It’s been a good day, but Ben Sasse looks a little tense standing inside Malachowsky Hall, the University of Florida’s new $150-million glass-walled showcase that’s been dubbed “UF’s new hub for artificial intelligence.”
AI is a key reason Sasse chose to leave the U.S. Senate representing his beloved home state of Nebraska last year to become UF’s 13th president. The school is home to HiPerGator — one of the world’s fastest supercomputers — and Sasse wants it used to do everything from curing cancer to enhancing student recruitment and retention.
In the moment, though, Sasse needs to relax for a photo shoot and can’t seem to. Just do what feels comfortable, a photographer suggests. “None of this feels comfortable,” Sasse quips.
If he sometimes shuns the spotlight, you might blame it on his roots. At his UF inauguration, he described how “being at the center of attention makes my stoic, German, Lutheran, Midwestern soul super uncomfortable. I am very uneasy. Pomp and circumstance are not a big part of life in rural Dodge County, Nebraska.”
Despite his Midwestern sensibilities, Sasse has grand plans for Florida’s flagship university. “One-and-done higher education,” he says, “is going to be a thing of the past.” Rather than attend a university for four years and come back for homecomings and sporting events, generations going forward will have to return to the classroom repeatedly to adapt to workplace disruptions triggered by the digital revolution. To serve those lifelong learners, UF cannot expect those students to come back to Gainesville. It must be accessible in the places people work — and the university will expand across the state to reach them.
“We’re on the verge of all things new,” Sasse told the Florida Board of Governors hours before Florida Trend’s camera focused on him, “and the disruption is going to exceed that of the industrial revolution.”
At the meeting, governors approved UF’s plans to build a $300-million graduate campus in downtown Jacksonville. The project was in the works before Sasse came on the scene, but its approval marks a significant accomplishment for the new president, who has about 16 months under his belt running UF — an $8-billion enterprise with 60,000 students, nearly 40,000 faculty and staff and a 2,000-acre main campus.
Jacksonville is one of the country’s fastest growing markets, Sasse notes. It will have plenty of workers needing educational updates throughout their careers, and the new campus will serve as “a doodle pad for lots of the broader experiments and reform that are needed in higher ed in general and that the University of Florida is obviously a leader on.”
While major state universities are not known for being nimble, Sasse envisions a new paradigm. If something works, “Let’s expand it, let’s scale it,” he says. “And if it doesn’t work, great. Let’s learn from it, redevelop it and go back into the lab and bring it back into a clinical environment on a tight time cycle. Not create some academic program, let it exist for 10 or 15 or 20 years and then analyze whether or not it’s actually useful.”
Humble Beginnings
Sasse grew up in a place where change is slow. Fremont, Neb., a farm town located about 37 miles northwest of Omaha, had fewer than 24,000 residents when Sasse was in elementary school. Today it’s home to slightly more than 27,000 people.
His father was a high school teacher and a wrestling and football coach. As a youth, Sasse spent his summers hand-weeding soybeans and detasseling corn — a ritual that involves walking through fields and plucking the pollen-producing tassels from the top of each plant. It was something “almost all Nebraska kids did back in the ’70s and ’80s” and is the sort of hard work, he argued in a 2017 New York Times opinion piece, that could benefit kids today.
But the fifth-generation Nebraskan was bound for more. He excelled academically and in sports and was recruited to wrestle at Harvard University, where he earned a degree in government. He went on to earn a master’s degree from St. Johns College in Annapolis and received three degrees, including a Ph.D. in American history, from Yale. His 2004 Ph.D. dissertation, “The Anti-Madalyn Majority: Secular Left, Religious Right, and the Rise of Reagan’s America,” won Yale’s Theron Rockwell Field Prize, which is awarded annually for a work of scholarship, and the university’s George Washington Egleston Prize, which is awarded for an essay on American history.
In the mid-1990s, in between earning degrees, Sasse got a job with the Boston Consulting Group. He spent a year there before hanging out his own shingle and working on an array of consulting projects with various public and private sector entities.
By the 2000s, Sasse was boomeranging between jobs in academia and government — including stints serving as chief of staff in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy, teaching at the University of Texas’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, and counseling then-U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt on policy and strategic initiatives. In 2007, then- President George W. Bush tapped Sasse to be assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at HHS, but he didn’t remain there long.
