It was the spring of 2024, and the University of Florida’s new Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education was getting off the ground. Sasse, then the university’s president, was a self-described “zealot” of the center, a Republican-backed venture to teach students about the Western canon and civil discourse.
But the rollout was hitting roadblocks. Several graduate students had complained that liberal-arts faculty were targeting them for affiliating with the Hamilton Center. There were murmurs that humanities departments would block its curricular proposals. The center’s director later described some professors’ conduct as “abuses.”
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Ben Sasse was angry.
It was the spring of 2024, and the University of Florida’s new Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education was getting off the ground. Sasse, then the university’s president, was a self-described “zealot” of the center, a Republican-backed venture to teach students about the Western canon and civil discourse.
But the rollout was hitting roadblocks. Several graduate students had complained that liberal-arts faculty were targeting them for affiliating with the Hamilton Center. There were murmurs that humanities departments would block its curricular proposals. The center’s director later described some professors’ conduct as “abuses.”
So Sasse spoke to David Richardson, then dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. According to two academic leaders who received nearly identical accounts of the conversation, Sasse gave the dean an ultimatum: Deal with it, or he would absorb the liberal-arts college into the Hamilton Center. In one of those accounts, Sasse said Richardson’s job was on the line.
A third academic leader said that all they could disclose about the exchange was that it was “unpleasant.”
Sasse’s ultimatum was at odds with the Hamilton Center’s original pitch as an independent academic unit — one that would collaborate with UF’s liberal-arts college. The center would “build on existing strengths,” its inaugural director said.
But for most of the last academic year, the Hamilton Center was locked in a behind-the-scenes turf war with the college. The center said faculty members waged an active campaign against it, stifling its progress and discriminating against its students. Some liberal-arts faculty countered that the center was duplicating their established departments’ offerings and shirking typical university protocols.
The clash culminated in a university investigation into whether six liberal-arts faculty members had “interfered” with the Hamilton Center — a probe that threatened disciplinary action up to termination. The Chronicle’s reporting is based on over a dozen interviews with university officials and rank-and-file faculty, and scores of emails and documents obtained through public-records requests and those involved.
Florida is among half a dozen states where civics schools and centers with Republican ties have sprung up, envisioned as an antidote to concerns that left-leaning humanities professors are turning away from Western thought and that conservative scholars are underrepresented. National faculty advocates have sounded alarms about the new units, which they see as a troubling injection of political influence into teaching.
Sasse’s conversation with Richardson, in which the then-president threatened to trample on UF’s existing liberal-arts programs, encapsulates professors’ fears about the worst-case scenario. So does what happened next.
As some liberal-arts faculty see it, the Hamilton Center’s opaque origins tarnished it from the start.
The center wasn’t UF’s idea. A little-known group called the Council on Public University Reform hired the former chief of staff of Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, to lobby for the center’s creation, The Chronicle reported last year.
The initial proposal for the center argued that the fundamental mission of higher education — to seek truth — was threatened by “cancel culture and uniformity of opinion on campus.” It called for a “robust and fiercely independent center” at UF that fostered “political and intellectual diversity,” and a “traditional liberal education in the Great Books that form the foundation of Western intellectual tradition.”
The Hamilton Center — named for the founding father — would exist outside any departments or colleges and offer its own courses and interdisciplinary degree programs, per the initial proposal. A board of advisers would provide a list of initial faculty hires to the university’s Board of Trustees, which would make final selections. If the center’s faculty were to be hired through existing departments, the proposal said, “the result would be a replication of what already exists.”
After the former DeSantis aide delivered the proposal to the university in January 2022, a lengthy deliberation ensued. Joseph Glover, then the provost, argued the proposal laid out “a conservative agenda to influence the curriculum” and did “not align well” with administrative and faculty governance structures. Edits were made, the proposal was OK’d, and by July, the center had been established, had a director, and was equipped with a $3-million start-up injection from the Legislature.
While building up the center, Sasse rejected the notion that it was a partisan project.
