A Simple Grifter: The Latest Mess at the University of Florida Is Almost Disappointing in its Tawdriness

What is going on with Florida's public universities?  Nothing good has been happening for the last several years, but the ways in which things are going wrong have just taken a very unexpected -- and almost comical -- turn for the worse.  In an odd way, however, the latest news is somewhat deflating in its banality, because it turns out that this is not all about culture wars and attacks on intellectual freedom.  As so often happens with Republicans in the Trump era, it is also a simple money grab.

Corruption.  Corruption?  Yes, Corruption.  Plain, old, boring corruption.  Important, but still a bit like the end of "Game of Thrones."  This is how things turn out?  I almost feel betrayed.

Even though Florida's awkward and unlikable governor (who does not even merit the now-vogue descriptor "weird") has been out of the headlines after his ignominious flame-out in the 2024 Republican primaries, he and his Republican crowd in Tallahassee have continued to try to turn the nation's third-largest state into their version of un-canceled paradise: hostile to minorities, to women, to LGBTQ+ people, and even to businesses.  In one particularly ridiculous episode, as I noted in a recent column, Ron DeSantis recently pushed through a ban on lab-grown meat in his state, saying: "You need meat, okay? Like, we’re going to have fake meat? That doesn’t work." As I wrote in that column: "Like, great argument."

Although Governor Meatball's attack on "woke meat" reinforces his anti-business record and reminds everyone just how small he is, his larger agenda is anything but trivial.  The Republican plan there has been fundamentally built around an unrelenting series of attacks on the state's universities.  He has aligned with his party nationally in attacking America's world-renowned system of higher education for supposedly "indoctrinating" young people, but his actions in Florida were so extreme and threatening that they caused a lot of people -- including me -- to leave.  We saw the writing on the wall, and although it was as incoherent as the governor himself, there was an unmistakable warning that the state's Republicans are hellbent on destroying one of the state's most important assets.

I do have news about the content of those attacks on the statewide university system and its early impacts, especially on the flagship campus in Gainesville (commonly known as UF), where I used to teach at the law school.  In the next week or so, I will write a column about those developments.  Before getting there, however, it is useful to turn today to some unexpected news from Gainesville specifically, where the UF campus has seen some unusual (to say the least) developments at the highest levels of its administration.

Kent Fuchs was a very good university president at UF, and he was hired with the kind of resume that made a pre-DeSantis Republican-dominated university board want to hire him.  After a solid eight-year tenure, he announced his departure.  A rather opaque search for a successor led to the big announcement that Ben Sasse would be the new President of UF (again, the main campus, not the statewide system).  Sasse announced that he was resigning as Nebraska's junior US Senator, and he officially became a President (though not the one that he clearly wanted to be) just over eighteen months ago.  He resigned on July 31 of this year.  That departure is an interesting story to which I will soon turn, but it is important first to understand why his hiring was so unusual.

At the time that his appointment at UF was announced, I had not yet decided to take emeritus status and bug out from the Sunshine State.  I was thus especially interested in who the new UF President would be.  Learning that it was Sasse, I was confused.  Although he did earn a PhD in history from Yale, he did not have an academic resume.  He had briefly been a management consultant before moving into evangelical Christian political activism.  He was then purely on a political track, working in Republican politics (in the George W. Bush Administration) before running for Senate.

But wait, I skipped a step.  He was also briefly the President of Midland Lutheran College, a tiny college in Nebraska that Sasse rebranded as Midland University.  Other than teaching part-time and being a research fellow in Texas while building his political resume, he had nothing else in his background that would seem to qualify him to be the President of a huge, highly-ranked, public research university.  Certainly, nothing about being a US Senator (requiring only the most minimal management of a very small staff) is relevant to the job.

When some of my UF students asked me about Sasse, I decided to be generous and say that maybe there is nothing about the Fuchs-style standard resume that is essential to running a large university.  After all, plenty of law professors think that the next gold ring is to become a dean, but many quickly learn that they have no clue how to do the job.  Some, including Kent Syverud and Laura Rosenbury, are successful, but many others are simply in over their heads.  Meanwhile, in the 1990's, David Boren left his US Senate seat in Oklahoma and had a fairly successful run as the President of his state's main university.  Of course, Boren was at least going home.  Sasse, as far as anyone could see, had no connection to Florida at all.

In any event, a record of traditional academic success is hardly sufficient to guarantee a happy outcome for university administrators; and I at least was willing to hold out the possibility that it is not even necessary.  We will never know, however, because it turns out that -- at least according to recent reports -- Sasse was a simple grifter.

Yes, Sasse was also flailing as UF's President, but it has been at least possible to imagine that that was by design, that is, that DeSantis had specifically hired Sasse to ruin UF.  Sasse was notably invisible to the larger community, and it seemed likely that he was spending his time behind the scenes advancing the anti-intellectual agenda of his patrons.

Sasse's sudden departure is in one small way disappointing to me, because I have been accumulating examples of his vapidity ever since he took the UF job. But now, I will never be able to use most of them.  His periodic emails to the university community were a treasure trove of empty platitudes, much like the books that he wrote when he was trying to position himself for a presidential run.

How insipid was he?  In 2022, New York Times columnist Carlos Lozada responded to the news of UF's romance with Sasse by noting that Sasse had issued a statement calling UF "the most interesting university in America right now," which Sasse would help to become the country’s "most dynamic, bold, future-oriented university."  Lozada then noted that this was exactly the same kind of bland, trite pap that Sasse had used in his 2018 book "Them," which Lozada called "a generic, forgettable work: packed with big-think buzzwords rehashing old arguments, clichés and metaphors passing for analysis, thought-leader-ese masquerading as vision."

