The Race for Rankings and the Vindication of Former Dean Rosenbury
A recent article in The New York Times examined the firing (or more politely, the "departure") earlier this year of Ben Sasse, the former US Senator from Nebraska. Sasse had just a year earlier resigned his Senate seat after he was almost inexplicably hired as President of the University of Florida's flagship campus in Gainesville (UF). "A Star President’s Resignation Was a Mystery. Was It All About Rankings?" was the work of Stephanie Saul.
Saul writes with penetrating insight about higher education in the United States, and her work is always thorough and fair. (And to be clear, I would say that even if her reporting on my own situation at UF had not played a prominent part in an article that she wrote last December.) Indeed, she is one of the best of a dwindling number of reasons to continue to subscribe to The Times. Her recent article is especially useful in two ways.
First, the central question in the article is the degree to which UF's manic pursuit of rankings -- specifically, climbing the infamous and reviled USNews higher education rankings -- explains Sasse's fate. Saul explores that issue in the context of the larger challenges facing higher education, and I plan to write a Verdict column next week drawing both on her insights and on a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education that is also about UF. The latter source is particularly useful in demonstrating how Florida's Republican Party seems almost deliberately to be using their state's university system as a lab experiment to test the most effective ways to destroy one of a state's most important assets.
The second extremely useful lesson from Saul's article is the light it sheds not only on UF and higher education as a whole but on recent controversies at UF's law school specifically. Although it is by no means the point of Saul's article, her reporting ends up indirectly serving to vindicate former Dean Laura Rosenbury's tenure at UF Law. That also carries larger implications, as I will explain below.
For those who are new to all of this, I should stipulate up front that I have a direct interest in the UF story. In 2019, I left my position as a law professor at George Washington University in DC to become a chaired "eminent scholar" at UF. Dean Rosenbury successfully recruited me to move to a university and a state where I never could previously have imagined myself moving. Four years later, however, I announced that I had decided to leave UF and take Emeritus status, doing so quite a few years earlier than I otherwise would have expected. I made that decision while the President and Provost of UF were also leaving and, most notably, after Dean Rosenbury announced that she too was moving on, in her case to become President of Barnard College.
It seemed like a good time to leave, and it was. The mess at UF is so bad that the previous President and Provost have both now been brought back as interims to help steady the ship. More broadly, as I have made clear on multiple occasions, the hostility from the state's one-party autocracy toward higher education was already quite bad and is only getting worse. I continue to follow happenings there closely, and as I will discuss at length in next week's column, I could not be happier that I left when I did.
But what is the "vindication" part of the story regarding former Dean Rosenbury? When I arrived on campus in 2019, I became aware that there was a small but loud group of law faculty who opposed Rosenbury on almost everything she tried to do. Indeed, at least one of them had told/warned me before I accepted the offer not to come, specifically because Rosenbury was supposedly such a horrible dean.
I am a skeptic about such claims, in part because I also am aware that there are more than enough controversies about law deans to go around, some contrived but some very legitimate. In fact, the faculty at my previous law school had succeeded a few years earlier in forcing their dean to resign, and the same thing has happened at many other law schools. I thus asked the anti-Rosenbury people at UF Law (both before and after my arrival) what exactly was the problem with her deanship. In broad brush, the answers amounted to two, mutually reinforcing complaints: (1) She was a "tyrant" (or some synonym thereof, "dictator" being another favorite insult): (2) She was obsessed with rankings.
As to the tyranny complaint, I tried on multiple occasions to elicit more detail from Rosenbury's accusers. Even though these were all law professors who presumably know how to build an argument, none could offer either evidence or logic to support the broad, conclusory assertion that she was a tyrant. There were a lot of "You just don't understand what she's like!" kinds of responses, but when I then asked them to please enlighten me, the best that they could offer were examples of decisions that the dean had made with which the complaining professors simply disagreed. When I gently followed up with, "But how does that make her a tyrant?" the response was merely to repeat the conclusion.
Of equal or greater relevance, I attended faculty meetings and personally observed the dean being the opposite of a tyrant. Even in many situations in which the question at issue was one on which the dean had made her own preferences clear, she neither shut down debate nor imposed her own preference on the faculty. In short, she accepted defeat at the times that she was defeated. And it is important to emphasize that the state's rules governing UF are extremely unfavorable to faculty governance, so there were plenty of times when the dean could have accurately said that the faculty's views were non-binding. Even so, time and again she listened to the faculty's voice and changed course accordingly.