The Hamilton Center entered UF in a period of transition. Kent Fuchs, then the president, and Glover were on their way out. Sasse, who succeeded Fuchs in February 2023, became the center’s biggest champion, jockeying to fast-track its development. Less than four months after taking office, he replaced the center’s inaugural director with William Inboden — a close friend of 30 years and a historian of the American presidency and the Cold War at the University of Texas at Austin. Sasse, a former Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska, also leveraged his political acumen with the Florida Legislature to bolster the center’s recurring state funding to $10 million. He was even a co-instructor for a course at the center, “The American Idea,” last spring.
While building up the center, he also rejected the notion that it was a partisan project. “It’s just classically liberal,” Sasse said in June of this year. “It’s not right of center. We’re not interested in your politics. … We’re wrestling with big questions here, and political indoctrination is boring.” He also described the center’s broad disciplinary lens as a remedy for the “nichification” of humanities scholarship.
Not all faculty were convinced. Some still suspected that the Hamilton Center was a Trojan Horse for the state’s conservative agenda and would siphon resources from existing units. A few months after the center was established, an anonymous swath of liberal-arts and law professors told the Faculty Senate that they feared the center was a “shadow college” meant to replace humanities departments without faculty input, and now regarded university officials who helped in its creation as “agents of the state.”
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Last fall, the center offered 10 courses and housed more than a dozen faculty and staff members. But Republican power brokers have higher aspirations for the center. Beginning in 2025, the center is required by law to report its progress toward becoming a fully fledged school — Hamilton College — within the university. To get majors off the ground by 2025, approvals needed to begin in the spring of 2024 and would require the support of departments where there may be curricular overlap.
In other words: The Hamilton Center had to convince some of its biggest skeptics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to sign off.
When Inboden, the Hamilton Center’s new director, presented to liberal-arts faculty about the center’s two inaugural majors — Great Books and Ideas, and Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Law — he was met with silence and “blank stares,” according to a faculty member in attendance.
Later, an associate dean relayed to a Hamilton Center associate director that humanities departments would be “upset” if the majors were approved.
Then, when two Hamilton Center courses came up for review by the university’s General Education Committee, its co-chair — a classics professor — subverted the standard process. The co-chair asked at least two humanities department heads to evaluate whether the center’s courses overlapped with their departments’ existing offerings. But the General Education Committee wasn’t supposed to have authority over such consultations.
The fact that humanities chairs got involved at that stage angered Inboden, who later called the decision a “deliberate violation” of usual curricular protocols, “despite being strongly urged against doing so by multiple senior officials in the provost’s office.”
Meanwhile, Hamilton Center officials had been talking to humanities graduate students over several months about their interest in the center’s Graduate Fellows program. Those conversations revealed concerns about facing backlash from their home departments, including English, history, and anthropology.
One graduate student believed that if her home department were to find out about her Hamilton Center ties, “she would lose important friends, mentors, and allies necessary for her to pursue academic excellence,” according to an email from Inboden to Sasse describing the students’ complaints.
Another student said that his department had “many faculty members who hate the Hamilton Center and would not be happy at all should a student affiliate themselves” with it. The student also thanked the center’s academic specialist for meeting with him at an off-campus coffee shop, “away from people who might see us.”
A third student said his department “has essentially dissociated from him.”
A separate complaint suggested that, in one case, a faculty member had acted on their biases. A prospective doctoral student told his mentor, who had recently been hired by the Hamilton Center, that the history department’s graduate coordinator had rejected his transfer request to UF. Moreover, the student claimed he was told that his mentor would “not be able to be involved” in his research in “any way” because she was a Hamilton Center faculty member.
Inboden was “pretty shocked to hear about the abuses that came to light in the past week,” he told Richardson, the liberal-arts dean, in an email at the time. “I was very familiar with the vocal opposition to the Hamilton Center expressed by many [College of Liberal Arts and Sciences] faculty but had not realized that in some cases it extended to targeting graduate students and applicants,” Inboden said. “Hopefully further investigation will provide the full picture.”
As the Hamilton Center’s grievances grew, Sasse gave Richardson the ultimatum, threatening to dissolve the liberal-arts college unless his faculty stopped meddling with the center. Once Sasse got involved, one faculty member said, the dynamic between the liberal-arts college and the Hamilton Center “became a whole different animal.”
