Let me tell you about the University of Florida, Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse.
Attending the top-ranked school, I know from personal experience, is life-changing — and the students protesting your secret selection as sole candidate to become its president deserve to be led by the best education professional in the nation.
Not a second-term politician with only small-college experience, little knowledge of Florida and even less demonstrated ability, at least during Monday’s campus visit, to articulate a modern vision for tackling the challenges facing faculty and students today.
What are they?
Political interference is at the top of the list: assaults on academic freedom, fascist surveys of faculty and students to gauge political leanings and repeated moves by the governor to use the university as a political pawn.
And that’s eroding UF’s most precious asset: its credibility.
Proof of the damage is your candidacy, which only adds to the grievances — and descent.
Leading a top university should be a job top scholars and national leaders aspire and run to, not away from. That you’re all the selection committee could come up with says a lot.
You’ve been chosen for political reasons, not high academic valor, rigor and worth.
That you were even in the running is only a result of the dismantling by the state’s Republican leadership of a principle that made Florida exceptional — its Government-in-the-Sunshine laws. Left intact, they would have made your candidacy and that of others a public record.
But, thanks to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ strongman ambitions and the compliant Republican-dominated Legislature, presidential searches now occur behind closed doors and are ideologically driven.
Values have changed — and not for the better.
Instead of public accountability, the Republicans’ culture wars reign supreme, demanding, like authoritarian regimes, that political stripes be held in higher esteem than talent and experience.
There will be consequences for the school that I, and all of Gator Nation, treasure.
Top 5 ranking
It’s a source of pride that, for the second year in a row, U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges 2023 has ranked UF the No. 5 public university in the country. But it didn’t achieve this by having academics and leaders who play the role of sycophants to politicians.
Sadly, that’s what UF has become during the last four years of DeSantis’ meddling: a university in service to politicians.
When the respected College of Medicine is forced to accept among its ranks a controversial doctor peddling debunked COVID-19 theory, Joseph Ladapo — to give him the prestige to be DeSantis’ surgeon general — a line has been crossed.
What will you do when DeSantis, to whom you would owe this job, wants to reward one of his cronies with a UF appointment?
Don’t answer. I know.
This is why you’ve been chosen.
Life-changing education
And now you’ll have to face the students — who are braver than faculty members. They want to keep their jobs.
If you learn anything being a Gator challenged by the best professors in their fields, it’s to think critically, to ask the right questions, and to examine your own life.
I had only been in this country for a little over seven years when someone in the admissions office decided that this Cuban refugee, No. 14 in her Hialeah Senior High 1977 graduating class but no genius, was worthy of admission.
I didn’t have high SAT scores like fellow classmates, but journalism was already my passion and I wrote my way in.
I didn’t come from privilege but from factory workers who valued education. I would have qualified for all kinds of financial aid, but my high school counselor was such a racist that when I asked her for help with forms, she sent me on my way, saying: “You’re not college material. You’re going to be a bilingual secretary in downtown Miami.”
I thought she just didn’t know me. Undeterred, I worked my way through college, as I had done in high school, stashing away a year’s tuition. Unable to afford a meal plan, I survived freshman year on green apples, six-packs of Tab, the occasional bagel and cream cheese — and the kindness of friends.
I was only awarded a grant and a scholarship after a friend walked me to the financial aid office. Too late for this year, maybe next. By then, I had made it to the College of Journalism and was on my way to a career at the Miami Herald.
Years later, when UF needed me, I took a short leave of absence to serve in 1993 as Distinguished Freedom Forum Visiting Professor, a role that would help the college fill a lacking diversity requirement to re-certify.
I wonder, would the class I created and taught using the Miami multicultural experience as a model, Urban Community Journalism, be deemed inappropriate now, amid critical race theory bans and under you, Sen. Sasse?
Will you give a damn about minority students like I once was — or will you become part of the effort to return to the days when people judged you by the color of your skin and where you came from, and rewarded or punished you accordingly?
I hope not.
The state of education in Florida, submerged in politics, has descended to such lows.
Only a courageous president can save the University of Florida from its sad role in the state’s downward spiral.
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