The outlook for the University of Florida is bad, under Ben Sasse
An article from their English Department:
Since February 2023 he has been here among us, but not with us. Missing posters have been put up with his face on them. A cabal of Nebraskans I thought of Mandelstams line from The Stalin Epigram, big friends from home protects him. The contrast between him and his kindly, ineffectual predecessor, Kent Fuchs, who spent weeks saying public goodbyes to all comers he had a desk put out for him under the trees in front of the library is absolute. Sasse does not use the office set aside for him, nor does he speak to any of the locals, even when they are his employees and colleagues. I imagine him with a Nebraskan chef, a Nebraskan valet, a Nebraskan taster. His homeschooled children are oh, somewhere.
It seems there is only one model for todays man of action, and that is Shock and Awe. Overwhelming force deployed suddenly and overwhelmingly. A theatrical performance with no audience as such, only a houseful of victims. The lions eat the circus and then tweet about it. Ask no questions, tell only lies, and double down, triple down, quadruple down. The ineffably stupid move fast and break things that has so much to answer for in our time. Our new Innovation Hub has an asinine three-word slogan: Grow Ignite Disrupt. It would make just as much sense to have Paper Scissors Stone for a motto. And rather more to have Smash Grab Run.
Sasse wanted, it was claimed, to spend a few months to take soundings but hes in fact as unresponsive as Ulysses lashed to his mast. (Nor does he answer letters, not even when personally addressed, courteously written and submitted in triplicate via US Mail, campus mail and email.) More than $4 million is being spent on an analysis of the institution by McKinsey the management consultants. (It so happens that management consultancy is Sasses business background.)
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/april/in-florida
sop
(10,274 posts)"From early on in DeSantiss governorship, it was apparent that here was someone who took extreme pleasure in malice and cruelty. In him, the political is personal. Which is to say he has no politics beyond the reach of his shadow, neither care nor imagination nor interest. Here was someone who had witnessed and approved force-feeding at Guantánamo. He told asylum seekers there was something waiting for them, and flew them to the middle of nowhere (he alone had the pleasure of knowing it was the playground of the enemy, Marthas Vineyard). He took funds away from schools that, against his wishes, kept mask regulations in force. He sacked a public prosecutor in Tampa who said he wouldnt criminalise abortion, and another in Orange County who refused to turn a blind eye to police crimes. He fired a data scientist who collated coronavirus statistics. He seems to have special antennae attuned to the category small opposition. And these individuals librarians! he goes after with his thunderbolts, with the astonishing array of state power. Not bad for a party that claims to want to drown it in a bathtub."
"His special animadversion is education: teachers, school libraries, syllabuses, test preparation. Dreary enough, ordinarily, to kit out the most colourless political career imaginable, but because invested by DeSantis with a kind of berserker fury, and because the annihilation of his tiny targets implies a vast inversion, an extraordinary attention to detail and limitless reserves of force, terrifying. How does he know? What does he care? Why does he bother? It all makes for a formidable politics of intimidation. This kind of thing feels like its only ever been deployed historically in spy-riddled, denunciatory or panoptical societies, but the new technology makes it possible; first the discovery of the hold-out, the lone exception, and then the magnification of the consequent annihilation."
"In Sarasota, in South Florida, DeSantis took it upon himself to take a small liberal arts college, New College of Florida six hundred students, founded by Unitarians in 1960 and give it a conservative overhaul. He named Richard Corcoran, former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, president, appointed a bunch of mostly out-of-state ideologues to the board, and settled back to watch the damage. Its the small target that really gives bang for the buck. The faculty quit, the students were terrorised, the press was agog, intellectual standards plummeted, jocks enrolled and sports teams were started up. (Previously, there had been no sport other than sailing in Sarasota Bay.)"
Sounds like Sasse and DeSantis have similar plans for Florida's flagship university.
LisaM
(27,843 posts)I tried to sound the alarm a few years ago when people seemed determined to force STEM down everyone's throats, and throwing the liberal arts under the bus. I felt as if the tech companies were trying to force our public schools to train programmers and coders for Amazon and Apple and the humanities be damned.
Let the liberal arts vanish at our perish.
303squadron
(547 posts)Whereby, the State of Florida would withhold part of the State college and university funding and make those institutions "earn" that funding back. The lost funding would be earned by graduation rates. Most technical degrees and certificates would earn more than liberal arts degrees. Funny how that calculation was weighted!
Well that plan fell through for reasons too complicated to go into here....but the hand writing was on the wall - fuck the liberal arts. Go study humanities and social science on someone else's dime.