Ben Sasse’s $38K Sushi Bill

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As president of the U. of Florida, Ben Sasse, a former U.S. senator, steered millions of dollars toward consultants and hired his Republican allies to serve in lucrative jobs. And he threw some expensive parties.

Related Reading:

• Sasse’s spending spree: Former UF president channeled millions to GOP allies, secretive contracts (The Independent Florida Alligator)
• Lavish Catering Under Ex-UF President (Fresh Take Florida)
• Ben Sasse Spent Far More Than His Predecessor. Including on These Reports.
• Ben Sasse is U. of Florida’s Next President. His Critics are Seeing Red.

Guest: Garrett Shanley, reporter for The Independent Florida Alligator / intern at The Chronicle of Higher Education

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from the Chronicle.

Garrett Shanley I think the most eye popping thing from that list was a $176,000 holiday party thrown at the old president’s mansion on campus that had a $38,000 hand-rolled sushi bar.

Jack Stripling A student journalist at the University of Florida broke a bombshell story in August. Here are some of the key details from that report: During his 17 months as president of the University of Florida, former United States Senator Ben Sasse directed millions of dollars toward a consulting company where he once worked, and he hired old political hands to work remotely from Washington in lucrative university jobs. All told, spending from the UF president’s office ballooned to $17.3 million during Sasse’s first year on the job, more than triple what it had been under his predecessor. The story, which came out just weeks after Sasse abruptly resigned as UF president, drew national attention and scrutiny from state auditors. All of this came to light thanks to reporting from Garrett Shanley, a UF student and a reporter for The Independent Florida Alligator, the university student newspaper. Garrett is an intern this semester at the Chronicle of Higher Education, and we’re excited to have him on the show today to talk about his reporting. Garrett, welcome to College Matters.

Garrett Shanley Hi, thank you for having me today.

Jack Stripling Congratulations on this story. It made a big splash. And I think that the best way to get into it is just talk about who is Ben Sasse? Tell me about that.

Garrett Shanley Right, so prior to becoming UF president in February 2023, he was a Nebraskan Republican senator. He was elected in 2014. He was one of seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump on charges related to the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection. And I think one of the mainstays of his legacy as a senator was his relationship with Trump. He said that his oppositional relationship to him has defined his legacy as a senator. But aside from that, he did vote in line with Trump most of the time on Capitol Hill. And two years into his second term, he was announced as the sole finalist of the UF job.

Jack Stripling He’s best known as a senator, but did he have a background in higher education?

Garrett Shanley Yeah, he was an Ivy League grad in history from Yale. He had some professorships over the years, including at UT Austin. His most high profile higher education job was as president of Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska. It’s a very small, private Lutheran college. He came there in 2009 when the school was in dire straits. He did turn things around, but there were some controversies there. There were faculty buyouts, even allegations of loyalty oaths the faculty had to sign. There was a very comprehensive report on the loyalty oaths and other parts of his presidency at Midland done by Christian Casale, who’s a former alligator reporter a couple of years ago, right before he came to UF as president.

Jack Stripling And he does have a Ph.D., right?

Garrett Shanley Yes. In history from Yale.

Jack Stripling Yeah, because a lot of times when we see hiring of political people, that’s the first question. You know, do you have the terminal degree? And in this case, he did, which might have made him a more palatable choice, at least for the board of trustees. Is that your sense?

Garrett Shanley Yes, he’s certainly an academic.

Jack Stripling You mentioned Midland University. This is a private college. It’s nothing like the University of Florida, right? Talk to me about the differences.

Garrett Shanley Yeah I mean, they’re both in small towns, Fremont, Nebraska, and Gainesville, Florida. But compared to Midland, UF is a tanker. It has about 60,000 students on its campus whereas Midland only has about 1,600 as of today.

Jack Stripling And the budget at UF, I think, is around $9 billion. Is that your understanding?

Garrett Shanley Yes.

