Will Gator Nation Lead Education Reform in America?

Then-Senator Ben Sasse meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with a delegation from the U.S. Congress on September 6, 2021. Photo courtesy of the office of the President of Ukraine.

When he left the Senate to lead University of Florida, there was plenty of speculation about how Sasse might reform education. Now, Floridians and Americans are getting a taste of Sasse’s vision for the future of education at U of F and beyond. He posted this tweet recently, explaining his vision:

Hello Gator Nation – and other folks interested in higher education reform:

I’ve been attending to some family health stuff, so didn’t respond to a report earlier this week about budgeting at the University of Florida. It’s obvious that silence led to confusion and a bunch of speculation. Many have asked whether it’s true if UF over the last couple years had inappropriate spending.

No, it’s not true — but it is a duty to transparently address folks’ concerns, both because fiscal stewardship is a fundamental obligation of public institutions – and also because our alumni, donors, and hardworking taxpayers should be confident that such stewardship and oversight have been and are being exercised. They are.

Now, it is true that there was substantial funding for a number of important new initiatives. I am very happy to defend each and every one of these initiatives (I’ll itemize a few of them momentarily), because 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. My views about this generational project have been public and obvious for a decade – there’s been no secret.

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”).

**We need to accelerate the targeted, direct hiring of the nation’s best faculty, and especially biomedical research physician-scientists, at the pace of tech and business – rather than at the sleepy pace where status-quo bureaucracies often drift for years, instead of pursuing targeted, rockstar academic hires.

**We need to grow by 10x the ability of UF undergrads to study abroad in a way that does not delay their graduation timelines.

**We need to reform the core curriculum, recognizing the ongoing shift of more students’ major areas of study into STEM, but simultaneously still acknowledging their need to be prepared to think qualitatively, not just quantitatively. This doesn’t mean that humanities professors with nichified interests are allowed to drive demand unscrutinized into their narrow silos, but rather that we should engage a broad group of societal grasstops in shared discussion of what it looks like to prepare (for the first time in human history) ALL of our students for the imperative of lifelong learning.

**We need to create a data analytics unit to improve our student services and course scheduling to eliminate bottlenecks (especially in the 3rd and 4th semesters) that reduce talented students’ ability to graduate in under four years.

**We need to get better at administering our post-tenure review procedures. Over the first year of this initiative, we made important strides, but I’ve made clear my view that many professors – not just at UF, but across the nation – who are on 50% or greater research leave but who have ceased to be research productive should be returned to a full-time teaching load. Such a reform would save Florida taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in annual human capital expenditures at this institution alone.

**We need to partner with Florida’s booming space industry, taking full advantage of HiPerGator and our geographic footprint, to convene the best universities in the nation in an unprecedented consortium — but this will require speed and flexibility rarely seen in higher education.

These are initiatives we were running out of the president’s office – and there should be even more – and I am dang proud of each of them, as I believe they will benefit Floridians immensely if brought to fruition.

Does everyone agree on the benefit-calculus of each of these initiatives, or on the pacing and priority-ranking among them? Of course not – and that is fine.

Thoughtful Floridians and Americans should be arguing more, not less, about big initiatives and big academic reforms – debate is healthy. But what is unhealthy is pretending that having reformers at the helm of a prestigious university would somehow not be…disruptive. That was very much the point.

To repeat: I am unabashedly for big reform in higher education. This has never been a secret – certainly not when I was being pursued and publicly vetted for the UF presidency. And the unanimous support two years ago of the Board of Trustees – followed by the near-unanimous support (one dissenting vote) of the Board of Governors – is precisely why I agreed to pull on oars together in a state on such a rocketship trajectory.

I plan to write a broader memo for the Governor’s Office and other interested parties in Tallahassee, but for purposes today, consider just one of the firstfruits of this “go bigger” approach. During my tenure, we grew faculty at the Hamilton Center more than fourfold, raiding some of the globe’s best universities, recruiting top talent to Gainesville. As a result, it is one of the five greatest liberal arts colleges in America already – and climbing fast. I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve been building at Hamilton, and gratified by the caliber of folks who’ve agreed to join in this noble effort. Parents: you should send your kids here.

