Ben Sasse next UF president?

He hit the high notes for me, then. At least it’s what I wanted to hear. I’m now a fan of the hire.

 

hopefully at a minimum it made things marginally better and not worse.
I do think understanding our metrics is fair. Without having a grasp of where are strengths and weaknesses are, what his office budget is, what future plans are on the table etc. it’s hard to talk about who you are going to hire.

 

Interestingly enough, he didn't specifically address academic freedom and unless I missed it in the 5 minutes I had to look away.

 

True, but I would also say that he is starting from a place of lacking experience at this level, so almost like a coach with very little experience at the major college p5 level, I would argue he will have a steep learning curve on the academic administration side of things - but I think (fricken hope) he will probably be excellent at dealing with the politics at the BOG and in Tallahassee. Just based on his ability to communicate.

 

It got asked about - and given a more direct answer - in the faculty forum (it was the question after tenure).

I don’t know that it has directly come up in this student forum yet though.

In the faculty forum, he discussed it largely in the context of “Stop Woke” etc. and said part of what you have to address there is misconceptions and people talking past each other, that no we don’t want students being indoctrinated, but good education and vigorous academic debates aren’t indoctrination and require people to be exposed to ideas, even those they may not have been exposed to before or that may make them uncomfortable. The example he gave is that his academic background is history and that you cannot understand American history without also understanding the American original sin of racism and the role it has played in American history.

 

Apparently students protesting outside with the very original “hey hey Ho Ho Ben Sasse has got to go” chant that is audible when someone opens the doors.

He initially joked that at least they have rhythm, a lot of times when you hear protestors some are on the 1, 3 beat and others are on the 2, 4.

He then said that while he admittedly wishes they didn’t feel that way, so he doesn’t know that he can say that he’s “happy” to hear the protest, from an intellectual and legal perspective he’s glad that they have that right and are exercising the opportunity to make themselves heard.

 

Nice - had to step away for the student forum - but I'm sure he's used to it.
GAU and a few other groups pretty much protest almost every BOT meeting so he might as well get used to it.

 

Is there any video of him speaking to both groups?

 

Not sure if they will replay as well, but the livestream link is at:

Presidential Candidate Q&A

I believe there is supposed to be a UF employees forum at 3:45 still.

 

Students crack me up. I’m sure they worked each other into lather over this and were out for blood.
Their youthful energy is helpful on important causes, but their lack of experience and knowledge about anything beyond the simple view of the world they still tend to have makes them look silly many times.
And I don’t even wholly disagree with them here.

 

I’m not sure the employee town hall will actually happen at this point or not given that, based on Twitter, we now seem to have protestors with bullhorns in the room where the town halls were being conducted.

 

Employee town hall is happening and is live now but has been relocated to a different room.

 

They moved it to a private room. The students crack me up. So militant lol.

 

Ben Sasse is a very smart guy, but this hire is like hiring a guy who owns a grocery store to be the CEO of Publix.

 

Have you considered they're protesting the hiring of an underqualified politician to lead one of the top universities in the country?

 

They also had the really counterproductive effect of cutting short the student forum with the guy they supposedly have lots of questions about so that relatively few of those student questions got answered.

 

Sweet lord My step-Dad said this exact phrase to me yesterday.