| By James Taranto Mr. Taranto is the Journal’s editorial features editor.
The University of Florida president has a theory of how higher ed succumbed to execrable ideas—and thoughts on reforming it.
WGainesville, Fla. ould calls for the genocide of Jews be a violation of the University of Florida’s bullying and harassment policy? “Yes,” says Ben Sasse, UF’s president.
Three university heads equivocated when lawmakers asked that question in a congressional hearing last month. So far two of them, the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay, have been demoted to the faculty. Mr. Sasse—who came to Florida a year ago after eight years as a U.S. senator from his native Nebraska—is a deft enough politician to parry a gotcha question.
Yet when I follow up by raising the issue of free speech, he acknowledges the answer isn’t so simple. Regarding the First Amendment, he says, “I’m a pretty libertarian zealot.” He emphasizes that the Constitution “draws a deep, deep line at speech and action,” that “threats are the front edge of action,” and that “orchestrated plans, or getting to a definable way of targeting specific people, is when speech ceases to be deliberation.”
Which isn’t that different from Ms. Gay’s testimony last month: “We are deeply committed to free expression. But when speech crosses over into conduct that violates our policies—policies against bullying, harassment, intimidation—we do take action.”
Does that mean we have a meeting of the minds between Florida’s president and his erstwhile Harvard counterpart? Not quite. Mr. Sasse calls Ms. Gay’s appeal to free speech “laughable” in light of “the culture of trigger warnings and safe spaces and everything else that they’ve built on top of their victimization grid that defines the worldview of Harvard bureaucrats of late.” Mr. Sasse’s view is that toleration of antisemitic expression is a price worth paying for free speech. Ms. Gay expects us to pay it and get nothing in return.
Mr. Sasse, 51, says higher education is having an “emperor-has-no-clothes moment.” Illiberalism, anti-intellectualism and identity politics were spreading on campus for decades before they congealed recently into open and pervasive antisemitism. For those of us who have long been dismayed by this trend, it has been satisfying to watch institutions like Harvard suffer well-deserved reputational damage.
But it’s a guilty pleasure. “The culture of ideological conformity and monoculture at those schools is unhealthy not just for them, but for the nation at large,” Mr. Sasse says. “Some people from the right . . . say, ‘Let’s just let it all burn,’ That is not a healthy instinct.”
Fair enough, but what’s the alternative? The boards at Harvard and Penn ditched their embarrassing presidents, but that’s a far cry from actual reform. “Historically they’re resting on their laurels of having delivered a much, much better education,” Mr. Sasse says. “Network effects” make it possible for these schools’ prestige to endure a long and deep decline in their quality.
Maybe the answer lies in good old-fashioned competition. To be sure, Ivy League and similarly selective schools have only enough capacity to serve a tiny segment of the higher-ed market, leaving plenty of room for others to capture market share by offering a similar product to a wider customer base. And if parents and prospective students are learning that the merchandise is defective, they ought to be open to sellers that offer something different.
The University of Florida may be ideally positioned to become the Harvard of the Unwoke. It is the flagship public institution in a state whose governor and Legislature have declared war on identity politics. There are no racial preferences in admissions, thanks to a 1999 executive order by the underappreciated then-Gov. Jeb Bush. Mr. Sasse himself is a conservative Republican with a scholarly background. He holds a doctorate in history from Yale, and before entering the Senate he taught at the University of Texas and served as president of Midland University in Fremont, Neb.
He proudly notes that The Wall Street Journal ranks UF higher than any other public institution in the U.S. (behind 14 private ones). U.S. News puts it at sixth place among state schools nationwide. Taking into account “study, sports and weather, we’re No. 1,” he says. “We have edge-of-Ivy-League-level admissions now. Our average SATs out-of-state are 1450, in-state about 1420.” University of Florida Hillel estimates that nearly 20% of undergraduates are Jewish.
UF also has what Mr. Sasse calls “a healthy radical bias toward practicality” owing to its status as the state’s land-grant university— established under the Morrill Act of 1862 “for the benefit of agriculture and the mechanic arts.” The university has extension offices in all of Florida’s 67 counties, most specializing in agriculture. It has impressive technical facilities, the crown jewel of which is a supercomputer called HiPerGator that was donated by Nvidia and its cofounder Chris Malachowsky.
“There’s a lot to say about the healthy large land-grant institutions being the most important institutions of American higher ed 10 years from now,” Mr. Sasse says. As rapidly advancing technology transforms the economy, “students are going to have to get retrained for a new job not just when they come out of high school and go through college, but at age 30, 35, 40, 45, 50—you’re going to have more and more job disruption over the course of your life.”
Yet the liberal arts are also central to Mr. Sasse’s educational vision: “I think the best people to navigate a complex world are people who have a broad worldview and are well and widely read.” He wants to institute a “dual core” so that humanities majors would be required to take courses in science, technology, engineering and math and STEM majors in the humanities.
