The brief and turbulent tenure of former UF President Ben Sasse roiled the university in controversy and left campus politics in a near-constant state of flux. Now, the monthslong search for Sasse’s successor is underway.
The next president faces a daunting agenda: healing rifts between faculty, students and administrators, restoring UF’s standing in public university rankings and steering the institution through Florida’s increasingly politicized higher education landscape.
So, how could the search for UF’s next president play out?
According to experts, a lot like the last one.
Judith Wilde and James Finkelstein, a research duo at George Mason University who study university presidencies, anticipate that another secretive and costly search will yield “maybe two people at most” as finalists.
They also predict the fallout of Sasse’s tenure, coupled with Tallahassee’s micromanagement of state universities, could scare away traditional candidates from applying for the UF presidency. That could leave the door open for another academic outsider to step into the big job.
Five of seven Florida university and college presidents named in the last two years — including Sasse — have been former politicians, a trend that Wilde and Finkelstein said the state’s flagship university is unlikely to buck.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just a drum roll, pulling the curtain aside and ‘here’s your new president,’” Wilde said. “I wouldn't be surprised if it was someone who had a political or governmental background. …with Sasse, obviously, it blew up, which actually didn't surprise us a whole lot either.”
As Wilde and Finkelstein see it, the search isn’t just about UF; it’s about the future of higher education nationwide. Florida is among a growing number of states where Republican lawmakers are reshaping college campuses, aiming to root out what they see as left-wing bias in curricula.
Sasse’s appointment was seen by some as a litmus test for whether that agenda could succeed at a flagship institution as prominent and expansive as UF.
Sasse, then a Republican U.S. Senator from Nebraska, emerged from a pool of more than 700 candidates as the sole finalist of UF’s last presidential search in late 2022. He dazzled the UF Board of Trustees with his bold vision for the university, but his tenure was cut short, marked by excessive spending and political controversy.
“This is going to be one of the most high-profile presidential searches in the country because of how the search was conducted last time, and how it ended,” Finkelstein said.
UF’s last presidential search took place mostly behind closed doors. Under a state law put in place weeks before the search launched, the names of applicants for public university presidencies are kept under wraps until the search committee narrows the field to three finalists. After that, the public has 21 days to weigh in.
Proponents of Florida’s closed search law, under which Sasse’s replacement will be selected, said it was meant to attract high-caliber candidates who don’t want to jeopardize their current jobs. Wilde, however, said it’s typical for closed searches to end in what she called “failed presidencies.”
Failed presidents aren’t necessarily bad at their jobs, she said; they are fired or resign less than two years into a multi-year contract.
“A large number of them came about through secret searches and very little due diligence,” Wilde said. “Part of what led to their downfall was a skeleton in the closet, because those skeletons do not tend to stay in the closet.”
Wilde said presidents selected through closed searches also face an uphill battle to win over faculty and students, who may see the candidate as being foisted upon them by an opaque selection process.
In Sasse’s case, the UF Faculty Senate voted no confidence in the search, citing a lack of openness. Sasse had a “hill of trust” to climb, one student leader said at the time.
The search committee tasked with finding Sasse's successor, reached by email through UF spokesperson Steve Orlando, didn’t directly respond to an emailed list of questions, including whether it plans to name more than one finalist this time. Orlando said in a statement that the university’s search process is “robust and will lead us to the best possible candidates.”
Sasse abruptly resigned in July, less than two years into his five-year contract, attributing the decision to his wife’s recent epilepsy diagnosis and a need to spend more time with family.
Since stepping down, he has come under fire for alleged wasteful spending and nepotistic hiring practices while in office. The governor’s office has called for an audit into Sasse’s expenses and the UF Board of Trustees recently passed new regulations giving the board chair strict oversight of the president’s spending and hiring decisions.
Finkelstein said potential candidates may not want to apply to a position that’s under heightened scrutiny from Tallahassee and the university’s board of trustees.
“That’s certainly going to be a red flag in a search process, and it’s going to be an issue that any serious candidate is going to raise in their conversations about the job,” he said.
But Finkelstein, who together with Wilde has analyzed the contracts of more than 300 public university presidents, said UF could lure and secure skeptical candidates with a big compensation package — what he referred to as “golden handcuffs.”
Sasse’s contract included plenty of goodies, including a $1 million salary, an annual performance bonus of up to $150,000, a five-year retainer of $1 million. Finkelstein said Sasse’s contract was the most lucrative of any public university president at the time, but it has since been outvalued by the contract of the University of Michigan’s new president, who stands to make more than $2 million a year.
As competing institutions raise their presidential compensation packages, so too will UF if it wants to poach candidates, Finkelstein said.
“In the nuclear field, they call it mutually assured destruction,” he said. “This is ‘mutually assured benefits.’ …I would suspect that anybody who applies for this position and considers it seriously is going to want a contract at least as lucrative as [Sasse’s] was.”
Sasse’s successor could receive another potential perk: post-resignation pay. After stepping down, Sasse retained his $1 million salary as a professor at UF’s Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, where he earns nearly three times the annual pay of the center’s director.
According to Wilde’s and Finkelstein’s research, it’s unusual for presidents who resign early in their contracts to retain their full base salary. They found that it’s typically cut by a quarter in their transition to professorship.
Finkelstein said this could attract applicants who don’t intend on staying for the duration of their contract at UF.
“There are people who take these jobs for other than altruistic reasons,” Finkelstein said. “They like the compensation, they like the perks, they like the prestige — as opposed to people who really have a deep commitment to public service [and] the ideals of a university.”
Public university presidencies — particularly in Florida — are an increasingly lucrative option for outgoing lawmakers looking to pivot away from politics, Finkelstein said. State university presidents are paid more than most public executives in Florida, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, who earns a salary of $141,000.
“Who knows what DeSantis is going to do when his term is over?” Finkelstein said. “Maybe he’s the next president of the University of Florida.”
Contact Garrett Shanley at gshanley@alligator.org and follow him on X @garrettshanley.
Garrett Shanley is a fourth-year journalism major and the Summer 2024 university editor for The Alligator. Outside of the newsroom, you can find him watching Wong Kar-Wai movies and talking to his house plants.