One academic leader who received an account of the conversation wrote at the time that Sasse planned to follow through on his threat if anyone in the college either criticized the Hamilton Center or insisted that its curricular proposals go through regular university procedures, according to email records. That faculty member didn’t respond to an interview request.
Jon Sensbach, chair of the history department, told The Chronicle that he spoke with two people with direct knowledge of Sasse’s exchange with Richardson and that Sasse had been “livid.” He declined to publicly identify the sources because they feared professional repercussions.
Whether or not Sasse planned to follow through on the threat, “it seems to have served as a way to intimidate the dean into taking drastic steps,” Sensbach said.
Neither Richardson nor Sasse responded to The Chronicle’s interview requests or an emailed list of questions, including ones about details of their conversation. A university spokesperson also didn’t answer questions about what Sasse said.
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The exchange quickly became the center of gossip among faculty. At a Faculty Senate meeting in March, a philosophy professor asked whether humanities departments would be “siphoned off” into the Hamilton Center. “I’m hoping that this is a silly rumor that has no basis in fact,” the professor said, “but God knows what might be going on.”
J. Scott Angle, the provost, responded that while there was “quite a dynamic environment of events” between the center and the liberal-arts college that have “kicked off these wildfires,” plans for a merger were “not going anywhere.” But with Sasse, Angle continued, “literally everything is on the table.”
“The rumor you are hearing is completely false,” the dean wrote in response to another concerned professor. Then Richardson told his four associate deans that if any of them “implied or touched on this idea with anyone outside of the college office, it needs to be corrected.”
“I hope none of you were the source of statements that might have led to those rumors,” he wrote in an email.
Either way, Sasse had put Richardson under the gun.
The dean “fully understood the president’s reaction” to the graduate students’ complaints and shared his “anger and determination to stop the causative behavior,” he told Inboden in an email. “We are beginning those corrections.”
Within days of talking to Sasse, Richardson put in place plans to ensure faculty members’ cooperation with the center.
He scheduled emergency meetings for March 2 — a Saturday — with the associate deans and seven humanities chairs to discuss “the general range of their faculty’s thoughts” on the Hamilton Center’s curriculum and if they were aware of “any unprofessional mentoring of graduate students” regarding the center.
Coming out of the meetings, some felt targeted. John A. Palmer, chair of the philosophy department, wrote in an email afterward that he was, “frankly, offended at being cast as obstructionist.”
“Not that I imagine anyone will care,” he told an associate dean, to whom Richardson had just assigned all future curricular matters involving the Hamilton Center. Center leaders, Palmer continued, “should be more careful about bad-mouthing UF faculty who have been making genuine efforts since before their arrival at UF to be cooperative with the Hamilton Center.”
Despite the behind-the-scenes friction, Richardson told Sasse in a written debrief of the meetings that “all chairs were forthcoming and reported that they would cooperate” with the Hamilton Center on curricular matters and “correcting issues with graduate mentoring.” He reiterated: “I fully share the president’s displeasure.”
Around 9 p.m. after the Saturday meetings, the seven humanities chairs were directed to sign pledges to cooperate with the center, including giving approvals for its two planned majors. They had less than a week to comply. “I know it’s a tight turnaround,” the associate dean — Richardson’s newly tapped Hamilton Center liaison — told the chairs. “I again appreciate your cooperation.” They could modify the pledge template, the associate dean said, “but the message of supporting/not objecting should be clear.”
The pledge template included this suggested language: “We believe that the Hamilton Center curriculum will provide a unique opportunity for students interested in these areas and will complement our department’s offerings nicely. We have no objection to the implementation of these courses and degrees.” The template also encouraged chairs to “fully support” having the center’s faculty serve on graduate committees for master’s and doctoral students.
That Saturday night marked the first time that Sensbach, the history chair, had seen the Hamilton Center’s official degree proposals, he told The Chronicle, sohe felt “ill-prepared to comment” on the curriculum. During a meeting the following week with department colleagues, he acknowledged the “stark choice” between doing a thorough review and facing possible consequences if they didn’t sign the pledge.
“They agreed we needed to do that,” Sensbach said.
All seven chairs submitted their pledges by the five-day deadline — with some caveats. Only one chair used the draft template. Two omitted language that would have endorsed having Hamilton faculty members serve on their departments’ graduate committees. Five stipulated that they would cooperate with the center as long as its efforts went through “official channels” and “well-established procedures.”
