Florida’s secretive new university presidential search law is a colossal failure, and a greater insult to the public than expected.
First at Florida International University and now at the University of Florida, search committees identified only one finalist. They said no top candidates were willing to be publicly identified except as a lone finalist.
The law passed in this year’s legislative session (SB 520) provides for only disclosing a “final group of applicants” — plural — but that didn’t anticipate the deviousness of academia. Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, author of this gross erosion of government in the sunshine, insists he didn’t mean for only one finalist.
The gaming of the search law won’t be a lingering problem at FIU, where Kenneth Jessell was a senior vice president for 13 years before becoming interim president in January.
But it casts an ominous shadow over Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, the surprise anointed outsider at the University of Florida. Sasse starts out as a pariah in Gainesville with the enmity of many students and faculty, mostly for his conservative views. If Sasse is to have a successful presidency, as everyone should want, he will have to live down how he got the job.
The UF faculty was told belatedly that he and 11 others who were interviewed in secret refused to be identified publicly other than as the sole finalist. They exploited the new Florida law. Before its passage, all candidates’ names were released once they applied — as it should be.
The blanket of secrecy worked to Sasse’s advantage as the favorite of Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose chief of staff, James Uthmeier, helped usher him through the process.
The also-rans avoided having it known that they competed and lost — to their discredit. People too self-important to compete publicly for one of the best jobs in higher education in America have no business winning it. This was a total disservice to the universities and to the taxpayers to whom the universities belong.
Rather than accept an ultimatum, UF’s search committee should have rejected the entire lot and started over. That’s what UF trustees should do on Nov. 1, but they most likely won’t. As with most everything DeSantis wants, it’s a done deal.
Had the background intrigue been publicly known sooner, the protests over Sasse’s campus visit Oct. 10 might have been more strident.
Three days later, on Oct. 13, Amanda Phalin, the new chair of the UF Faculty Senate and a Sasse supporter, circulated a memorandum explaining what had happened.
“The Selection Committee did not choose to pick a sole finalist; a sole finalist was picked because none of the top candidates were willing to stay in the pool unless they were the sole finalist,” Phalin wrote. “In other words, none of the top candidates — all of whom were high-profile leaders — were willing to compete against two others publicly for 21 days, which is what the new state law requires.”
It’s beyond ironic that a U.S. senator who had been through two public statewide elections would be unwilling to compete publicly for a university presidency. Our two emails to his spokesman asking for Sasse’s side of it went unanswered.
In 2021, before the new law, Florida State University’s wide-open presidential search yielded a trove of strong applicants resulting in the choice of an acclaimed scientist and administrator, Richard McCullough, Harvard’s vice president for research. McCullough’s experience in securing research money made him an ideal fit for FSU.
Sasse’s pre-Senate experience as president of Midland College, a tiny, 1,700-student Lutheran school in Nebraska, doesn’t compare.
That doesn’t mean Sasse is unfit or that politicians can’t make good state university presidents. In Florida, John Thrasher and T. K. Wetherell at FSU, Betty Castor at the University of South Florida and Frank Brogan at Florida Atlantic University all earned the respect of students and faculty.
But the question about Sasse is why a politician was chosen for a university that is justifiably fearful for its future under a governor and legislature who meddle in the curriculum to make political points. A faculty survey this summer, with 623 responses, found 67% unsure of their freedom to dissent and 74% concerned over whether trustees would protect UF from “undue political influence.”
That reflects the UF administration’s attempts to bar professors from testifying in voting rights cases or even alluding to critical race theory, and the pressure from Tallahassee and UF’s own Board of Trustees chair — developer, Republican megadonor and DeSantis adviser Morteza “Mori” Hosseini — to secure a tenured faculty appointment for DeSantis’ anti-vaxxer surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo.
To Sasse’s credit, he was one of only seven Republican senators who had the integrity to vote to convict the impeached President Donald Trump of inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection. The question now is whether he can stand up to DeSantis. Given Sasse’s history of opposition to same-sex marriage and to the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the apprehension of students and faculty is warranted.
There has been considerable interest in an essay Sasse published in The Atlantic five months ago in which he took on some of the rigid traditions in higher education, such as the inflexible credit-hour standards for graduation and the exalted influence of the Ivy League. The essay has been faulted for being longer on criticism than on remedies, but the criticisms are pertinent. While we don’t agree with his blanket objections to President Joe Biden’s limited student loan forgiveness program, Sasse was spot-on in arguing that it is not an alternative to fundamental reforms.
Can a senator from the Great Plains protect Florida’s flagship university from the narrow goals and personal ambitions of DeSantis and other Florida politicians? Having had no effective choice in the matter, the university and the state can only wait, watch and hope.
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