Ben fricking Sasse?

Seems not.

I'm sure many will rejoice at the perceived trolling of the libs.

The president's job is mainly fundraising, honestly, and given were the $$$ comes from these days at flagships, it may not prove disastrous. It honestly doesn't matter if you're Che Guevara or Milton Friedman in your personal politics, as long as you understand your job is mainly landing dollars.

The state of Florida allocated $2.7 billion total to all state universities, of which I think UF got something like $470 million or something, basically the lion's share. But the operating budget is $3.4 billion, which means any UF president has a lot of money to turn up.

Obviously, that isn't all done directly by that position, but even the indirect stuff - grants, licenses from new tech, partnerships, etc. - are largely set up by the actions of who runs the show. The office of the provost is who the colleges mainly go to about day to day ops, but the provost reports directly to the head honcho.

If Sasse can bring in the bucks like Fuchs did, it will all likely smooth itself out largely. If he can't, this will get nasty quick.

Nothing can be more shady that the chancellor search that went down where I am few years ago, but it largely seems to have calmed down because, regardless of how he ended up with the job and where he came from, money is coming in and the talent in some key positions is much better. Everybody calms down with the politics when the day-to-day is going well, despite how it looks on Twitter sometimes.

Still, very odd choice.

He’s been schooled at Harvard and Yale, so that makes him a perfect fit for UF and the Florida culture.