Were there situations in which she did exercise her authority, notwithstanding some faculty opposition or without bringing issues to the faculty in the first place? Of course she did, but that is true of even the most beloved deans everywhere. A deanship is an administrative position that involves making executive decisions, and not everything is a matter of faculty prerogative. National Republicans constantly referred to President Obama as a dictator or "wannabe king" whenever he exercised executive authority, but that is not proof that he was a tyrant.
At the very least, the disconnect between the facts that the dean's detractors could offer and the intense vitriol that they openly expressed toward her was stark. If she were such an obvious autocrat, there should have been plenty of examples and at best little room for doubt. That was not the case, to put it mildly.
All of which brings me back to the Saul article and my colleagues' second complaint about former Dean Rosenbury, which is that she was obsessed with rankings. To which my response was always: "Well, of course she is! No matter who was hired to do that job, they would have to obsess on the rankings. That is the job description at UF." The response from the anti-dean crowd was to offer variations on the idea that she should have fought against that requirement rather than enabling it, taking a principled stand for all that is good and right in legal education.
My response to that? This is not a matter of ex post insight but what was in fact blindingly obvious in the moment: If Laura Rosenbury or any dean were to defy the prime directive from the political appointees who run UF (including the relevant governing boards), we on the faculty would have been throwing her a thank-you party that afternoon and a good-bye party the next morning. Moreover, she would have been replaced by someone who would be on an even shorter leash.
Nothing and no one was going to stop the Board of Governors from pursuing rankings nirvana. And for anyone who thought that the Board (especially its chair, who is a huge Republican donor in the state) would not dare to fire the dean of the law school, let us look at former UF President Ben Sasse.
Back when he was dumped, I wrote two articles entertaining the idea that Sasse was fired for petty grifting, based on some important reporting by student journalists at UF. I was skeptical that grifting was a firing offense, but the only other explanation I could imagine at the time that made any sense was that Sasse was simply bad at his job. Saul's article refers to Sasse as a "star," but that is accurate only in the sense that hiring a former US Senator made news. He was not in any way a star among university leaders, and his performance over the year-plus that he was on the job ranged from invisible to embarrassing.
The specific and ultimately unforgivable way that Sasse was bad at his job, however, is not any of the ones that I had in mind. In the eyes of those who fired him, being bad at that job meant resisting their focus on rankings. As a result, a lavishly paid, high-profile, politically connected new president was dumped unceremoniously, and it happened so quickly that it made people's heads spin. UF's overall university rankings had dropped by one slot when he was forced out, but as Saul made clear, the issue was rather obviously (and I say "obviously" only because I can now draw on the facts that her reporting unearthed) that Sasse had the temerity even to question the focus on rankings.
I too believe that the world would be a better place if universities and their sub-units were not obsessed with rankings. I thus think that Sasse was fired for the wrong offense. I also have no reason to think that former Dean Rosenbury "believed in the rankings." But the fact is that she would not have been dean for even a nanosecond beyond the moment that she stopped trying to deliver the one and only thing that UF's power brokers wanted.
To be sure, there are times when one cannot continue in good conscience to serve an unjust system. Importantly, however, Dean Rosenbury's most unappreciated skill was minimizing the damage that can be caused by excessive focus on rankings. Minimizing damage is not sexy or as dramatic as falling on one's sword, but it is an essential part of being a good dean. On more than one occasion, I listened while she explained to the faculty different ways in which she had headed off truly bad rankings-driven ideas (like requiring the use of citation counts or, even worse, download counts in promotion and salary decisions for faculty) by finding other ways to boost the rankings that on their own merits were simply good educational policy.
Again, Saul's article indirectly provides the goods. I say this not because I see that article as in any way a conscious effort to exonerate anyone or even to make an argument either way about UF Law. Instead, good journalism involves reaching out to many sources, in this case including those who have made repeated efforts to publicly trash now-President Rosenbury.
