioned whether Uthmeier bypassed a separate law school policy requiring full faculty approval when an adjunct teaches two courses in the same academic year. McAlister said she did not know whether all materials were forwarded as required and admitted she is “not always as careful about some processes as I could be.”

“I will own that,” the dean said, “My intent was to follow the process and to the extent that there was a failure, it was not in telling the committee that we needed to present it.”

‘Music to my ears’

Faculty also raised concerns about inviting a figure as politically divisive as Uthmeier to campus. In McAlister’s calculation, Uthmeier’s presence was part of “protecting and preserving” the law school’s academic independence and “providing a measure of increased intellectual diversity.”

In a recent one-week span, McAlister noted, the law school hosted a spate of ideologically diverse events: the attorney general’s class, a symposium critical of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” a guest lecture on racial injustice and the “decline of democracy,” and an environmental conference featuring a fault-finding panel focused on Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz detention center — one of Uthmeier’s signature political projects.

One professor posed a hypothetical to McAlister: Would she offer the attorney general’s current role to a Democrat — Pete Buttigieg, for instance — if they were interested?

“Absolutely,” McAlister replied, referencing “institutional neutrality,” or the notion of “hiring without regard to viewpoint.” If Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Nikki Fried were attorney general, the dean mused, she would make the same decision. (Fried taught a short course at the law school in January on marijuana law, McAlister said. Contacted by the Herald/Times on Wednesday, Fried said the law school covered her lodging expenses but did not compensate her for the 14-hour class.)

At least one professor openly praised the dean’s hire, arguing it benefits students and gives the attorney general firsthand exposure to the law school’s academic culture. “He’s been very vocal about the things he doesn’t like that are going on in the state of Florida,” the professor said. “It’s very helpful to have him here and see we’re not a bunch of devils with horns growing out of our heads.”

McAlister agreed, saying Uthmeier has exceeded her expectations in helping students secure clerkships and jobs, even offering positions within the attorney general’s office to students who have not yet passed the bar exam. That, the dean said, was “music to my ears.”

“I recognize not everyone’s going to agree with the choices I’ve made as a dean in a variety of ways, and that’s totally fine,” McAlister said. “I hope that at least it comes through that my goal, first and foremost, is to protect and preserve the law school.”