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In the midst of that frenzy, three of the department chairs got another message: Richardson had placed them under investigation.
The English, history, and anthropology chairs, as well as the departments’ graduate coordinators, faced allegations that they had “interfered” with the Hamilton Center. The notices cited university policies regarding academic freedom and “disruptive behavior,” violators of which face disciplinary action up to termination.
Sensbach said that being asked to sign an “oath of fealty” to the Hamilton Center while the threat of termination “hung over my head” amounted to “arm-twisting.”
“I was being asked to conform to some policy or some ideological position that was being imposed from several layers above,” he said. “There was no question in my mind about what I was being forced to do.”
Sensbach said the 11-week investigation was “the most stressful time” in his 26-year tenure at UF. He constantly feared the university was monitoring his emails. He had trouble sleeping.
The history chair wasn’t a foe of the Hamilton Center. The scholar of colonial America and the American Revolution didn’t think it was a problem that the center’s curricular offerings overlapped with his department.
But he understood the more critical views. The university’s humanities departments have had to “scratch and scramble” to hire faculty in recent years, he said, whereas the center had a “lavish” $10-million recruitment stipend from the state. The history department’s entire budget is $4 million.
A “jealousy” toward the center brewed, he said.
“There was a sense that the Hamilton Center and its priorities were being floated ahead of longstanding departments who have been teaching all kinds of subjects, including Western civilization, for decades,” he said. “It’s clear that the Hamilton Center was moving ahead without anybody else’s input. That generated a lot of resentment.”
Now Sensbach felt that resentment was being pinned on him.
The investigation concerned whether Sensbach and five other faculty members had “engaged in actions or inactions which impaired, interfered with, or obstructed the ability of students to participate in academic programs” or “faculty members’ ability to teach and/or advise students” within said programs, according to the notices they received.
It’s not clear why the history department was targeted, though Sensbach believes one driver may have been the complaint last spring from the prospective graduate student whose transfer application was rejected.
The student’s complaint alleged that Mitchell Hart, the history graduate coordinator, said there was a “good chance” the university wouldn’t accept his application, and that his mentor could not in “any way” be involved with his research at UF because she was a Hamilton Center professor.
But Hart said the rejection was pretty routine and informed by university policies.
In the emailed denial, Hart told the student that he had missed the application deadline for the program “but was of course free to apply again.” He didn’t indicate that the student’s mentor wouldn’t be able to be involved with his research but said that she couldn’t chair his thesis committee. Under university policy, a faculty member outside of a student’s home department can’t chair their thesis unless they have graduate-faculty status. The student’s mentor didn’t meet either requirement.
“It is still unclear what role, if any, someone in the Hamilton Center can play with regard to doctoral committees,” Hart told the student. “I’m afraid we are still trying to figure out the relationship, and it is certainly well above my pay grade,” he added.
“It was so banal,” Hart told The Chronicle; he tells prospective graduate students about policies and deadlines 10 times a day. “It’s really a very boring job,” he said. “That’s the rule. I didn’t make it, but suddenly I’m an opponent of the Hamilton Center.”
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When Richardson asked Sensbach about the situation, he forwarded the exchange to the dean. “I thought it was self-explanatory, especially as dean, that he would understand Mitch was following the rules,” the chair told The Chronicle.
Three days later, the dean began investigating Sensbach and Hart anyway. For Hart, “that’s what really pissed me off,” he said.
It was a fishing expedition. They didn’t really know what they were looking for.
“He understood that there was nothing there and that it was complete garbage to accuse me or Jon Sensbach of anything, but he went ahead and did it,” Hart said. The dean seemed to “imply that I had done something misleading, that I had tried to dissuade the student from participating in the Hamilton Center. That’s complete horseshit.”
Sidney Dobrin, chair of the English department, was the first of the six targeted faculty members to be interviewed by human resources. The investigator’s questions left him at a loss, according to Churchill Roberts, the faculty union’s grievance-committee chair, who accompanied Dobrin to the March 12 interview. What were his thoughts on the center? Were his faculty members “bad-mouthing” the Hamilton Center? Had his faculty members targeted students with ties to the center? (Dobrin didn’t respond to The Chronicle’s requests for an interview.)