Lozada wrote that Sasse's book "proved so paralyzingly pointless that, upon reaching the last page, I found I had nothing to say."  He noted that Sasse's word choices in his UF statement were predictably silly: "Interesting. Dynamic. Bold. The future! It sounded a lot like 'Them.'  Nothing the book or statement says seems really wrong, but only because they both say so little."  I cannot resist reproducing this especially trenchant paragraph from Lozada's op-ed in full:

Instead, “Them” is on the dulling edge of political thought, a book that can safely be omitted from the syllabus of any University of Florida seminar unless Sasse himself teaches it. “Genuine wisdom will require not just acknowledging the disruption of our ways of making a living, but also our way of thinking about ourselves, our identities and our places in the world,” Sasse offers in a typically vapid sentence. He cautions us not to tackle America’s troubles with a “formula” or a “silver bullet” or a “one-size-fits-all solution,” an impressive trifecta of triteness.

Kudos to Lozada for "the dulling edge."  Ouch.  In any case, it is bad enough that Sasse's emails and statements to the public were so empty.  That might even be forgiven, in light of the audience.  Somehow, however, Sasse managed to be just as embarrassing in his emails to the faculty.  Mixing in some rah-rah nonsense with buzzspeak, his emails were a study in nothingness.  After a made-for-Fox controversy arose regarding a student protest at Stanford Law School, Sasse wrote to tell us that UF students had more "grit" than Stanford students and could thus tolerate listening to hateful speech.

My research assistants soon discovered that grit seems to be one of Sasse's favorite words, because of course it is.  Indeed, in a single email to the UF faculty -- an email that began with the one-word salutation "Team" and ended with "Go Gators!" -- Sasse informed us that our university's "biggest brains and grittiest producers are changing the world" and that the State of Florida understands "our belief in the importance of grit and resilience."

For all of the eye-rolling that Sasse provoked, however, my take on the situation was that he was still useful to the people who hired him. Any hope that his minimal academic background might cause him to develop a backbone and defend the university was long gone, and it seemed likely that he was doing what he had been told to do behind closed doors. He was as bad as I had feared substantively, worse stylistically, and generally a nonentity, but there was no reason to think that he would not keep doing what he was doing.

That all changed two weeks ago. An acquaintance who follows these issues sent me the announcement of Sasse's sudden resignation from the UF presidency, adding her own two-word commentary: "Rather abrupt." That announcement linked Sasse's decision to his wife's recent epilepsy diagnosis, however, so I was willing to take at face value the assertion that a major life event had changed his plans. Even so, there was some background noise suggesting that the DeSantis donor who runs the university system's governing board had concluded that Sasse was totally clueless about how to run a major university, so it seemed possible that Sasse had gone from being a useful talking head to a useless buffoon.

Yesterday, the other shoe dropped, and it was a steel-toed boot.  A UF student journalist published a heavily researched article in one of the student newspapers under this headline: "Sasse’s spending spree: Former UF president channeled millions to GOP allies, secretive contracts."  It is an excellent piece of reporting, and I encourage everyone to read it in full.  Just to run through some of the highlights:

-- In his first (and only full) year, Sasse more than tripled spending by the President's office compared to Fuchs, from $5.6 million to $17.3 million.  According to the article: "A majority of the spending surge was driven by lucrative contracts with big-name consulting firms and high-salaried, remote positions for Sasse’s former U.S. Senate staff and Republican officials."

-- Sasse hired "six ex-Senate staffers and two former Republican officials to high-paying, remote jobs at the university."

-- "In Sasse’s first full fiscal year at the university’s helm, travel expenses for the president’s office soared to $633,000 — over 20 times higher than Fuchs’ annual average of $28,000. Sasse spent more on travel in his 17 months at UF than Fuchs’ entire eight-year tenure."  Again, Fuchs's was a very, very successful presidency.

-- "Sasse spent $7.2 million in university funds to consultants for advice on his strategic planning and to fill leadership gaps — over 40 times more than Fuchs’ total consulting expenses over his eight-year term," two-thirds of that to management consultant McKinsey.  I suppose one could say that Sasse knew that he knew nothing and thus tried to hire experts to compensate for his own incompetence, but there are cheaper ways to fill a knowledge gap (including not taking the job in the first place and letting someone who is qualified take the job).

I wrote above that I was honestly surprised that Sasse turned out to be a simple grifter.  And I do mean simple, in every sense of that word.  Sasse is not even an interesting con man.  He enriched a few cronies and used university funds to have someone else do his job (for which he was paid a base annual salary of a million dollars, plus free room and board along with other perks), and that is plenty bad.  Sasse's former Senate colleague Robert Menendez, however, took stacks of cash and gold bars for his grift.  Sasse apparently lacked that kind of imagination.

In the end, I hope that Sasse's wife gets the medical attention that she needs, that the university is able to recoup at least some of the looted funds, and that now-reinstated (as an interim) President Kent Fuchs can clean things up in Gainesville.  In the end, however, Sasse was a symptom, and Fuchs has no power to cure the disease.  Florida's Republican politicians have been at war with their own university for years.  I suspect that they will find a permanent replacement for Sasse who will be bad in all of the ways that they wanted Sasse to be bad, but who will not be a petty hustler.