Two years later, Sasse, then 37, returned to his hometown of Fremont to lead Midland Lutheran College. It needed a fixer — enrollment was declining, and the school was having trouble making payroll. The college “was super special in my family’s history,” he says. His father attended Midland, becoming the first in the family to go to college. There, he met Sasse’s mother. In addition, his grandfather worked at Midland for 33 years, becoming its business manager. The position included overseeing the school’s athletics department and Sasse, an avowed sports freak, fondly remembers riding around Nebraska and Iowa in his grandfather’s midnight blue 1978 Chevy Caprice Classic to attend sporting events as part of the job.
As the school’s president, Sasse made swift changes that included buyouts of long-tenured faculty to cut costs. He renamed the school Midland University and added new academic programs and athletic teams to attract students. A money-back guarantee that students who met certain requirements would graduate in four years also beefed up interest. By the time Sasse left in 2014, enrollment at Midland had doubled and he’d cemented his reputation — at least on a small scale — as a turnaround artist.
His next stop in the U.S. Senate, where he served for eight years, proved a less natural fit. There were a lot of things Sasse loved about the Senate, says William Inboden, who became friends with Sasse nearly 30 years ago when both worked in Washington, D.C., and who now works at UF. But Sasse found its “propensity for more talking than doing frustrating,” Inboden says. “He really is a doer and a builder. There are many great things about the United States Senate, but doing and building are not its fortes … He’s better suited to an executive role.”
Disruptions
CEO of UF is a not the position Sasse necessarily envisioned for himself, telling the Nebraska Examiner that he thought a private equity firm investing in technologies related to the “future of work” would be a more likely landing place after the Senate. But the opportunity presented itself in early 2022 when then-UF president Kent Fuchs announced he would exit the role after nearly eight years and return to teaching.
Under Fuchs, UF had rocketed up U.S. News & World Report’s annual ranking of public universities from No. 14 to No. 5. Fuchs also completed a $3-billion fundraising campaign and kept a promise not to raise tuition. But his tenure had also been marked by politically charged controversies over academic freedom and COVID-19 policies.
Sasse’s selection ignited more controversy and loud protests on campus. The UF Faculty Senate passed a no-confidence vote in the search process after Sasse emerged as the sole finalist from a mystery pool of hundreds of candidates. And some students expressed concern, based on his Senate voting record, that he might be hostile to gay and other minority students.
In the face of that storm, Sasse stayed relatively quiet, which makes sense to those who know or have come to know him.
“I don’t think that that is President Sasse’s style to help people come to terms with things, to talk them through things,” says Amanda Phalin, a business professor who served on UF’s Board of Trustees when she chaired the Faculty Senate. “He just does the work.” She endured a Senate no-confidence vote after voting to hire Sasse.
Inboden, who now runs UF’s new Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, suggests that Sasse’s spiritual grounding enables him to rise above the fray. “As a person of deep faith and strong character,” Sasse is “not as needy of public acclamation as maybe other public figures might be.”
Sasse spent his first six months on the job meeting with colleges and departments, trying to learn all that goes on in the classroom, the laboratory, on athletic fields, in dormitories and every other part of the campus.
He was angered when a state legislator falsely claimed that a UF professor had compared Israel’s response to October’s Hamas terrorist attack to Nazi Germany. It turned out that the professor hadn’t worked for the university in years.
But, Sasse asked UF professors, what if the culprit really was on the faculty? There have been no specific, public allegations of UF faculty forcing opinions on students since Sasse has been president, and he did not directly respond to a question about whether he has seen any. But in December, he lectured the UF Faculty Senate about indoctrination.
“To be clear, academic freedom is protected, but political activism in taxpayer-funded classrooms is not,” he said. “Employment contracts at the University of Florida do not come with some license to substitute activism for education. This place is not a seminary. It is not our job to indoctrinate or catechize. It is our job to educate ... Our professors have this extremely high calling of helping our students engage hard issues in the classroom. And that’s a very different thing than activists using public dollars to enforce ideology.”
The reaction to Sasse’s admonishment “was not good,” says UF Law Professor and outgoing Senate chair Danaya Wright. “The people I talked to were like, ‘we don’t indoctrinate.’”
