College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Mike Foley is a veteran newspaper editor and executive now on the faculty of the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida in Gainesville. After nearly 30 years with the Times Publishing Co., which publishes the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times), the largest daily newspaper in Florida, he joined the faculty in August 2003 as a Master Lecturer in the journalism department. Foley’s classes focus on news reporting and writing. At the Times, He served as executive editor, managing editor, metropolitan editor and city editor. He also worked on the business side of the paper as vice president of Community Relations. He has served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes, president of the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, judge for the Hearst Foundation College Writing Awards and trustee of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Florida. He was honored as a Distinguished Alumnus of the College of Journalism and Communications in 1994 and was named Teacher of the Year for the College and University in 2006-7. In 2013, he was honored by the Society of Profession Journalists for “Distinguished Teaching in Journalism.” He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Business Administration in 1991 by Tampa College. The Princeton Review selected him as one of The Best 300 Professors.

Dr. Richard Conley is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS) Program at the University of Florida, where he has taught since 1998. His teaching and research focus on American politics, the Presidency, and more recently, Native American studies. His recent book, Donald Trump and American Populism, was published by Edinburgh University Press (UK) in 2020. He is currently researching a book, based on archival and field research, that investigates how national institutions–Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court–have interacted since 1949 to shape incongruencies in policymaking towards Native Americans, including economic and social development, education, and the protection of sacred sites on and off reservation lands. He currently serves as American Politics Field Chair in the Department of Political Science. He has been a member of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Diversity and Inclusion Steering Committee since 2018.

Michelle Jacobs (Professor of Law, Levin College of Law University of Florida) teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, International Criminal Law, Critical Race Theory and a seminar, Criminal Law in the Virtual Context, which examines the ways technological development creates interesting intersections between traditional civil law and criminal law. Her students blog about crime and technology.

Before taking on the teaching role, Jacobs was an experienced trial attorney. She represented union workers in District Council 37, New York’s second-largest union and then went on to represent plaintiffs in federal civil rights litigation under the Fair Housing Act 42 U.S. C 3601, et seq. After transitioning her practice to criminal defense, she represented defendants in federal cases in the Southern District of New York and in the state courts of New York and New Jersey.