Sasse’s consulting contracts have been kept largely under wraps, leaving the public in the dark about what the contracted firms did to earn their fees. The university also declined to clarify specific duties carried out by Sasse’s ex-Senate staff, several of whom were salaried as presidential advisers.
The university said Sasse’s budget expansion went through the “appropriate approval process” but did not answer questions about how Sasse bankrolled his splurges, where the funds originated or who authorized the spending.
Keeping friends close
Amid protests over his conservative track record as a Nebraska Republican senator, Sasse promised during his ascension to the UF presidency in Fall 2022 that he would divorce himself from partisan politics under what he called a vow of “political celibacy.”
But the senator-turned-university president quietly broke that promise in his 17-month term at the university’s helm, hiring six ex-Senate staffers and two former Republican officials to high-paying, remote jobs at the university.
So, what reforms and upgrades do I think are needed? And therefore, what new initiatives did we begin investing in from the president’s office at UF? As everyone who’s listened to me speak has heard over and over and over again, I think:
**We need to experiment with launching new institutions and campuses. For UF, this is the new UF-Jacksonville campus, where we want to sync up educational programming more tightly with the AI revolution, and with the rapidly-changing needs of industry. This initiative was launched and run out of the president’s office – and no, planning for a new campus isn’t cheap.
**We need to utilize for the first time a 20-year-old Florida statute that enables UF to authorize innovative K-12 charters all across the state, via rapid new school launch.
**We need to set public goals – and be held accountable regarding – at least ten academic disciplines where UF will become an undisputed national leader within a decade (the “10x10x10 initiative”).