Sasse “came in with a deficit of trust among the faculty and the students,” Wright says. “And he got to work and spent a lot of time figuring out how UF works. He’s figured out where the dumpster fires are, where things are going well. He’s figured out what we need to do to shore up different colleges and programs and where we’re at risk of backsliding and where we have lots of great opportunities. I wish he would stick with that.”
While a lot of faculty are confident in Sasse’s leadership — “I’ve not heard anything negative” from the faculty, says Saby Mitra, dean of the Warrington College of Business — others grumble about the administration’s silence on state-mandated hot-button issues.
With his national profile and ambitious plans for the university’s future, Sasse arguably has more latitude to push back against Tallahassee’s mandates. Faculty are frustrated that he has chosen not to, Wright says.
UF generated national headlines in March when it announced it was terminating Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs and firing 28 people. It’s something all Florida public universities are now required to do by law, but UF — perhaps due to its stature and to Sasse’s national profile — got the bulk of the media attention.
Asked whether the state of Florida over-corrected with the ban, Sasse repeated that UF will follow the law. He made no statement when the DEI firings were announced in a memo from other UF administrators. The problem, Wright says, was that many of the DEI staffers found out they were out of work from the memo and “were truly blindsided.” It fueled distrust between faculty and the administration, she says, and should have been handled better.
Supercomputer
Among the opportunities Sasse sees is for UF to be “an elite, top 5, no-doubt-about-it game-changing institution.” He speaks about enhancing the student experience, both in coursework and in coming of age, nearly as often as he discusses the need for lifelong education.
He also wants to add 14,000 dormitory beds, replacing some rundown stock, but mostly allowing more students to live on campus.
Like most else with Sasse, the idea is datadriven. Freshmen and sophomores who live in dorms enjoy a “pedagogical upgrade. There’s more persistence. They’re happier. There are less mental health problems,” he says. “There is so much benefit from going from living under Mom and Dad’s roof to living in a dense environment with other students who are arriving and having similar experiences as opposed to a commuter/ consumer experience.”
But those students need to get off campus, and even out of the country if they want. UF surveys indicate more than 60% of students say they want to study abroad, but less than 10% do. Sasse — who studied abroad at Oxford during his junior year at Harvard — wants that gap to narrow dramatically.
“It’s because higher ed isn’t built to try to support students who want to have that kind of experience. And when I look at my three kids, I absolutely want them to study abroad ... You can’t really understand your culture unless you can look back on it from a comparative point of reference. And so our kids should study abroad. And yet the bureaucracies of big universities are not meant to facilitate what’s necessarily the best experience a student can have. We’re often built around whatever structures (were created by) the people who keep working in them year after year after year.”
Perhaps the biggest opportunity for Sasse — and part of what drew him to the job in the first place — rests within the university’s 25,000-sq.-ft. data center, where its HiPerGator supercomputer lives. Other schools across the state have also jumped on the AI bandwagon. For instance, the University of South Florida is planning to open a college devoted to AI and cybersecurity. But with its 51,000 processors and 120 TeraBytes of RAM, HiPerGator puts UF in a class by itself.
Virtually all of UF’s new Jacksonville degree programs will have AI and data analytics elements, if not a full concentration on emerging technology. And UF is weaving the technology into its entire curriculum. A complete, modern education means “our data scientists know a little bit about literature, and we want our literary critics to know a little bit about data science,” Sasse says. “That’s a big part of why we want to create a dual core where students majoring in STEM disciplines take a humanities core and vice-versa.”
HiPerGator is being used to recruit and retain students, says Mary Parker, vice president for enrollment management.
It’s a selling point to parents and prospective students. “If employers are concerned with talent pipelines, students want to know ‘what is this degree going to get me? Is it going to help me get into the best graduate program? Or is it going to help me to start my career when I graduate?’” The supercomputer also is looking inward, she says, helping identify which courses may have disproportionate withdrawal rates so administrators can determine how to better support the students. For example, students who are first in their families to attend college may have different struggles adjusting to campus life.
Sasse, Parker says, knows there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. “He is not one to say ‘we are doing this. You must do it.’ It’s been a very collaborative approach and I feel like my voice is heard. When I say we have some challenges with this, he’s good at taking a step back and thinking through that with me. I just think he’s an authentic, kind person who is extremely intelligent and has this drive to truly make UF and higher education this transformative experience that is going to change what we do and how we do it.”
