The party of corporate greed's leaders in Florida are not conservative. They are wastrels, like disgraced defrocked former University of Florida President BENJAMIN ERIC SASSE. From Palm Beach Post:
The short, expensive, politically driven folly of Ben Sasse at the University of Florida
Frank CerabinoThe short tenure of a questionably experienced U.S. Senator from another state picked to lead Florida’s flagship public university deserves a closer look.
It was remarkable when Ben Sasse, a Nebraska conservative with precious little experience in higher education and no discernable Florida ties got the coveted job as the president of the University of Florida in late 2022.
The hire had all the markings of an inside job. Prior to the hiring, state lawmakers rewrote the transparency laws for hiring presidents of public colleges and universities in Florida.
Reasoning that applicants needed to be shielded from public scrutiny to remain in good standing at the jobs they already had, the new Florida law required secrecy surrounding the candidates applying for presidential appointments at state colleges and universities.
Critics of this new secrecy law were mollified by a provision in the law that said only the first part of the process would be shielded from the public, that the selection process would open to public scrutiny once a list of finalists was picked by the search committee from the wider pool of applicants.
So, stop your complaining. But as it turned out, the lawmakers were just streamlining corruption. Because when it came time to release the names of the finalists for the UF presidency, only one person’s name was on the list: Sasse.
When your “list of finalists” is one person, that’s not transparency – that’s a middle finger to transparency.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’ fingerprints were all over it. The university’s search committee was led by a Gov. Ron DeSantis political donor who was selected by DeSantis’ biggest political donor, whom DeSantis had installed to preside over UF’s Board of Trustees.
Clearly, DeSantis wanted a puppet president at the state’s biggest public university to provide campaign talking points for his own U.S. presidential ambitions.
And Sasse really needed a new job. At the time, Sasse’s political future in the party of Donald Trump was dim because he was one of seven Republican senators who had voted to convict Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U..S. Capitol.
Sasse was certainly heading for a MAGA challenger if he decided to run for re-election in Nebraska. But it was still a shocker that the dead-ended Sasse was the sole finalist for the UF presidency.
After all, his only academic experience was a four-year stint ending in 2014 as the president of a 1,200-student Lutheran college in his hometown of Freemont, Neb.
And we’re supposed to believe that he was the only desirable and available choice to run one of the nation’s top-10 public research universities with an enrollment of 60,000 students?
The University of Florida Faculty Senate didn't buy it. The UF faculty group overwhelmingly voted “no confidence” in Sasse’s selection.
“The next President should come already equipped to lead an institution of this caliber rather than aiming to learn on the job,” the Faculty Senate resolution reads. “Anything less will result in a lack of faith in leadership.”
It didn’t matter. Sasse was hired with a lavish contract. His five-year deal at UF was reportedly worth $9.7 million, with a base salary of $1 million-per-year, a $3 million term life insurance policy and a guaranteed full-time faculty appointment available to him after he left the job.
As it turned out, his tenure as president of the University of Florida would turn out to be short.
ust 17 months after being hired, Sasse stepped down last month, saying he needed to spend more time with his wife, who was diagnosed with epilepsy.
Despite his promise that he would practice “political celibacy” at UF, Sasse delivered for DeSantis and his divisive culture-war strategy.
During his short tenure, Sasse fired all of UF’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff, and took away $5 million earmarked for DEI programs at the university.
DeSantis reacted to the firings at UF by tweeting, “Florida is where DEI goes to die.”
Sasse also got UF’s Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education off the ground. The center, created by a $10 million annual grant from the Republican-led Florida Legislature, was designed to increase “the political and intellectual diversity of the UF faculty” and fight against so-called “cancel culture and uniformity of opinion on campus.”
In other words, it’s a brick-and-mortar manifestation of DeSantis’ public education criticisms and rhetoric.
Being the political handmaiden to DeSantis’ future job aspirations was certainly a key part of Sasse’s short stint.
But his most enduring footprint may be in the amount of liberal spending this so-called fiscal conservative from Nebraska did with public education dollars here in Florida.
The university’s student newspaper, The Independent Florida Alligator, published an extensive piece this month that outlined the way Sasse tripled the spending of his office.
His office spent $17.6 million during his first year in UF by handing windfall salaries to his political allies and former U.S. Senate staffers, who were pulling down six-figure UF salaries in some cases while working remotely from the Washington, D.C. area.
He created a previously non-existing position called the UF vice president for innovation and partnerships, and gave it to his former Senate chief of staff at an annual salary of $396,000 – more than double what the staffer made in his previous government job, the newspaper reported.
Sasse’s senate communications director was hired at UF while allowed to work remotely in Washington, D.C., for a university salary of $432,000, replacing a 30-year UF communications director who was making $270,000 a year, the newspaper reported.
Meanwhile, Sasse handed out $7.2 million in contracts to consulting firms to do, well… Who knows what?
“Sasse’s consulting contracts have been largely kept under wraps, leaving the public in the dark about what the contracted firms did to earn their fees,” the newspaper reported. “The university also declined to clarify specific duties carried out by Sasse’s ex-Senate staff, several of whom were salaried as presidential advisers.”
His travel expenses in office were $633,000 for his first year, more than 20 times higher than the previous UF president spent on travel.
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fter days of silence, Sasse defended his office spending on Friday through a lengthy social media post on X.
"Many have asked whether it's true if UF over the last couple of years had inappropriate spending," he wrote. "No, it's not true."
Sasse characterized his office spending the necessary result of "substantial funding for a number of important new initiatives."
He wrote that "from day one, the whole reason I agreed to leave a great job representing the salt-of-the-earth people of my home state of Nebraska is precisely because higher education needs massive reform."
And that a precondition for him to "accept this calling was being able to bring big-cause, trusted people from my last three teams along to help build a stronger, more dynamic UF."
His early departure means that UF must embark on a new search for a president.
It’d be nice if this time it doesn’t turn into a made-for-DeSantis to-do list of political chores wrapped in a public fleecing.
If we’ve learned anything from the Sasse episode, it’s that it’s very, very expensive for Floridians to keep subsiding DeSantis’ selfish aspirations for higher office.
Frank Cerabino is a news columnist with The Palm Beach Post, part of the Gannett Newspapers chain.
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