“It was a fishing expedition,” Roberts said. “They didn’t really know what they were looking for.”
Moreover, the faculty union was filing its own complaints about the matter, and graduate students weren’t speaking to the investigator.
Less than three weeks after the university started the probe, the investigator told the targeted faculty members, without explanation, that the remaining interviews were indefinitely postponed.
Sasse publicly trumpeted the investigation in a “quick word about academic freedom” to all faculty in March. He said that he’d spoken with Richardson, who “acknowledged some egregious actions by others in the college and is working to get to the bottom of it.”
The university, Sasse wrote, depends on its ability to “expose students to a wide range of opinions in an environment free from the fear of reprisal.”
Later that month, the letter landed in the inbox of Ken McGurn, a multimillion-dollar donor, real-estate developer, and lifetime member of the UF Foundation.
The word “egregious” caught his eye.
“What comes to mind when words like ‘egregious’ and ‘investigation’ are used is that someone is a pedophile or beat up a widow or killed someone,” McGurn told Richardson in an email. “I would sincerely appreciate knowing what actions prompted the use of such inflammatory language.”
“As a long-term supporter of UF,” the donor added, “I am very concerned.”
Publicly available information about the investigation was scarce at the time — so McGurn, also a former U.S. military spy, began an investigation of his own. He had a brief phone conversation with Richardson, who seemed “under a lot of pressure,” he said. (Richardson also told him that “egregious” wasn’t his word.) He spoke to faculty members who were nervous and exhausted.
McGurn brought the issue to the president in a letter. “Help!” he wrote in the first sentence.
The letter was one of a half-dozen McGurn sent over the next three months that urged Sasse to put an end to the investigation and apologize to the “Gainesville 6.” In another letter, McGurn asked Sasse to clarify a list of “rumors,” including that “if you criticize, you are ostracized,” and that his administration was a “black hole.”
“The Emperor Has No Clothes,” he told the president. “Who can U trust to tell the truth?”
Sasse ignored all of the donor’s messages, and the university went into “silent mode” on the investigation, McGurn told The Chronicle. At an April foundation meeting, McGurn stood at the exit, extended his hand, and “softly” told Sasse that “it needs to go away.” Sasse shook his hand but “did not respond otherwise.”
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On May 6, McGurn made a final plea to both Sasse and Richardson. “These are good people,” he wrote. “They do not deserve this. UF does not need this. Please make it go away.”
Richardson quit the next day. His five-sentence resignation letter gave no rationale for the decision. Less than three weeks later, the university notified the six targeted liberal-arts faculty, also without explanation, that the investigation was “not moving forward.”
Roberts, the faculty union’s grievance-council chair, said McGurn’s intervention was a decisive factor in both decisions. “The university thumbs its nose at the union,” he said. “Once major donors get involved, they sit up and listen.”
The university later said that no personnel action was taken against the faculty, and documents from the investigation will not be considered in their future performance evaluations, including post-tenure reviews.
Some think they are still owed an apology, but “the university would rather do anything than apologize,” Roberts said. The six faculty have “incredible loyalty toward the university, and they just dumped on them.”
The investigation’s closure cooled the feud between the units, but tensions still simmer.
The Faculty Senate’s former chair, Danaya Wright, said she tried her “damn best” to take the Hamilton Center’s concerns seriously. She created a task force to examine possible “political and structural headwinds” and invited center officials to participate, noting that “the issues plaguing the Hamilton Center are structural issues that go back for more than a decade.”
Inboden rejected the offer. The invitation’s “tendentious and distorted language” implied the center was “somehow at fault for the hostility and opposition we have faced,” he told Wright in an email. “I conclude with genuine sadness that the Faculty Senate would appear to be indulging in such parochialism.”
Wright said she also scrambled to advance the Hamilton Center’s degree proposals, fearing possible blowback if she didn’t. Faculty members typically take a month to review such proposals, and the end of the academic year was fast approaching, she told The Chronicle. But, she said, the Faculty Senate didn’t receive the documents until a week before its May meeting, the last one of the academic year. Faculty members ran out of time and voted to table the degree proposals without discussion, effectively punting the decision until the fall.