Sasse and UF’s trustees spend a lot of time talking about these changes, often in the context of how they affect the university’s national rankings. In 2023, the school slipped to 6th place on U.S. News & World Report’s annual list of public universities, sharing the spot with the University of California, San Diego and Davis. At the same time, UF moved up to 28th among all universities, including private ones. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, declared Florida the nation’s best public university last fall — better than the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina and the University of California, Berkeley.
“We’re obviously stewards of an incredible brand here,” Sasse says — but the stakes are high. His attempts to change the undergraduate curriculum and to take HiPerGator and an AI-based education beyond Gainesville’s city limits may either cement that elite status or see it fade.
To bring the project home, UF created a new position, “vice president for Jacksonville programs.” Sasse hired Kurt Dudas, a partner at New York wealth management firm Ehrenkranz Partners LP, paying him $687,000 to move to Florida. The university did not announce the hiring publicly and officials did not respond to requests to interview Dudas, a former Credit Suisse vice president.
While Sasse sees Jacksonville as “the first and most important” advance in the tower-and-satellite structure he sees UF building across the state, it’s still very much a work in progress. Initially, UF will lease a floor for its Jacksonville campus inside JEA’s downtown headquarters until a permanent campus is built. UF will choose from among three possible locations this fall. Sasse wants market-based tuition, not the low-cost, heavily state-subsidized rate most students pay today. That way, the satellite campus can be self-sustaining.
What remains to be seen is how it works, what adjustments will be made, and what other markets UF believes it can serve through similar satellite campuses.
Whatever happens, it won’t be based on a whim. Sasse is “not impetuous at all. He is deliberative,” UF Provost J. Scott Angle says. “He gets advice from a lot of people. He doesn’t rush into decisions. He does the work that he has to — but once he’s ready to move, you’d better be on that train. You’ve gotta keep up.”
Ben Sasse, 52
SALARY: $1 million annually, not including incentives
EDUCATION: BA, Harvard University (1994); MA, St. John’s College, Annapolis, Md. (1998); MA, M.Phil. and Ph.D., Yale University (2004)
FAMILY: Married 30 years to Melissa; children Elizabeth, Alexandra and Breck
EARLY RISER: Provost Scott Angle says he sometimes wakes up to a 5 a.m. text from Sasse, checking to see if he’s available to discuss something during the 6 o’clock hour. “It’s like that all day for him.”
AUTHOR: Sasse has written two books. The Vanishing American Adult examines the difference between adolescence and “perpetual adolescence,” a Peter Pan-like state that he believes too many young people are stuck in today. In Them: Why we Hate Each Other — and How to Heal, he looks at the root causes of division in American society and potential fixes.
TRAVELING MAN: As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sasse was a regular attendee at the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering where global leaders convene to discuss the world’s most pressing security challenges. He was back in March, as part of the U.S. delegation. “I’ve stayed close to my colleagues” on the Intelligence committee, he says, and he does “some advising on some pretty complicated riddles like dealing with the problem of deepfakes.”
UF Facts & Stats
- Undergraduate programs: 94
- Graduate programs: 228
- Research Grants: $1.25 billion
- Four-year graduation rate: 72%
- Fall 2024 Freshman Class Average GPA: 4.57
- Average SAT: 1420
Source: University of Florida
Future Focus
Sasse’s longstanding focus on AI and digital age disruptions help explain his decision to leave Washington and become a Florida man. “Disruption is coming, and it’s going to be gigantic,” Sasse wrote in Them, his 2018 book about political tribalism. “…But the bounty of the digital and automation revolutions will include not just greater quantities of goods and services, but also higher-quality, lower-cost, and more tailored innovations, from genetically targeted cancer treatment and trauma care to individualized architecture and energy-efficient construction.” Now he leads a university that attracted $1.25 billion in research grants last year, with medical researchers such as Duane Mitchell using immunotherapy to attack cancer cells. “He clearly came across as someone who’s given a lot of thought and has a lot of insights into the importance of the role of the university,” says Mitchell, who served on the presidential search committee and helped advise Sasse as he started the job.