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

I had Brigham. It's been many years, but I thought he was pretty good. It was one of those classes where your exam scores averaged in the 50% range and you got a B.

 

Also being at the University, some of the problem I see so far, in re: to Sasse, is that there is no information or obvious policy implementation. It seems there are a lot of people waiting on a lot of things to happen, and it just hasn't happened so far. IMO, the problem with someone who holds everything close to the vest and isn't transparent is that people insert their own narrative and that could be highly false. Perception becomes reality. He may think that doesn't matter, but I think it does since the position is highly political in nature. I personally haven't formed a strong opinion yet because I don't have enough information in which to do so.

 

Ha ha, sounds like my calculus class.
I've no strong opinion on Sasse other than I'm not a fan of hiring ex Pols. Reminds me of fsu hiring ex state politician Thrasher.
Met Lombardi once and I was a fan.

 

Lombardi once caught me "trespassing" in the side box area at the Performing Arts center. I sort of snuck up there as I was listening to a classical performance for a class. He walks in, assumed I wasn't really supposed to be up there and said "who let the riff raff in?". We both laughed and he asked me about my major, where I was from, etc. Nice guy.

 

I can’t speak to Sasse’s job at UF. At the very least, he seems to be failing in some domain of communication.

However, I wanted to chime in on his book, Them, which I just read. It’s about our state of political tribalism, arguing that much of our disdain for the other side results from a lack of community and deep meaning in our day to day lives. This lack of a local/family tribe results in us joining “anti-tribes” against them, what ever is the other political side.

The thesis, while tough to evidence, seems plausible, but I had a second motive to reading the book, which was to learn about Sasse himself. The Sasse that comes across in these pages is quite thoughtful about life and quite learned about governance. He give an anecdote about yelling at a slow host at TGIF when trying to get a quick non-hospital meal, after staying in the hospital for many days with his gravely ill wife. He realizes that he was mostly angry at his situation, and not the young host. He compliments some democrats along the way, such as Chuck Schumer, for his beautiful graduation speeches about cultivating meaningful relationships.

He is very wary of social media, to the point where his family has no-phone Sundays and has even drafted 16 aphorisms about social media that live on his fridge. The first aphorism is “Your thousandth social media friend won’t make you any happier. Your fourth real friend will.”

On the intellectual side, it’s clear that he’s read many social scientific and philosophical works regarding the components of a good society. One highlight is his excellent passages on Washington’s humility and Madison’s brilliant foresight at the founding.

Overall, I think Sasse comes across as a sincere person who has a view that our problems aren’t caused by politicians, even those on the other side, but by our inattention to what really matters in life, which for him are relationships with family, friends, and communities. These appear to be true values for him, as evidenced by his lack of embrace of Trumpism while in office. I am sure when anyone writes a book they want to show their better side, but I was pretty impressed with Sasse’s thinking and believe that he is just a good person.

 

President Marston used to spend a few minutes each morning talking to students in the parking lot behind Tigert after he got out of his car. He seemed very sincere and would even remember quite a few names.

It was a very nice gesture on his part to acknowledge the students and give them a few minutes of his time. And this was even after Robin Williams at Growl and Wendy O at The Halloween Ball

 

I can’t speak to whether he was the most qualified for the position, but seems to me we could have done far worse. He strikes me as intelligent and thoughtful.

 

Director of Uf online just quit. Interims at key provost positions. He needs to hire a provost really badly to clean up that side of the house. Until that happens it’s tough to get things done. Lots of interim deans too.

 

I feel the same. I’m disappointed that he hasn’t seemed to communicate his vision better, but I’d be very surprised if he doesn’t have a vision that he a working to enact.

 

12ft

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/interesectionality-american-college/676350/

https://archive.ph/SYtH9

The Moral Decline of Elite Universities
Too much of academia cares little for universal human dignity, leaves no space for forgiveness, and exhibits no interest in shared progress.

By Ben Sasse

In the spring of 1994, the top executives of the seven largest tobacco companies testified under oath before Congress that nicotine is not addictive. Nearly 30 years later, Americans remember their laughable claims, their callous indifference, their lawyerly inability to speak plainly, and the general sense that they did not regard themselves as part of a shared American community. Those pampered executives, behaving with such Olympian detachment, put the pejorative big in Big Tobacco.

Last week, something similar happened. Thirty years from now, Americans will likely recall a witness table of presidents—representing not top corporations in one single sector, but the nation’s most powerful educational institutions—refusing to speak plainly, defiantly rejecting any sense that they are part of a “we,” and exhibiting smug moralistic certainty even as they embraced bizarrely immoral positions about anti-Semitism and genocide.


Despite the stylistic similarity of these two images, they had a substantive distinction. Yes, both sets of presidents sat atop sectors experiencing a collapse of public trust. Higher education commanded the confidence of 57 percent of Americans a mere eight years ago, but only 36 percent of Americans by this summer, and a steeper decline is likely coming as a consequence of the grotesqueries of the past two months. And yes, both sets of testimonies—of the tobacco executives, and the elite-education executives—revealed a deep moral decline inside their respective cultures. But here’s a difference: The tobacco executives were lying, and subsequent legal discovery showed how extensive their understanding of nicotine was. The three university presidents, however—with their moral confusion on naked display—were likely not lying; instead, we saw a set of true believers in a new kind of religion.

 

What an original argument, this book is over 70 years old now:

God and Man at Yale - Wikipedia

 

Wait, what?

 

I don't understand the import of originality here.

 

apparently, unis have already been criticized for stuff....so, ....?

 

He clearly didn’t read the op Ed. Just had a kneejerk conservative = bad and read the title and posted.

There was no mention of religion in the article.

IMO Sasse nailed it. He chose his chance to distinguish himself really well.

 

to be fair, i did not read the article either. To me it seems pretty clear, the left has real issues in condemning the MOST.*MARGINALIZED.GROUP. or their supporters, no matter what.

* most is probably not needed here

 

He literally argued there was a new religion on campus! I referenced Buckley because he argued Christians (the real morality) were being fed a new religion of liberalism at an elite university. Is Sasse saying anything different? If unis are in moral decline what moral values is he implying are being lost?

 

It’s more than that. Some of these universities have gotten so wrapped up in trying to conform to this new ideology that they’ve lost sight of right and wrong. Misgender somebody on campus and there is hell to pay but threaten to kill Jews, well that’s context dependent.

 

Clearly you don’t get it. Just revert to Go Team!!

 

hard to argue against....I just read about misgendering being equated to violence at unis. I've seen chik fil a equated to violence. These are supposed to be educated folk. It is not violence, but their args are being made to justify violence, so if they accurately label it, their justification for violence goes away.