Ben Sasse Gets $1 Million/Year For Four More Years To Quit University Of Florida

They *might* not let him spend a million a year on catering any more though :(

Boyish lunkhead Ben Sasse, the Eddie Haskell of Omaha, recently resigned his post as president of the University of Florida. Possibly because as a former Republican senator, he found the pace of a job where he had to come into the office five days a week overly taxing.

Ha ha, we kid. First, we have no idea if Sasse bothered coming into the office five days a week. Second, the one-time US senator from Nebraska claimed he was resigning to attend to his wife, who is in poor health. Yr Wonkette guessed he was fleeing ahead of an audit of his office’s spending. Not shockingly, we were right. Are we Nostradamus? No, we’ve simply grown wizened and cynical when talking about politicians, particularly and usually of the Republican ilk. Which, after all, is what Sasse is first and foremost, no matter how many history degrees he has.

Anyway, if you had spent on catering in your first year nearly twice what your predecessor spent on average every year of his eight-year tenure, you also might not want the press looking into it too carefully. If you managed to spend $1.3 million on catering in 17 months, including $176,000 on a catered holiday party — a party for 200 guests — featuring a sushi bar with two sushi chefs making fresh spicy tuna rolls and charging you over $38,000 for the privilege, at a time when higher education budgets across the nation are being slashed and your own university’s classes are often taught by an underpaid adjunct who struggles to get to campus in his broken-down ’93 Hyundai Excel, you too might consider fleeing just ahead of the accountants and the pitchforks.

Okay, fine, the holiday party was for big donors whom you are hoping will write the school giant checks, so maybe you felt you had to spend money to make money. But the university has rules it tries to strictly enforce, even if you’re a professor ordering a couple of pizzas for your class to celebrate the end of the semester.

From WUFT, the PBS station covering Gainseville:

UF warns employees that “every effort must be made” to keep meal and drink costs for meetings with donors, prospective hires or other officials under $75 per person. The December holiday party was 12 times higher.

Twelve times higher works out to $900 per party guest. We’re not sure Saudi Arabian weddings cost that much. (Maybe Saudi Arabian weddings cost that much.)

Sources who had attended previous holiday parties under UF’s last president told reporters that the one Sasse threw was much more “opulent” than in the past. No shit.

Same goes for the football tailgates that Sasse hosted. Home football games are of course an enormous deal at UF, and catering for tailgate parties both in the president’s suite in the stadium and pre-game at the president’s mansion — a new practice that Sasse introduced when he came on board — accounted for over one-third of that $1.3 million catering bill.

Ben Sasse Leaves University Of Florida Just Ahead Of The Auditors

Your average college football team plays around six or seven home games a year. Sasse was only president for one football season. For a team that was 5-7. But at least the donors in his stadium suite got to chow down on bacon-wrapped hotdogs and “brisket coated in peach-flavored barbecue sauce.” Which, to be fair, does sound fucking delicious.

And the record-keeping around Sasse’s catering expenses appears to have left something to be desired:

Over 40 charges among the itemized expenses — ranging from $495 to $19,600 — included vague, incomplete descriptions like “dinner” or “lunch.” One invoice for $14,892 dated in July 2023 was labeled “Chris.”

Dang, Wonkette should have found a way to invoice UF for lunch.

And for all this, UF had the privilege of paying Sasse $1 million a year in salary, plus a performance bonus of $150,000. Did we say “had”? We meant “will continue to have.” Sasse’s contract guarantees him $1 million a year until February of 2028, even though he is not sticking around for almost three-quarters of the length of said contract. He did announce he’s staying on campus to teach classes. We’re sure all the tenured faculty who are making nowhere near $1 million a year were thrilled to hear that.

This is the “New York Mets and Bobby Bonilla” contract of college president contracts.

Sasse’s overall spending was three times what his predecessor spent in his final year in office. That predecessor has retaken the job on an interim basis after Sasse’s resignation. In a sign that the university has perhaps learned its fucking lesson about handing a Republican a bunch of money and saying “We trust you,” the university put a clause in his contract requiring semiannual reviews of all the office’s spending to be reported to the Board of Trustees. Better late than never, we guess.

[WUFT]

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