He sees the crisis in higher ed as having arisen in part from an overemphasis on training for employment. In the mid-20th century, as he tells it, “we were going through the late stages of the Industrial Revolution and the very, very early stages of the rise of knowledge-economy jobs.” With the need for farm labor rapidly dwindling and factories becoming more efficient, “you have a whole bunch of people who are just not going to be able to have brawn jobs for their whole life.” Anticipating that World War II veterans would need training, Congress enacted the GI Bill in 1944. “So you grow higher ed as a sector with an assumption that this is going to be practical first.”
But the idea that the purpose of education was, as Mr. Sasse puts it, “to prepare for life and thoughtful citizenship and engagement and caring about the good, the true and the beautiful” also held a good deal of sway. “I think people kind of intuitively understood in the late ’40s and early ’50s that you needed more of both.”
Then came the political convulsions of the ’60s and the “curricular wrestling” in the aftermath of the civil-rights movement and amid protests over the Vietnam War. “By the end of the 1960s, people are so exhausted that the general public decided, ‘I don’t know about all that stuff. I believe in the practical parts . . . . I don’t know about all those curricular debates.’ ”
As a result, public engagement with curriculum questions “starts to atrophy.” By the late ’80s, “you end up with more and more culture-war skirmishes happening on campus, but that are supposedly only the domain of the experts,” Mr. Sasse says. “The public saw it happening but stopped engaging and stopped paying attention.” Still, young people needed education to succeed, so their parents (and the government) kept supporting the system by sending them off to college.
Who would speak up for “dead white males” when ideologues declaimed against them? “Moms and dads have day jobs, and they need to provide for their families,” Mr. Sasse says. “They were patted on the head and said, ‘The experts got this.’ Well, the experts, if they’re people like President Gay, they don’t deserve us to defer to the claims of ‘my truth.’ What the hell is that? When she resigns, she goes out and runs to the New York Times and writes an op-ed and defends ‘my truth.’ Well, that’s absolute nonsense. That itself should be a fireable offense.”
Mr. Sasse likes to speak his mind, and during his time in Washington he was known for criticizing Donald Trump as scathingly as he now does Ms. Gay. He also knows his mind better than most politicians or university presidents. His Oct. 10 statement on the attack against Israel was clear and indignant: “What Hamas did is evil and there is no defense for terrorism. This shouldn’t be hard. Sadly, too many people in elite academia have been so weakened by their moral confusion that, when they see videos of raped women, hear of a beheaded baby, or learn of a grandmother murdered in her home, the first reaction of some is to ‘provide context’ and try to blame the raped women, beheaded baby, or the murdered grandmother. In other grotesque cases, they express simple support for the terrorists.”
In January 2023 an Omaha World-Herald reporter observed that the departing Sen. Sasse had “expressed concerns about Trump’s authoritarian streak” but “did vote with Trump 85% of the time.” The senator’s response: “I’m gonna flip it on you and say he supported my policies.” And unlike many other Trump detractors, Mr. Sasse also expressed concerns about the left’s authoritarian streak.
I didn’t come to Gainesville to talk politics, and Mr. Sasse says he “signed a 36-month pledge of partisan neutrality,” following the example of Mitch Daniels, the former Indiana governor and Purdue University president. But he touches on the subject when he says he worries that “the collapse of a belief in classical liberalism is what’s eating up all of these institutions,” including but not limited to universities. He blames this on both the “wokes” who have managed to “hijack” those institutions and the “super MAGA” types who would rather destroy than save them.
“You can’t burn down every institution,” Mr. Sasse says. “Lots of institutions are going to be bankrupted by the digital revolution,” and that disruption is made more dangerous by the “ideological warfare about every institution.” He would like “to conserve and preserve and reform and change and reorganize lots of institutions, and that requires you to have more of a public definition of what you’re there for.”
That’s another reason Mr. Sasse wants to re-establish a strong core curriculum, which he sees as not only a benefit to students but a necessary public good. “If we’re going to pass on the meaning of America to the next generation, it doesn’t happen in the bloodstream,” he says. “You actually have to teach what America is to the next generation.”
Of the push for “diversity, equity and inclusion,” he says that “the aspirational best parts of diversity and inclusion, I’m for.” “If you don’t have viewpoint diversity, I don’t know how you ever get to education—you just get indoctrination.” And he believes in “the dignity of every soul,” so “you want people to be included.”
What’s wrong with DEI “is the E,” he says, meaning the embrace of “equity” at the expense of equality. “The fundamental problem is saying that Martin Luther King can’t fit in the new communities of know-it-all ideological indoctrination bureaucrats that run most universities in the country . . . . MLK doesn’t fit because of his aspirations for a colorblind society.
“Can people have a different view than MLK? Of course.” But “the ideological conformity of mandating that equality of opportunity is wrong and bigoted, it has to be excluded from our discourse—those people are crazy.”