Don’t Sass Us, Ben Sasse

The events of the past couple of weeks have truly been historic. The attack by Hamas and the response by Israel have dominated the news cycles, the images of death and destruction throughout the region eliciting emotions around the world. Either directly or indirectly, American college campuses are not immune from this international crisis.

As we have seen lately, colleges and universities, either as an entity or through the president, increasingly have to decide when and whether to issue public statements. Events directly impacting students, like the Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action and abortion, are generally no-brainers. National events like the Charlottesville, Va., rally of white supremacists in 2017 and the murder of George Floyd in 2020 also routinely prompt presidential statements. But statements on international conflicts are rarer, and when they are complex like this one, they require much more consideration.

After Charlottesville I wrote an editorial for Inside Higher Ed arguing for no more statements. I quoted United Methodist Church bishop Bruce Ough, who challenged the church to move from “thin words” to “thick action.” Instead of these statements, we should find ways to meaningfully address the issues. Speaking up is definitely part of that, and opinion pieces offered by the president, not the institution, are an important piece of the work.

But statements are somewhat played out. I mean, is Hamas reading statements from American universities denouncing their violence and saying, “Harvard said we’re wrong, so let’s stop”? Of course not; they don’t give a damn about what we think.

Yet whether a president issued a statement recently has been a news story in its own right and has created all kinds of questions. Did you issue one? Did you issue it fast enough? Was it strong enough? Why did it take one side and ignore the other? This has especially been the case for Ivy League and prominent flagship institutions, where we’ve seen board members resign and major donors vow to cease their contributions over these statements.

More surprising, though, has been the friendly fire from inside the ranks. It started with former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who went after the current administration for a slow response and continued to push both on social media and through media interviews. He then went on to praise some, like the president of Brandeis University, saying on X that Brandeis’s president found “the moral clarity after Hamas in 6 hours that many other academic leaders have not found in 6 days.”

It is not lost on me that Summers is taking a shot at Harvard’s first Black woman president, as I am old enough to remember his comments about women in science and his assertion that the lack of women leaders in scientific fields may be due to “issues of intrinsic aptitude.” Summers insulted Cornel West within his first year of holding the Harvard presidency, received a no-confidence vote in four years and was out in five. Prior to Summers, you would have to go back to the 1860s to find a shorter tenure of a Harvard president. (This situation, by the way, is a good reminder for all the folks who made the pilgrimage to Harvard to see the sister president Claudine Gay inaugurated to offer some public support for her during this difficult time.)

But the media darling recently has been new University of Florida president Ben Sasse. Sasse wrote a strong statement condemning Hamas to Jewish Gator alums, important to a university with a large Jewish population. But Sasse didn’t stop there. He went on Fox News and decided to proclaim his moral superiority compared to other presidents.

In the interview, Sasse said, “You got so many universities around the country that speak about every topic under the sun, Halloween costumes and microaggressions. But somehow, at a moment of the most grave, grotesque attacks on Jewish people since the Holocaust, they all of a sudden say there’s too much complexity to say anything.”

Sasse was clearly feeling himself and decided to sass his colleagues, and the praise flowed.

“UF President, Ben Sasse, Shows All Other Universities How to Write Public Statements.” “Senator-turned-university-president disses fellow educators for silence.” “Lawmakers praise UF president for strong stance against Hamas: ‘Follow his lead.’”

Yeah. I’m not impressed.

Sasse spent eight years in the United States Senate, which basically means he didn’t do much beyond write statements. He should be great at it! He never sponsored a bill that became a law and never ranked higher than 97th among 100 members of the Senate for bills sponsored or co-sponsored, according to reports from the nonprofit organization Open Secrets. While he would openly criticize Trump, he voted with him 85 percent of the time.

The man who decried that “too little education” is going on at elite universities voted for the unqualified Ben Carson and Betsy DeVos, refused to meet with Merrick Garland, and voted against Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. He was the only senator to vote against an opioid treatment program bill. In 2017, Ben Mathis-Lilley described him as “a performatively deep thinker, an advocate of public decency who makes a case for good-faith discourse,” even as in his actions he “mostly advanced the interests of an increasingly authoritarian, unreasonable Republican Party.”

Sasse talks a good game, a thin wordsmith with no evidence of thick actions. Mark Joseph Stern said Sasse “pursued an approach of checking the executive branch via tweet and press release. Instead of pushing for legislation or hearings that might rein in Trump’s excesses, Sasse issues strongly worded statements.”

There you go. He’s really good at strong statements.

But Sasse conveniently ignores the terrorism not 6,000-plus miles away, but 140 miles away in Tallahassee, as a dictator in training attacks higher education. Last week, seven former presidents of public colleges in Florida penned an op-ed noting the assault on higher ed over the last two years: forbidding the teaching of poorly defined divisive concepts. Bans on diversity initiatives. Overall suppression of academic freedom. The governor’s penchant for retaliation has silenced all public presidents, which is why former presidents are speaking up.

Nearly 300 of the 642 faculty members from Florida universities who responded to a recent survey said they planned on seeking employment in a different state, and 95 percent called the political environment in the state bad or very bad. Sasse has strong words for Hamas, but there has been no strong statement of support for his faculty members. I guess he doesn’t care if they stay or go.

This is the same Ben Sasse who has avoided the students on his own campus, so much so that in the spring his face was plastered on missing-person fliers posted around campus (“MISSING,” they read. “Have you seen this man?”). The student newspaper indicated that he has declined interviews, not even dignifying their requests with an answer in their editorial “Paging Dr. Sasse.”

Look, I agree that presidents should use their bully pulpits to speak to the issues of the day, and that we don’t do it enough. But trying to sass them for not speaking out on a truly complex issue with global implications, especially from someone who is too timid to address issues in his own state, is ridiculous.

Morality, like charity, begins at home.