Former UF President Ben Sasse posted on Friday afternoon a lengthy defense of his administration’s spending, after Florida’s chief financial officer made a social media post calling for an investigation “to ensure tuition and tax dollars are being properly used.”
Questions on Sasse’s spending arose after The Independent Florida Alligator reported Monday that Sasse more than tripled his predecessor’s spending in the 17 months he spent in office.
Jimmy Patronis, the state’s CFO, posted on X Thursday afternoon to announce that the Florida Department of Financial Services would offer auditing services to the State University System of Florida’s Board of Governors to search for “fraud, waste and abuse.”
The next day, Sasse took to the same social media platform to defend his office’s spending.
“I am unabashedly for big reform in higher education,” he wrote. “This has never been a secret.”
The Alligator had reported that much of Sasse’s spending was on consulting contracts and high-paying positions for Republican allies, which Sasse said all leads back to many new initiatives he worked to start in his 17 months as UF’s president.
Sasse listed the new UF-Jacksonville campus, an initiative to start K-12 charters across the state, curriculum reform, data analytics and partnerships with the space industry, among others.
“These are initiatives we were running out of the president’s office – and there should be even more – and I am dang proud of each of them, as I believe they will benefit Floridians immensely if brought to fruition,” Sasse wrote.
Sasse said he welcomed debate about the merit of his reform initiatives, and an audit of UF’s expenditures during his administration, saying that every new initiative brought new staff and investment expenses.
“Thoughtful Floridians and Americans should be arguing more, not less, about big initiatives and big academic reforms – debate is healthy,” Sasse wrote. “But what is unhealthy is pretending that having reformers at the helm of a prestigious university would somehow not be…disruptive. That was very much the point.”
Sasse reiterated the university’s statement that the budget went through the appropriate approval process, adding that the board’s audit committee and UF’s internal auditing function did not raise any concerns about it.
“Our board leadership extended me full severance and an ongoing role with the university until at least 2028, suggesting no concerns on their part,” Sasse wrote.
He thanked the UF Board of Trustees and its chairman, Mori Hosseini, for “both for the unprecedented rankings rise over which they presided the last 8 to 10 years, and for the big vision they had and the charge they thus gave me to ‘take us to the next level.’”
“Academic bureaucracies are notoriously resistant to change, and these audacious folks outlined a big vision for taking this extraordinarily special and rising institution even higher,” Sasse wrote.
Sasse announced last month that he would step down as UF’s 13th president at the end of July, citing his wife’s recent epilepsy diagnosis and increasing health challenges.
If those initiatives were so worthy, why is it that the public has no knowledge of most of them? K-12 Charter schools???
What a great man to think that this governor doesn’t want him
Sasse’s 1,700 word-response on X, in which he portrayed himself as reformer of higher education. included this rationale, “[T]he whole reason I agreed to leave a great job representing . . . my home state of Nebraska is precisely because higher education needs massive reform.”
So, the question thus becomes: If you want to “fix” what you consider to be a broken system, why in the world did you come to an institution that, by most accounts, is already doing a damned good job?!?
When you hire a politician, that’s what you get
*republican