In the robing room of a graduation ceremony held days later, Sasse told Wright that the Faculty Senate had “lost his respect” and “should not exist,” Wright said, and refused to speak with her for the remainder of the event. (Sasse didn’t respond to an emailed question about the interaction.)
“He was childish,” Wright told The Chronicle.
The Faculty Senate was forced to vote on the center’s degree proposals in a first-of-its-kind special summer meeting, called by Wright’s newly seated successor to discuss campus safety. Around that time, the faculty union issued a letter alleging that the last-minute gathering had been called “presumably to enable” the Hamilton Center to meet approval deadlines. In response, one of the center’s associate directors told the union president that “with absolute certainty,” he and his colleagues wanted to sever ties with the union because of its “active campaign against the Hamilton Center.”
Less than half of the Faculty Senate’s body participated in the Zoom meeting, due in part to issues with the electronic voting system. Senators ultimately approved the proposals, putting the majors back on track for their planned launch. The state university system’s Board of Governors gave final approval to both of the majors in October.
He hadn’t been on the campus five minutes before he started accusing us of indoctrinating students and being ‘nichified’ and instructing us how to teach.
Inboden told The Chronicle that the center “scrupulously adhered to every requirement and step in UF’s rigorous process” in an emailed statement. “Last year’s growth included some growing pains,” Inboden said. “Those are in the past.”
Mary Watt, interim liberal-arts dean, said the college is “proud to be partners” with the Hamilton Center.
“We enjoy an excellent working relationship,” she said in an emailed statement.
The center plans to offer three more majors beginning in 2026. A state-backed $40-million renovation of UF’s historical infirmary building into Hamilton College is underway. This fall, the center offers 19 general-education courses and has amassed a flotilla of more than 30 humanities faculty members and Ivy League scholars — including Sasse.
The president abruptly stepped down in July, citing a need to spend more time with his family after his wife’s recent epilepsy diagnosis. He’s teaching a new course, “Civil Discourse and the American Political Order,” at the center next spring. Before resigning from his post, he negotiated an addendum to his employment contract to keep his $1-million salary through 2028 — making Sasse among the highest-paid professors in UF’s history.
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He is now embroiled in a scandal after The Independent Florida Alligator, UF’s student newspaper, reported that he tripled his office’s spending to award contracts to boutique consulting firms and high-paid, remote positions to his former Senate staff. Amid bipartisan calls for an audit, Sasse issued a 1,744-word defense on X. He touted the Hamilton Center as the “firstfruit” of his presidency and as evidence that big spending was necessary for his administration’s “‘go bigger’ approach.”
The center is “well on its way to making UF the top Western Civilization program in the nation — and we will ground our students in the foundations of the Great Books and the American political order,” he said. “Parents: you should send your kids here.”
Tucked in the middle of Sasse’s monograph was a reprised rebuke of pedagogical orthodoxy among “humanities professors with nichified interests” who “are allowed to drive demand unscrutinized into their narrow silos.”
Sasse’s parting message stirred Sensbach, now on temporary leave after finishing his three-year term as history chair. The former president, he said, was “an unabashed champion of the Hamilton Center at the expense of everybody else.”
Sasse “never missed an opportunity to denigrate other departments and dismiss the seriousness of their scholarship,” Sensbach said. “He hadn’t been on the campus five minutes before he started accusing us of indoctrinating students and being ‘nichified’ and instructing us how to teach. … We didn’t need that lecturing.”
With Sasse out of leadership, Sensbach hopes to return next spring to a liberal-arts college that can “coexist with the Hamilton Center amicably.”
“I think we can reach an understanding that that’s the case without his loud trumpeting of his belief that nobody else was worth a hill of beans at the University of Florida,” Sensbach said. “We can talk together and have a good collaboration — that, to me, is what it should be about, rather than pitting one side against the other as Sasse seemed to be doing.”
Emma Pettit, a Chronicle senior reporter, contributed to this article.
Garrett Shanley is a reporting intern at The Chronicle who covers college leadership, finance, and politics. Follow him at @garrettshanley, or send him an email at garrett.shanley@chronicle.com.