Jack Stripling So how do we go from a United States senator whose background is as a president of a small Lutheran college to becoming president of the University of Florida? What happened?

Garrett Shanley The truth is we don’t know. And it’s very hard to know. Right before the presidential search for our 13th president was initiated at UF, there was a bill signed into law that shielded presidential searches at higher education institutions in Florida from public view. So what that meant was that the Board of Trustees and its search committee conducted most of their search behind closed doors until they named a sole finalist.

Jack Stripling Sole finalist. So it kind of defies the term finalist, right? They only have one, right? How did faculty respond to this? How did students respond to that?

Garrett Shanley Well, the faculty senate voted no confidence in the search process because it was so secretive. And students, on the other hand, protested the naming of Sasse himself, primarily because of his voting record as a senator. They were mainly focused on abortion and same sex marriage issues.

Jack Stripling How did he respond to this kind of criticism, particularly about his political background?

Garrett Shanley He did two main things over the course of his presidency, I think, to quell the criticisms that he got. Very early on he said he was taking what he called a vow of political celibacy. And what that seemed to mean was that he was going to divorce himself from partisan politics. He was going to cut off relationships with politicians who might try to influence his work, wasn’t going to campaign or speak out on certain issues. The other thing he did and this was further into his presidency, and I think to combat criticism of how quiet he was on campus during the first half, was to say that he would be radically transparent in how he approached his administration and communications with the public.

Jack Stripling You know, I happened to have kind of a ringside seat for this, Garrett. I should probably disclose that I am not only from Gainesville, Florida, where you UF is located, but I live there presently. So I’ve done some reporting on this myself and one of the fascinating things that I observed during this period that you described was students protested and they were pretty loud about it. But by the time we got to late 2022, it really was a fait accompli, as you describe. I mean, Ben Sasse was named the sole finalist. There was a quote unquote interview before the Board of Trustees where he came in, but it was pretty much a done deal at that point. And, you know, I was just looking back at some of my notes and reporting from that time, and a lot of things struck me about this. You know, Ben Sasse was kind of out of central casting, if you wanted to send a signal that change is coming to this hidebound institution, right. He’s about 50 years old at the time. He’s got this thousand watt smile. He’s got kind of great hair, at least compared to me. And he talked about Google and AI and he said he was a romantic, and he quoted Tom Petty. And there was a lot of talk about the digital revolution, and I think some mention of hunter gatherers and the breathtaking opportunities in Florida. And one thing he did that I really noticed was that he lavished praise on the University of Florida as this land of opportunity.

He called it the most important institution in the most economically dynamic state in the country.

Ben Sasse I’m here, rather than at some other school or rather than trying to claw to stay in the United States senate for decades, because I believe that this is the most interesting institution in the state that has the most happening right now. And is therefore the best positioned to help lead our country through a time of truly unprecedented change.

Jack Stripling And he was deeply skeptical of the pace of change in higher education, which isn’t a really novel idea. But I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that. What did what did Sasse have to say early on about his view of higher ed and how it ran itself as a business and how it was adapting to modern realities?

Garrett Shanley He does have great hair. He’s certainly a technocrat in the way that he approaches higher education and governance. He is very focused on the future. And, you know, AI. Lots of talk about the pace of change at UF and higher education in general. He had a big emphasis early on in his presidency once he had first kind of laid out his strategic plan about adapting education for the future, where people are going to need to come back to college multiple times and will have to go to college abroad. So there was talk of overhauling some classes to be hybrid, you know, some people remote and some people in person. But yes, I do think his message of higher education as a stagnant, insular industry and that it moves too slowly was pervasive. I think that was part of his justification for turning to people that he knew from outside of higher education, like consultants and people from his former political life who he seemed to think, like himself, or necessary to transform the university.

