Cronyism Is No Way to Run a University

Well, well, well.

Last week I wrote how political partisans in the executive and legislative branches of some states have decided to abuse their oversight responsibilities of public higher education institutions, by subjecting the faculty and students of those institutions to intimidation and control.

It turns out that one of the things these partisans are eager to control is the money that flows through these institutions so it can be funneled to their cronies.

Thanks to truly outstanding work by the student journalists of The Independent Florida Alligator, from a story by Garret Shanley, we can appreciate the full scope of former University of Florida president Ben Sasse’s spending profligacy through which he “channeled millions to GOP allies and secretive contracts.”

During Sasse’s brief, 17-month period as president, he “more than tripled his office’s spending,” a surge “driven by lucrative contracts to big-name consulting firms and high-salaried, remote positions for Sasse’s former U.S. Senate staff and Republican officials,” The Independent Florida Alligator reported.

Each paragraph of story is more gobsmacking than the last.

Sasse hired six former staffers and two additional former Republican officials.

One of the hires was Raymond Sass, Sasse’s former Senate chief of staff who was installed as UF’s vice president for innovation and partnerships, a previously nonexistent position, paying him $396,000, which doubled his Senate staffer salary.

James Wegmann, Sasse’s former communication director was installed as the vice president of communications at a salary of $432,000, replacing the previous VP who was making $270,000 a year, and was “demoted to Wegman’s deputy” The Alligator reported.

Wegmann lives in Washington D.C. and works remotely.

This is a pattern previously seen in Florida with Ron DeSantis and the New College, where he installed a crony as the college president at a salary double the previous president, brought in a bunch of out-of-state ideologues (including Chris Rufo) for the board, and basically wrecked the place.

Sasse’s office spent over $600,000 on travel, apparently reimbursing all those remote executives he hired when they needed to travel to Gainesville. The previous president spent $28,000.

Sasse also paid over $7 million to McKinsey consultants for work that was redacted from the records request made by The Alligator, making it impossible to know what the money went toward.

The Alligator has said “this is a developing story,” and thank goodness for that. Every kudo imaginable should go to Garrett Shanley and anyone else on the paper’s staff that undertook this investigation. It’s a model of journalism achieved through publicly accessible—though not always easily publicly accessible—information.

I’m going to assume that everything Sasse did passes legal and administrative muster. Presidents of large bureaucracies are often given significant latitude to pull the financial levers. This may be extra true in this case as Sasse—who claimed to be putting his partisan days behind—is aligned with DeSantis. Questioning the moves of a university president aligned with a popular governor would likely result in a quick trip out the door.

But just because it might have been strictly legal, does not mean it wasn’t corrupt. It’s most reminiscent of the kind of routine graft that happened in the Chicago of my youth, as aldermen made sure to sprinkle city money around in order to maintain their political power. At the very least, the spending is careless and wasteful, an abrogation of the responsibilities a university president should have toward his institution. In the case of that Chicago graft, at least the money was being used to an end, this is just Sasse rewarding his cronies with public (and student) money. 

Sasse recently resigned for personal reasons, so we don’t get to test whether this would have been the kind of activity that could have resulted in his removal. In last week’s post, I suggested that the solution to this kind of abuse of power in relationship to our public institutions ultimately required a political response. The public is going to have to make it clear that this kind of misuse of public funds and failure of leadership is unacceptable. The only way to do this is to remove the people who allow these abuses to happen from those positions of power.

The role of the press to expose these abuses is an important part of being able to exercise the voting franchise in an informed way. Floridians should be thankful for the high quality of student journalism that will ultimately help make their flagship institution stronger.