Former UF President Ben Sasse stepped down unexpectedly in July, citing concerns about his wife’s health. But nine current and former administrators and top donors say there was more to the story.
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.
The situation was made to look like a voluntary resignation and friendly departure, one former administrator said.
Behind the scenes
One day after the Board of Trustees met by phone July 18 to accept Sasse’s surprise resignation, Sasse publicly announced he was leaving effective July 31 with a note on X, formerly Twitter. He said that Melissa Sasse, who suffered a stroke in 2007, had been diagnosed with epilepsy and was suffering from new memory issues.
The administrators and donors confirmed that Melissa Sasse’s health concerns were genuine and had worsened. Melissa Sasse, who is 55, was deeply involved in homeschooling the couple’s three children, including two who are now college aged, and she was forced to stop with their youngest son, Breck, 13.
All the administrators and donors spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive collision of interests involving the most powerful officials at Florida’s flagship public university. The donors are among those who have given millions to the university and enjoy close relationships and regular briefings with top UF officials.
Hosseini and Sasse, through a university spokesman, Steve Orlando, disputed that personal conflicts led to Sasse’s resignation. In a statement, Orlando said, “those claims are completely unfounded,” and Orlando said any insiders discussing with journalists what happened should do so on the record, by name.
The other 12 trustees have declined to discuss the matter or did not return the Alligator’s messages.
Minutes from the 19-minute board phone call on July 18, which was convened so quickly that no journalist monitored it, showed that Sasse cited his wife’s health as his reason for stepping down, and that Hosseini and other trustees “applauded him for putting his family first and extended prayers to him and his family.” All the trustees were on the call except James W. Heavener, who had an excused absence. The board later said no one recorded the call.
“Gator Nation needs a president who can keep charging hard, Melissa deserves a husband who can pull his weight, and my kids need a dad who can be home many more nights,” Sasse wrote the next evening on social media.
Sensitivity surrounding reasons behind the hasty departure of the university president implicates the search for the next one, if the perception were that a seasoned politician like Sasse was unable to successfully navigate the politics of higher education in Florida. The trustees will be responsible for attracting top-caliber applicants in the next search, which was expected to continue into 2025.
Sasse’s spending scandal
Since Sasse’s resignation, he has since faced bipartisan scrutiny after The Alligator first reported Monday that he had tripled his office’s spending — a majority of which was for lucrative consulting contracts and high-paid, remote positions for GOP allies.
He spent $17.3 million in his first year in office. The figure was far higher than the $5.6 million in spending during the final year of the previous president, Kent Fuchs, who has agreed to return as interim president through 2025.
In a new statement Friday, Sasse disputed reports of any inappropriate spending but acknowledged there have been spending increases by his office.
“Now, it is true that there was substantial funding for a number of important new initiatives,” Sasse wrote. “I am very happy to defend each and every one of these initiatives…”
This week, the DeSantis administration urged the Board of Governors, which oversees Florida’s public universities, to conduct an audit of what the state’s chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, called “reports of UF’s exorbitant spending by Ben Sasse’s office.” Patronis, a member of the governor’s Florida Cabinet, said his agency specializes in investigating fraud, waste and abuse, and would offer support in such an audit.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who represents the congressional district in Florida’s Panhandle, called it “this widening Ben Sasse scandal” and said DeSantis wants no part of it.
Florida attorney John Morgan, a leading Democratic fundraiser who graduated from UF’s law school, said he gave the university $1 million but would cease donating until he was reassured with the results of an investigation.
“I won’t give one penny more until an investigation is completed to tell us how this happened and most importantly, is it criminal?” he said on social media. “Makes donors like me feel stupid. Every donor, past and future, need to be interested in this gross grifting.”
The aftermath
Sasse has indicated he intends to become a president emeritus and continue to teach college classes at the Hamilton Center, the university’s new, GOP-mandated civic program devoted to research and teaching about Western civilization and the principles of a free society. Those plans – and the issue of how much of his $1 million base salary he would continue to be paid – are subject to approval by the trustees, including Hosseini.
Sasse had other disagreements with Hosseini during his tenure, the administrators and donors said. Hosseini is sensitive to the university’s national rankings in higher education and believes a prestigious ranking helps attract donors and research grants.
Sasse has openly disdained the importance of rankings, such as those in U.S. News & World Report. He has said each ranking organization's methodology can change suddenly, affecting a school's arbitrary score.
Florida fell one position last year to No. 6 among public universities in the U.S. News rankings, even as it climbed one spot to No. 28 in the magazine's rankings of top public and private universities overall. The Wall Street Journal last year scored UF as the No. 1 public university in the country and No. 15 among all universities. UF touted it by hanging No. 1 banners across campus, despite what Sasse said he felt about rankings.
Sasse also has drawn private criticism from administrators and donors over perceptions that he was insufficiently attentive to seven- and eight-figure donors to the university. At least two multi-million-dollar donors said Sasse did not return their email messages or accept meeting invitations.
Sasse was a controversial selection whose hiring in November 2022 came after a search process shielded from public view under a new state law. He started the job in Gainesville in February 2023 after he resigned from the U.S. Senate. Sasse had been president for four years until 2014 at tiny Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska, a far cry from UF’s sprawling statewide footprint, more than 58,000 students and $1 billion in research.
The presidential search happened secretly under a new Florida law intended to encourage applicants who can be considered confidentially until they are finalists for the job. Sasse's political positions – including his opposition to abortion rights and same-sex marriages – were troubling to some students and faculty on campus in one of Florida's most progressive cities. He was the only finalist.
Early in his tenure, Sasse commissioned a $4.7 million report from a consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, to help him develop a strategic plan for the university, which included expanding non-traditional teaching that wouldn’t require students to meet regularly inside classrooms in Gainesville, increasing interdisciplinary work across the university’s colleges and eliminating what he described as unproductive professors.
Sasse also spent $2.5 million in other consulting expenses, the Alligator reported. Sasse spent some of the $17.3 million on high-salaried, remote positions for Sasse’s former U.S. Senate staff and Republican officials.
They included James Wegmann, Sasse’s former Senate spokesman, who was paid $432,000 and allowed to continue living in Washington D.C. to become UF’s vice president of communications, and Raymond Sass, Sasse’s former chief of staff, who was paid $396,000 and also allowed to continue living in Maryland for a newly created role, UF’s vice president for innovation and partnerships.
The university has declined to clarify whether all Sasse’s appointees remained working at the university.
Citing what it said were “questionable financial choices and the lack of transparency,” the university’s faculty union this week said it was asking the Board of Trustees for an audit of spending in Sasse’s office.
“Accountability for public money is the very least that Florida students, parents, and citizens should demand from a BoT that was responsible for the coronation of Ben Sasse after a secretive, unilateral, and apparently whimsical and capricious selection process,” the union’s president, Meera Sitharam, said in a statement.
Garrett Shanley contributed to this report.
Vivienne Serret is a UF journalism and criminology senior, serving as the Fall 2024 race and equity reporter for The Alligator's Enterprise desk. She previously worked as a columnist and previously reported for The Alligator's university desk as the student government reporter. She loves karaoke and lifting at the gym.