Ben Sasse Burning Glass and the Boston Consulting Group reported last month that 37% of the top skills of the average job, not the high end knowledge economy job at the 90th percentile of the income distribution, 37% of the top skills of the average American job have been eliminated by technology in the last five years. Large portions of higher education; not everybody, not every institution, not everybody at any of the institutions that are most problematic, but large portions of higher education appear more complacent and self-satisfied rather than more innovative and more humble, more inclined to seek experimentation and a greater number of partnerships.

Jack Stripling So, you mentioned that Sasse promised radical transparency. How accessible was he as a president?

Garrett Shanley Yeah. He was denying The Alligator and other media outlets interviews. He was barely spotted on campus.

Jack Stripling Yeah, there were reports that there were even fliers on campus that had a picture of him that said missing.

Garrett Shanley Yeah. It was missing and have you seen this man? Stuff like that.

Jack Stripling Yeah. So a mercurial figure. And, you know, again, I got to say, as somebody who kind of lived here in Gainesville watching this, he was kind of perceived as a bit of an odd duck. I mean, Ben Sasse is a notorious gym rat. I mean, he’d be the first to tell you that. I think he has a background in wrestling. And he had a routine that became an object of some obsession in the town. I remember texting with somebody at UF about this and saying, is it true that, you know, Ben Sasse might have a secret office like at the basement of the baseball stadium? That was something that went around. And I was looking back at that text this morning, Garrett, and this is what I was told at the time, that he had a main office on the third floor of Tigert Hall, that he usually got there around 4:30 or 5 in the morning after running through campus. He had a secondary office at Dasburg House, which is the president’s house here in Gainesville. And then he had this practice that he had, apparently engaged in in multiple jobs across multiple decades, where he would walk 10 to 12 miles per day, returning calls from donors and campus officials, like basically working as he walked around the city of Gainesville. And relative to the rumor about whether there’s an office in the baseball stadium, I even asked about that again today, Garrett, still couldn’t get a clear answer on this, but at the time I was told that he had replacement phone batteries at the baseball stadium because he was talking so much on these long walks. So I guess I mention all this to say that this guy didn’t seem like a typical college president in a lot of different ways. He had this background as a senator, but he also had practices that were quite different from his predecessor. Let’s talk a little bit before we move on about who Ben Sasse replaced.

Garrett Shanley Kent Fuchs is Sasse’s predecessor. So he was president from 2015 to early 2023 when Sasse took over. He was kind of known as a campus prankster. He would have annual April Fools jokes. He would often be seen driving a golf cart around campus, you know, bussing students to class, taking students with selfies. I mean, I remember as a freshman, I was reading in the morning at Plaza of the Americas, which is in the - it’s the big grassy fields in the center of campus. And I was reading on a bench and I just looked up and he was he was right there talking to somebody. And I didn’t even know it was him at the time.

Jack Stripling Yeah. He leaned into the compassionate piece of the job. I remember he dressed up as Darth Vader at a basketball game. He’s got a background in divinity. So yeah, Fuchs really seemed to lean into that part of the job, it sounds like.

Garrett Shanley Yeah, and I think going from Fuchs to Sasse was a big shock for people, at least in that non business end of things, just the campus personality part of it. I think people missed that. And whether fairly or unfairly did compare him to Fuchs on that front.

Jack Stripling So you mentioned Sasse and Fuchs were very different, both in terms of accessibility and personality. As someone who was covering Sasse, what did you observe about how he was running the university? Who is he hiring? How is he spending money?

Garret Shanley Yeah, I mean, right when he took office, there were a bunch of leadership shakeups, both people voluntarily resigning and some changes that he made directly. One of his first moves was firing Charlie Lane, the chief operating officer at the time, which is a big move in any corporate environment for a CEO to do. And then we knew that he’d hired a couple of his former Senate staffers to serve as advisers. And a month into his presidency, it hired McKinsey and Company, which was a global consulting firm where he once worked. But we didn’t know much about what the company was doing to support his grand vision for the university. And we didn’t exactly understand what his former Senate staff was doing at the university. And I think importantly, we didn’t have a picture of the overall increase in spending that he had incurred.