But guess what? With each new initiative comes new staff – and new investment expenditures.

So did we hire some new staff? Yep. And did all of them move immediately to Gainesville full-time? Nope. And did some top-tier consulting firms compete to advise on important initiatives like those itemized above? Of course. (For those following this story closely, here are a few additional facts that might interest you: Yes, I persuaded almost a dozen folks who had worked with me in one or more of my last three jobs, both in and out of politics, to join in this important work – as basically all arriving CEOs do. Some of our new hires took paycuts, because they wanted to join this cause; others of them got pay-raises, because they are super-talented folks who had competing opportunities and offers. One of my preconditions in agreeing to accept this calling was being able to bring big-cause, trusted people from my last few teams along to help build a stronger, more dynamic UF – and happily, the board and selection committee embraced this. We also cut spending and consulting expenses in some areas, building a healthy “One UF” team, but countervailing accounting realities aren’t sexy amid breathless social media.)

I want to be clear: I welcome both a debate about the merits of these reform initiatives, and an audit of UF’s expenditures.

Any $9 billion enterprise should always be finding ways to tighten its belt (and one of my more unpopular 2023 proposals was to consider consolidating some of our 200[!] academic units), but I am confident that the expenditures under discussion were proper and appropriate – and that the folks responsible for oversight were faithful in their work. To give taxpayers and alums a few starter datapoints of comfort:

**It is my understanding that the Audit Committee of our board did its work thoroughly and without any findings of concern.

**Similarly, the longstanding and well-staffed audit function inside UF did not raise any concerns about any of these matters with me.

**Our board leadership extended me full severance and an ongoing role with the university until at least 2028, suggesting no concerns on their part.

**As the university has said since my departure from the office of president, this budget went through the appropriate approval process.

I am very grateful to our Chairman and board, both for the unprecedented rankings rise over which they presided the last 8 to 10 years, and for the big vision they had and the charge they thus gave me to “take us to the next level.” Academic bureaucracies are notoriously resistant to change, and these audacious folks outlined a big vision for taking this extraordinarily special and rising institution even higher.

I am sad that our health constraints at home meant that I would no longer be able to serve as a day-to-day operational leader of reform efforts like these for the present time – but it is my great hope that we will see more rather than fewer, and faster rather than slower, higher education reform – both in Florida and beyond. There are some wonderful pockets of great teaching and learning happening here and there, but overall, higher education nationwide is broken.

We owe our kids better than is being offered most places right now. A great education should expose tomorrow’s citizens — and parents and neighbors and workers — both to the great wisdom handed down from tradition and to the most perplexing riddles on our intellectual frontiers. It should offer an intoxicating combination of world-class research and life-changing teaching for students wanting to grapple with the biggest questions.

As I wrote to you last month, I have two competing callings in life right now – and the prudent choice is to prioritize duties in our battles at home for a time. But I am deeply grateful to have had the opportunity in the president’s office to labor alongside so many extraordinary Gators across this campus. The ongoing works we were fortunate to steward, as well as the new efforts we were privileged to initiate, are both incredibly important.

My family and I have come to love Gator Nation, and I’m honored to continue toiling in these fields. The Hamilton Center is well on its way to making UF the top Western Civilization program in the nation – and we will ground our students in the foundations of the Great Books and the American political order, cultivate in them the virtues of citizenship in a free society, and prepare them for service, leadership, and professional success.

UF is a glorious place – and our future is even brighter.
Go Gators,
Ben

Hello Gator Nation – and other folks interested in higher education reform:

I’ve been attending to some family health stuff, so didn’t respond to a report earlier this week about budgeting at the University of Florida. It’s obvious that silence led to confusion and a bunch of…

— Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) August 16, 2024