Broward Sheriff Tony hired his NSU doctoral advisor as reserve deputy days after 2024 graduation

By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org

Days after Broward Sheriff “Dr.” Gregory Tony’s commencement ceremony at Nova Southeastern University in June 2024 he hired the academic chairman of the NSU committee that judged his doctoral dissertation as a BSO reserve deputy sheriff.

Vincent Van Hasselt, a psychology professor, was hired for the part-time position on June 24, 2024, records show. Van Hasselt, 73, is a certified law enforcement officer and, since joining BSO, has been “vested with the authority to bear arms and make arrests” under Florida law.

He earns $19.13 an hour and drives an unmarked BSO take-home vehicle — a perk not offered in BSO’s public solicitation for reserve-deputy applicants.

Van Hasselt’s hiring, so soon after Tony’s graduation, raises questions about whether the sheriff rewarded a key academic gatekeeper in his doctoral process with special benefits — paid for by the public agency he leads — to advance his personal educational goal.

His annual gross pay was $1,932 in 2024, $4,266 in 2025 and $1,569 as of May 5, 2026, according to BSO’s public information unit.

Neither Van Hasselt nor Sheriff Tony responded to requests for comment about the timing of the professor’s hiring or why he was assigned an unmarked BSO vehicle.

Sheriff Tony often touts his PhD, so much so that his personal educational achievement is a point of public controversy. He’s spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to add “PhD” or “Dr.” next to his name on BSO’s ubiquitous logo, stationery and signage, and across walls, ceilings, floors and even shower curtains at the sheriff’s controversial $74 million gym and training building.

PhD OR EdD?

The federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) shields university students’ records, including their work papers. But on April 29, after Tony posted his 71-page dissertation on BSO’s website, Florida Bulldog reported that Tony apparently violated state ethics law by using confidential police data to write it.

The disclosure also raised questions about Tony’s actual NSU degree. The dissertation twice says Tony submitted it “in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of education at Nova Southeastern University.” NSU’s online Doctor of Education, (EdD), is a “practitioner-focused” degree aimed at organizational leaders who want to use research to solve real-world problems – not to attain a more rigorous, time-consuming and impressive PhD.

Did Tony misunderstand the degree he was pursuing? Maybe. At Florida Bulldog’s request, NSU vice president and spokeswoman Kyle Fisher checked with the university registrar. “I can tell you that he was awarded a PhD in criminal justice from Nova Southeastern University in 2024,” she said.

Fisher added that Tony “is currently an adjunct faculty and is scheduled to teach a course this summer,” for NSU’s Fischler College of Education and School of Criminal Justice.”

Despite his PhD degree and status as sheriff, Tony seems an odd choice to teach law enforcement. NSU’s criminal justice school says its adjunct faculty “bring a wealth of professional experience and connections into the classroom.”

Tony’s law enforcement experience includes his arrest and acquittal for killing a young man when he was 14; his failure to disclose the homicide to Gov. Ron DeSantis before the governor appointed him sheriff in 2019; a two-year Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation that concluded he lied multiple times on official records; a judge’s finding that he failed to maintain “good moral character”; and his acceptance last year of a public censure and reprimand that ended, without trial, a Commission on Ethics probe.

TONY’S ‘APPLIED DISSERTATION’

NSU’s Fischler College of Education pitches its online EdD program to prospective students like this: “Be a leader in your field with a doctoral degree in education from Nova Southeastern University. Learn how to foster positive change and development in your classroom, school, administration, or organization. Unlike research-heavy Ph.D. programs, this degree is designed for practitioners, giving you a more hands-on approach to educational leadership.”

That description matches the scope of Tony’s “applied dissertation,” which examines whether Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training affects mental health crisis response and arrest decisions among 1,500 BSO deputies from 2017 to 2023. No other police agency was studied.

Tony’s conclusion: “The results revealed no significant effect of CIT training on the decision to arrest after controlling for officer age and years of service. However, among officers who had made at least one arrest, those who were CIT trained at the time of the incident were significantly less likely to make an arrest than those who had not been trained.”

CIT training is used to teach first responders how to interact effectively with individuals with mental illness and how to de-escalate confrontations with law enforcement.

CIT training is one of Van Hasselt’s specialties. “He has been teaching it since its inception in 2002,” Tony wrote in a 2021 article, calling Van Hasselt his “mentor.”

It is unclear whether Van Hasselt or the three other NSU professors who served on Tony’s advisory committee, or the university’s Institutional Review Board – which reviews every dissertation – questioned Tony’s methodology. His study relied on internal BSO databases and BSO employees’ research to compile and analyze the data underlying his thesis.

NSU’s Fisher said FERPA restricts what the university can disclose about graduates, adding that “we will never be able to have anyone provide to you detailed information about an individual’s dissertation process, their committee makeup, etc.”

Sheriff Tony remains close to Van Hasselt and Dr. Ryan Black, an NSU assistant professor of psychology who also served on the committee that evaluated Tony. On March 27, they and two other academics co-authored an article for Corrections1, an online publication for corrections professionals, promoting a “structured peer support model designed for correctional officers to address chronic stress, reduce stigma and strengthen workforce resilience.”

The article says the Peers as Law Enforcement Support – Corrections (PALS-C) program was adapted from the PALS model that Van Hasselt previously developed for use by police officers.