Jack Stripling So he serves as president for less than two years. There’s a lot of questions about his spending and his staff. Then what happens?

Garrett Shanley Yeah. So he resigned out of nowhere on July 18th. I remember I was at home collaging with my girlfriend watching the RNC, and I got a call from one of my sources at the university and all they said was, “Check your email. It’ll come in three minutes. I can’t tell you anything else.” So at that point I opened up my email and was hitting a refresh, and I go to Twitter and I look up UF. And Florida Politics had broken that he was stepping down. So at that point, I text my editors, tell them to put up a breaking tweet, get in a Google doc and start writing what I know. Set up a war room that lasted about four hours just trying to figure out what was going on. It was a it was a very hectic night.

Jack Stripling Yeah. I was looking back at Ben Sasse’s tweet about this. It was 8:22 pm that he gave his sign off via Twitter and he mentioned some reasons in there. Tell us about that.

Garrett Shanley Yeah, in the pretty lengthy, heartfelt post he sent out to X that night, he said that he was stepping down so he could spend more time with his family, primarily because of his wife Melissa’s recent epilepsy diagnosis and a recent crop of memory issues that were related to that.

Jack Stripling But the story wasn’t over for you was it?

Garrett Shanley No. That was just a starting gun for a crazy month.

Jack Stripling Stick around. We’ll be back in a minute.

[BREAK]

Jack Stripling So Ben Sasse resigns very suddenly. What happens next?

Garrett Shanley Right. So the night of his resignation, I had been reaching out to multiple of my sources in the administration to see who might take over in the interim. And they had all told me that Kent Fuchs had already been contacted and was in the works to come back as interim.

Jack Stripling This is Ben Sasse’s predecessor, who we’ve talked about, right?

Garrett Shanley Yes. And at the same time as news about Fuchs’s return, we were looking to tie up loose ends about Sasse’s presidency. That included looking into what would happen to these multimillion dollar consulting contracts he had taken out. What happens to his senior leadership team, who he brought in and what happens to that grand revolutionary vision that he brought in for the university? So we started looking into that, and we already had a lot of table scraps for that, so to speak. There were outstanding records requests for consulting reports. We had the initial contracts, the dollar amounts. We had employment contracts for most of this team. So from there, I mean, we had all these contracts, we had all these dollar amounts. So I think out of that kind of came the question: How much did the Ben Sasse presidency cost UF? We could have tallied that up all on our own, but I, we wanted to have some kind of a reference point to judge it from. So the next goal was finding budget breakdown of that. There was this budget directory that we found, and with the help of a university official, kind of navigated that. And from there we were able to find top lines for budget expenses out of the President’s office under Sasse and his predecessor, Kent Fuchs, and then the more granular line items of consulting expenses, personnel expenses, travel, catering.

Jack Stripling Yeah. I mean, even before you got into these, these dizzying spreadsheets, there was a lot of talk about big contracts for consulting companies. Anybody here could observe that he had created a lot of new positions within the president’s office. But your reporting added a lot of meat to the bone. Tell me what you found.

Garrett Shanley The main thing we found was that the top lines had shot up under Sasse. In his predecessor, Kent Fuchs’ last year in office, he spent $5.6 million. But in Sasse’s first year in office, the president’s office spent $17 million on personnel and operating expenses. So among those smaller line items, we found that personnel expenses had shot up. And a lot of that was because Sasse was bringing on people that he used to work with in the Senate and other Republican officials, who most of them worked out of state. Another big line item was consulting contracts. So a lot of that went towards McKinsey and Company, who is this boutique Big Three consulting firm. He brought them on for $4.7 million. And the nature of their work was pretty opaque. And it raised questions because Sasse had previously worked there as an adviser on an hourly contract. And then two of the kind of more interesting line items there were travel expenses which had gone way up under Sasse. I mean, I added up all of the travel expenses from Fuchs’s entire eight year presidency, and they were still under what Sasse spent in one year in travel. A main driver of that was the fact that he allowed a lot of his political hires to work outside of Florida and then shuttled them to UF’s main campus in Gainesville on the university’s dollar when needed. And then kind of the more juicy, appetizing thing in that budget sheet was his catering expenses, which were a breath of fresh air for me as a reporter. Because it was weeks of reporting on political hires, consulting contracts, government audits. It got very taxing for me. But I had seen one thing when I got that original budget sheet that catering expenses had gone up. So I threw in a records request for just a breakdown of his catering expenses, and I got back a list of over 500 itemized expenses.

