A World Without Heroes

Author’s Note: This excerpt is from my weekly “Top of Mind” email, sent to subscribers every Thursday. For more content like this and to receive the full newsletter each week, sign up on Minding the Campus’s homepage. Simply go to the right side of the page, look for “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” and enter your name and email.

By fourth grade, I had broken my left arm three times, each break in the same place, and each break the result of failed stunts—leaping from a swingset, an end table, and a staircase—all in an attempt to imitate my hero, Spider-Man. Fast forward to the summer of 2017, when I was working my first internship on Capitol Hill, my hero had changed. Now obsessed with education policy—a field I later worked in—I admired Senator Ben Sasse. Formerly a college president, Sasse had just published the Vanishing American Adult. He argued that college-aged students were infantilized and unprepared for adulthood—I agreed. His driving for Uber also resonated with me—I later similarly juggled driving for Uber while running for office in Mississippi. For a time, Sasse was my hero. But just as my admiration for Spider-Man faded after his girlfriend asserted that the Washington Monument was built by slaves, so too has my respect for Sasse.

I first became skeptical of Sasse’s presidency when I learned that the University of Florida (UF) offered him a nearly $10 million compensation package over five years. 

His base salary started at $1 million per year, with potential raises, performance bonuses, and benefits pushing the total to over $5.4 million. Additionally, he was promised a $1 million retention bonus, nearly $800,000 in retirement contributions, and at least $1.7 million in fringe benefits, including life insurance, rent-free housing, and tuition waivers for his family. 

I’ve always believed that such high compensation packages are unjustified. As Richard Vedder has argued, university presidents operate in a market distorted by public subsidies and lack clear performance metrics, and where funds are intended for education, they are diverted to enrich top officials. 

Despite his excessive compensation, I still held out hope that Sasse might steer UF in a fiscally conservative direction and practice “political celibacy,” which he had promised. But when news of his spending spree made headlines last week, that hope was quickly dashed. 

As reported by UF’s student newspaper, Independent Florida Alligator, his 17-month tenure saw a dramatic increase in spending and secretive decisions. Upon taking office, Sasse boosted the president’s office budget from $5.6 million to $17.3 million, largely to fund consulting contracts and high-paying roles for his former Senate staff and political allies. Among the highest-paid were Raymond Sass and James Wegmann, who both worked remotely from the D.C. area. Sass, as Vice President for Innovation and Partnerships—a newly created role—earned $396,000, more than double his Capitol Hill salary. Wegmann, working from his $725,000 home in Washington, D.C., earned $432,000 as Vice President of Communications.

And the spending didn’t stop at salaries.

Travel expenses for the president’s office skyrocketed to $633,000 in his first full fiscal year—over 20 times the $28,000 annual average during his predecessor’s tenure. This spike in travel costs was driven by the frequent commuting of out-of-state hires who worked remotely. In fact, Sasse’s travel spending in just 17 months surpassed the total travel expenses of his predecessor’s eight-year tenure, according to the Independent Florida Alligator. 

Out-of-state work is not unprecedented for UF employees—I work remotely and know firsthand that I get more work done by not commuting to the office—but, as the student newspaper wrote, it is unusual for top university officials and administrators to work remotely from outside Florida. And, Sasse’s office has been reluctant to provide Independent Florida Alligator a complete log of these expenses. A partial report indicates that between April 29 and July 29 alone, over $20,000 was spent on flights to bring these employees to campus.

Additionally, Sasse allocated $7.2 million to consulting services, with $4.7 million directed to McKinsey & Company, where he had previously worked. Details of McKinsey’s work at UF remain murky, with key documents heavily redacted under state public records laws.

In response to criticism, Sasse claimed that the spending spree was necessary for reforms like the new UF-Jacksonville campus, innovative K-12 charters, and making UF a leader in key academic disciplines. But his abrupt resignation in July, citing his wife’s health—an admirable reason to leave his post (a lesser man would choose his career over his family), but likely not an option for his lesser compensated faculty and staff—leaves many questions unanswered. I don’t have any questions—it seems pretty clear that taxpayer funds were wasted and that political celibacy was a myth—but like other critics, I have doubts about the future of his reforms at UF. 

Spider-Man left me nursing broken bones. But Sasse’s fall from grace leaves me with something that won’t quite heal: a constant reminder that we live in a world without heroes.  “Up, up, and away web.”

Image by Konstantin Yuganov — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 242988433