Sasse's reckless UF spending shows greed at the heart of 'education reform' | Commentary

The University of Florida board of trustees orchestrated Ben Sasse's ascendency to the presidency in secret, and in secret is how Sasse set about doing his work — the scope of which remains unclear — for the meager 17 months or so he was on the job.

Sasse, a Republican and former United States senator from Nebraska, had only previously run a microscopic college somewhere back in his home state, which is to say he was obviously not qualified to lead one of the nation's preeminent public universities with an enrollment that tops 50,000. Armed with little more than a thin file of glib essays on education reform, Sasse spoke like a dilettante hiding behind buzzwords more than he presented as any kind of competent big-school administrator. But his act impressed influential Republicans, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' friends on the board of trustees, so he cruised through the cloaked selection process.

His sins were virtues in DeSantis' Florida, where the governor is determined to reshape Florida's colleges into conservative learning academies — an ideological project that has, time and again, proved to be a financial bonanza for the governor's friends and allies. DeSantis himself has hardly tried to conceal his own influence over Sasse's controversial selection, offering only a half-hearted and bumbling denial: "I was not somebody that was involved, necessarily, in their past selection, that was something that they were and it just, I don’t know how it developed. Someone said you should check this out, but that’s what happened," he said recently.

To justify hiring this neophyte, the UF board had to concoct a version of Sasse as a disruptor, a change agent, an innovator, someone who was coming in with an "audacious" vision. These are insipid business-school weasel words, the language of scammers. No one bothered explaining why UF, one of the top public universities in the nation, needed a disruptor. But dripping with hubris, Sasse — who ran a college smaller than some Florida high schools — described himself as uniquely clear-eyed while "most of higher education doesn’t understand the pace of what’s coming."

Once in the job, Sasse disappeared.

He seemed terrified of the The Alligator, the university's hard-charging student newspaper, with whom he refused to sit for an interview, and his general absence inspired posters plastered across campus asking, "Have you seen this man?," according to The Alligator. His exit was just as spectral. Shocking some of the school's senior administrators, he announced earlier this summer he was leaving to devote more time to his wife's health issues.

Now, we know a bit more about what this avowed fiscal conservative was doing behind closed doors: He tripled spending in the president's office, according to a stellar Alligator investigative report, and ballooned the number of employees from 10 under his predecessor to 30. While a little less than $6 million was enough for Sasse's predecessor to keep the office running, the former Nebraska senator needed more than $17 million. How else was he to pay his former U.S. Senate employees and other Republicans six-figure salaries for high-level remote-work positions at UF? And where was he supposed to find money to pay McKinsey — a notorious consulting firm to whom Sasse was once an external adviser — several million for work the school refuses to explain?

Publicly, Sasse's only real contributions to UF were penning occasional and sneering op-eds critical of his peers in higher education and serving as the face of a proposed $300 million graduate campus of still-unspecified location somewhere in downtown Jacksonville — a pet project being driven by UF board of trustees member Mori Hosseini, a homebuilder and major DeSantis financial backer. Beyond some vague platitudes, Sasse never really articulated how building a lavish campus in Jacksonville, which is already home to three universities and a state college, fit into any kind of larger vision for the university, where he was simultaneously interested in slashing programs. The Jacksonville project began as a $150 million proposal and mushroomed at some point to $300 million for no particular reason. Not unlike Sasse's elevation, the idea seems like an obvious boondoggle in the waiting.

Sasse also threw some catnip at his right-wing patrons, promptly firing the school's diversity, equity and inclusion staffers.

For all the ideological claptrap these education-reform types spew, the unifying theme has always been cash. Sasse's little financial escapades are of a piece in this state. Not by coincidence, Richard Corcoran, the former Florida House member who once preached austerity, is now nestled in New College of Florida as its own right-wing president with a contract set to pay him out about $1.3 million over five years (Does it even need to be said? This is of course far in excess of what his predecessor made and way out of whack with the kind of pay for presidents at similarly sized colleges).

In K-12 education, DeSantis' "reforms" — universal vouchers and the continued proliferation of charter schools — have simply shifted more public money into private pockets or, in the case of vouchers, amount to nothing more than stimulus checks for the well-to-do.

That the governor and other powerful leaders placed one of Florida's most valuable assets in the hands of this charlatan should stir outrage. That he then plundered it for the benefit of his buddies should deepen the anger. That he did it at all, though, was not shocking. In Florida, that's nothing new.

Nate Monroe is a Florida columnist for the USA Today Network. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU. Email him at nmonroe@gannett.com.