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Several University of Florida employees hired by former president Ben Sasse have been terminated following his resignation, The Gainesville Sun reported.
Sasse, who resigned late last month citing his wife’s health issues, has been criticized for his multimillion-dollar spending spree at UF, ballooning the expenditures of the president’s office. He also hired several political figures, some of whom worked with him when he was a Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska, paying them large raises to follow him into higher education. Some of those employees had no higher education experience before joining UF.
Now, according to the Sun, at least six of those hires—Kari Ridder, Kelicia Rice, Raven Shirley, Penny Schwinn, Alice James Burns and Taylor Silva—are no longer at UF.
Not all were linked to Sasse’s time in the Senate. Schwinn, for example, was the former Republican commissioner of education for Tennessee.
Two other Sasse allies, James Wegmann and Raymond Sass—hired from his Senate staff into high-ranking roles at UF—appear to still be employed at the university, the newspaper noted. Both appear to work remotely from the Washington, D.C., area, according to their LinkedIn pages.
Sasse’s spending, which totaled $17.3 million in his first year, has since prompted calls for an investigation. Sasse stepped down after a little more than a year and a half at UF and has since been named president emeritus and appointed as a professor in UF’s Hamilton Center. The former president will continue to collect a base salary of $1 million, with possible performance bonuses, through 2028 unless he accepts a full-time position elsewhere or resigns from UF.