To put it as clearly as I can: Stephanie Saul would have every professional and ethical reason, as a reporter for The New York Times, to report truly "bad facts" as well as good, as she found them. Yet when it comes to Rosenbury's deanship (which was the focus of one small section of the article), Saul reported three complaints. Upon examination, all three are ultimately arguments in favor of how Rosenbury responded -- quite successfully, I should add -- to the relentless pressure to move UF Law up in the rankings.
To emphasize the point that The Times's article was not a whitewash, I note that Saul quotes one of Rosenbury's most aggressively nasty internal critics (who retired last year) as well as a professor at another law school who (two decades ago) created what little reputation he possesses by calling the entire law school enterprise a "scam." These are not friendly witnesses, to say the least. What are the complaints?
1. The law school at one point replaced a bunch of chairs in the law school buildings "to increase the rankings, by increasing expenditures per student." The quoted internal source put it this way: "One summer when we returned to school, every single chair from every single classroom had been put in the dumpster. They were perfectly good chairs." One of the oldest tropes in these kinds of discussions is to say that nonprofit organizations should delay replacing things by one more year, one more month, or one more day. No matter the situation, what we have is always "perfectly good." Think of it as Zeno's Paradox, leading to the tackiness and dysfunction of public spaces.
But let us stipulate that the law school spent some money to replace those perfectly good chairs. The one thing that the Dean knew for sure was that the university's higher-ups would support that kind of rankings-supportive spending, so she was not even forced to cut spending on more valuable items. At most, this is a matter of waste in a larger sense in response to perverse systemic incentives, but no one at the law school suffered because of this.
2. The law school "artificially inflated its faculty by counting guest speakers among them." Was that fraud? Was that illegal? No and no. At worst, the dean found and benefited from what might be viewed as a loophole in the USNews algorithm. To say that doing so is somehow a "breach of integrity" or something along those lines simply ignores the lack of integrity of the rankings themselves. While Saul's other negative source called this "an egregious abuse of the rules," supposedly because the USNews guidelines say that visiting faculty should "teach" a course, that word (as any professor can testify) is notoriously difficult to define. Is "teaching" giving lectures? Giving lectures for an entire semester? Giving lectures, holding office hours, and grading? It is hardly clear. So was this an "abuse"? No, and certainly not an "egregious" one.
Again, however, the idea that this -- even if the worst inferences are drawn -- is the smoking-gun evidence that the former dean was the devil incarnate is simply laughable. A person is told to boost the rankings, finds a way to boost the rankings that is at worst on a borderline (again, within an inherently indefensible system), and the educational product is not harmed.
3. The law school "bought" rankings by giving lots and lots of student scholarships. The article, quoting the former "scam" professor, puts it this way: "'[M]assive tuition discounts' resulted in an inflation-adjusted tuition revenue decline to $8 million a year from $36 million a year in seven or eight years. 'All of this was driven by a kind of obsessive attempt to jack up the school’s rankings.'"
Wait, what? The state government provided its flagship law school with tens of millions of dollars to make legal education more affordable, and that is bad? The government of California, meanwhile, has been forced by budgetary austerity to turn its "state" law schools into essentially private schools with Stanford-level tuitions. For everything else that one could criticize about Florida's government, why would "spent too much money on making higher education cost less to students" be an objection? Because it was motivated by rankings rather than Platonic purity? I certainly wish that there could be wider discounts and that they could be targeted to other potential students-- even free tuition to all -- but if hundreds of people graduate with degrees from UF Law with little or no debt, that is a win. It is, in fact, a unique win that should be celebrated.
Again, there is no way to read Saul's article as anything but a hard-hitting, deeply reported article that exposes the way things truly work at UF. As she demonstrates, the word from the very top is that it is all about rankings. Presidents are hired and fired because of rankings. For that matter, assistants in career services offices are hired with rankings in mind. I have every reason to believe that I was hired because of rankings. UF probably even thinks about rankings when it awards catering contracts. What the article also demonstrates, however, is that there are ways to create win-win situations or at least to do no harm to students or faculty while following the north star of rankings.
I have only a casual professional relationship with my former dean and know that she is perfectly capable of taking her lumps as stoically as any other administrator, but I also know unfair and baseless accusations when I see them. If all of this is the worst that anyone can say to a New York Times reporter -- and we have every reason to believe that it is -- then that is the best indirect vindication of Dean Rosenbury that one could ever hope to see. It certainly is not at all what tyranny looks like.