Florida Student-Run Paper Sends Ben Sasse Packing

Seems like a mess, Auburn football style.

https://www.alligator.org/article/2024/08/reason-behind-sasse-departure

After 17 months on the job, his working relationship with the UF Board of Trustees chairman, Morteza “Mori” Hosseini, became untenable, they say. Hosseini, a strong-willed top political appointee of Gov. Ron DeSantis and a developer, has served as head of the school’s board of trustees since 2018.

Out of public view, tensions escalated to a breaking point between Hosseini and Sasse, the former Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska who had started a process to overhaul Florida’s flagship public university.

Specifically, Hosseini sought to impose restrictions on Sasse’s communications and outreach with the governor’s office, Florida’s higher education oversight agency and the Legislature – where Sasse’s popularity was strong and growing. The new rule would require all those communications be routed through Hosseini, said one administrator, describing what Sasse had personally confided to this person.

Sasse also asked Hosseini for latitude to deal with the worsening health condition of his wife,
Melissa, and Hosseini said no, because the university’s presidency required his full attention, this administrator said.

I’ll say this for Sasse: He is not full of it. He can offend both sides, he can be idealistic and overly sensitive to compromising ideas, and he became weirdly afraid of the media over several years. Basically, he has a tendency to sniff his own wind.

But he’s sincere IMO. The first story made it seem like he did something crooked. This story makes more clear he was a square peg in a round hole.

 

The world was a better place when trustees stuck to meddling in football and eating cocktail shrimp with the Bull Gators.

 

Y'all do realize why Ben Sasse was terrified of the Independent Florida Alligator, right?

It's right there in the name of the paper: Independent. He and his couldn't threaten them into submission.

 

Well he absolutely overpaid his buddies to work remote jobs and created titles for them and ran up a crazy budget to do all this. I don't think we can deny that at this point.

And apparently he liked to chat with DeSantis every now and then and the BoT head didn't want to give up that privilege.

So Sasse is crooked and he was the wrong guy and the wrong time.

 

When you fully read the second story, Sasse still is a crooked grifter, but he wasn't giving the other grifters the attention they wanted. Sadly any investigation will be be filled with redacted shit so Meatball Ron isn't implicated in anything.

 

Come on man. They’re all crooks. What’s that line about “idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you”

 

I'm not idolizing anybody if I write they have the tendency to sniff their own farts, am I?

No, I'm suggesting that it's not quite the frame a standard progressive wants to put on it.

 

the treacliest person in that caucus. He was the fucking worst.

 

Go on. What is he? He appears to be a sloppy grifter at best that took a job he was wholly unqualified for and decided to hook up his buddies with remote gigs doubling the salaries of the previous holders of those positions or just making up new roles.

The part about him not being interested in rankings, etc...that basically him executing Meatball Ron's plan for higher education. Any of the educational missteps I don't blame on Sasse because...he was really unqualified for the job and only put there to execute the wishes of the Governor's office.

 

What made him unqualified for the job?

(In a sense I agree with you. Sasse would have been better suited to a smaller public university. You're not just going to overhaul something as institutional as the University of Florida very easily.)

 

That he didn't know what he was doing? And that he early decided being an absentee President was going to work? The whole process of hiring him was a sham. He was absolutely not qualified to be president of any large public university. He didn't have the years in education He didn't have the resume. He didn't have the history with earning major grants and donors for expansion and special projects. He didn't have any level of results he can point to and say he executed something on this level with any shred of success. University of Florida doesn't need to be be overhauled. It stands on it's on and quite an honorable public institution of learning. This was Apple handing over business operations to a mailroom staffer.

He did some of DeSantis' dirty work and handed Mori Hosseini a wonderful real estate deal in Jacksonville with the UF graduate school campus. He did those things and in the process decided to blow money like a drunken sailor. The grifting aspect he proved to be extremely qualified for.

And Hosseini, who would be investigated under any honorable administration is the bigger problem here because he excitedly conducted a sham process to get a politico hired, only to be jealous with the other politicians wanted to talk to the politician instead of him. And once the Jacksonville campus real estate deal was done, Hosseini had no more use for him.

 

You know he ran a university before, right? (Though not anywhere near this size.)

My sense is U of F was the wrong stage for a lot of his ideas, not all of which were cheap. And that's about the extent of it, really, except that higher education now functions like government, and sees any reorg as an existential threat to the very idea of learning.