Former Sen. Ben Sasse Takes Office as UF President and now announces he is retiring

Wonder how this type of bs will impact major donors

 

That's awesome. If nothing else, UF seems to have cultivated favor and a valuable ally with WSJ (they're also the ones who ranked us #1 pub school).

 

I know someone in the provosts office that asked the president for clearance to do a certain job in admin that impacts new program development. He’s asked 6 times in the past 2 months. He has received zero response. So program development is paused for no reason and no one knows why.

 

this shit with sass is horseshit. Especially remote work at 6 figures will he insists other staff should be coming back to campus. Hypocrisy. Cronyism. Horseshit. And ps sass has an mba. Making him a vp at a major public institution is an effing joke.

 

& to think people on TH said that Sasse didn’t have the exp to be uni prez. Sounds like a veteran to me

 

And ps Florida tax payer funding floating these salaries that, with benefits probs my cost the taxpayer 1.5 mil annually. And these positions were not listed openly they were basically appointed. Lol. Wow.

 

Really?

 

Really..most people believe that politics needs to stay the hell out of acadamia.

 

When I went off to get a PhD & told folks I’d gone to UF they were Gaga about theil & madalla being there - 2 top notch econometricians. I’d never heard of them. Ats cuz they lived far, far away. This was 30 years ago!

saw an old bud on a flight to Atlanta. Said he was chair at ga state & I asked how he like living in Atl. He said, I still live in Austin.

A chair at ASU lived in NC the whole time

oh yeah, the chair who hired me never lived here

a woman down the street “works” at Okla st & a good bud lives in Tulsa & “works” at CU Boulder

 

Taking public stand against @$$%#@ TERRORISM isn't #$%%# politics. It's civilization. And quite Apropos for education.

....good Lord....

 

hiring unqualified political operatives as VP's and letting them work remotely is politics. instilling that quack of a surgeon general at UF as a full professor is politics.

 

Yea, but I would think those are unique (not typical) situations. When I was at UF, I recall Dr Brigham, the guy that wrote the intro Finance text was on staff tho nobody that I knew ever had him for a class or even saw him.

I have a family member that is a professor at a major university who told me that no one he knew at his current school or prior one had that deal on a regular basis. He did know a couple of "highly published research professors" that came in for one semester annually but lived elsewhere doing research/writing papers.

 

how are you judging that? I've had a dean who was an assoc prof at 1 school & then became dean. We had a prez who was a math prof his whole career. most people I know who've worked in upper admin, think non academics make better presidents & from limited data, I cert agree.

 

people with no experience at the job they were hired to do.

 

you mean like a math prof running a uni?

Hell, I went from sitting in my office playing online poker & adding a fourth action to a rock, paper, scissors game that was dominated by the mixture of 1/3R, 1/3P & 1/3S to see if a dynamic system designed by biologists kept weight on the 4th action to being chair. I had no qualifications. I'd worked shitty jobs & taught econ.

 

You know more about academia than I do, but I would assume they still have to show up and teach classes routinely. I had a couple law professors who didn't live in Gainesville, but they had to be there each week to teach their courses and hold office hours. I'd say that's a different situation than a member of university leadership living in a different state and working entirely remotely. But maybe that's more commonplace than I think.

 

I think a lot of the objection is POLITICS. I bet w/o looking it up nobody here knew whether the last UF prez did similar or not. typically, at unis, there are admin that run internal shit & admin that are external folk*. The huge complaint about our dean 2 deans ago, was that he was always in his office.

* being a poli is perfect exp for that job. Even at the chair level, being a good politician may be the most important skill

 

What's with all of the hysteria?

Being the president of a university is cronyism.

Lombardi was a staunch liberal, and while I don't agree with him on everything, he was great at bringing in research $$ to the engineering and medicine programs, maybe better than anyone we have had. He pulled that off with a background in Latin American history.

Sasse is a politician, but an independent one who owes nothing to anyone, and the ability to appeal to both sides. That is useful in a GOP governed state. Bit of a showboat, so what?

Cronyism is part of his job.

 

Maybe. When people see politics influence the hiring, they're going to see politics in a lot of what that person does.

As an outsider who has seen this type of cronyism at other Florida universities when politicians took over (cough New College cough), it feels off for him to hire two former staffers to VP jobs that pay a ton of money when they can't be bothered to even live in the state. But maybe it's not unusual.

 

I think making two big hires without a job posting (or whatever they’re called today) is probably far worse than some cronyism, which goes on everyday, everywhere across the spectrum from government to unis to the private sector. It’s why people spend their life cultivating professional relationships. And it doesn’t sound like these were newly created positions being filled for the first time so the ordinary process should have been followed.

Cronyism doesn’t always mean someone is unqualified. It just means someone had a leg up. Which is why running the standard process is so important (whatever that would have otherwise been in this case).