Jack Stripling What sorts of things were expensed in that catering category?

Garrett Shanley I think the most eye popping thing from that list was a $176,000 holiday party thrown at the old president’s mansion on campus that had a $38,000 hand-rolled sushi bar.

Jack Stripling The sushi bar itself was $38,000?

Garrett Shanley Yes.

Jack Stripling Okay. That must have been good sushi.

Garrett Shanley Some other interesting things I found were that, it’s pretty regular for college presidents to have tailgate events at like suites and stadiums and stuff. I mean, that was common practice under Kent Fuchs, his predecessor and Sasse. But another thing he did was he held additional tailgates at the Dasburg House, which is the president’s mansion on UF’s campus. And he held those in conjunction with these president suite tailgates during the games. So that was a main driver in costs. One president suite tailgate had brisket coated in peach flavored barbecue sauce, hotdogs wrapped in candy bacon.

Jack Stripling So it sounds like a great Gator tailgate.

Garrett Shanley Definitely chomped down on some good grub.

Jack Stripling So, Garrett, I wonder, you know, you’re talking about $1.3 million in catering expenses from the president’s office. We have seen college presidents get in trouble for much less. I’m immediately reminded of local reporting about Gordon Gee, when he was president of Ohio State and there was a huge scandal that they had spent $64,000 on bow tie related things because Gordon wore a bow tie and there were bow tie cookies and bow tie pins and all sorts of stuff like this. This is just a staggering number in comparison. Were you kind of taken aback by how much money we were talking about here?

Garrett Shanley Yeah. I mean, especially when you stack up those numbers to Fuchs’s expenditures. It’s completely standard practice for university presidents to spend money on catering to core donors, state officials, prospective hires, stuff like that. But those expenditures had doubled under Sass compared to Fuchs and the university, and chefs wouldn’t answer questions about what exactly those expenditures were for for those meals. To go back to some of the more high dollar findings outside of catering. One of the more significant things we found was that Sasse had hired about a half dozen old political allies to serve in different positions at UF. You know, many of them in six figure positions. Two of his right hands were James Wegmann and Ray Sasse. Ray Sasse, by the way, is no relation to Ben Sasse.

Jack Stripling That’s probably helpful. Yeah.

Garrett Shanley Yeah. No, a very, very confusing reporting experience. But both Ray Sasse and Wegmann had leadership roles at UF. They were in the president’s cabinet, so to speak. Wegmann was Sasse’s comms director in the Senate and was brought in at UF as vice president for comms, where he made $432,000 and he was earning about $160,000 more than the person he replaced. And that guy had worked in the comms office for decades. Then you have Ray Sasse, he earned $396,000 in a position that was created just for him. And both Wegmann and Ray Sasse worked remotely from the DC area about 800 miles north of Gainesville.

Jack Stripling Wow, so you really see a constellation of people to whom Sasse is politically connected, who end up in pretty high paying jobs at UF it sounds like.

Garrett Shanley Yeah, there was a whole flotilla of them.

Jack Stripling So, Garrett, what’s been the reaction to this reporting?

Garrett Shanley Well, I remember when it first came out, it was on a Monday at noon, and I saw the immediate amount of reactions and retweets and comments it got. And I turned off my phone for a couple hours just because I couldn’t, I couldn’t handle it.

Jack Stripling Well, a lot of people sent it to me. I will say that.

Garrett Shanley It spread very, very quickly. And then three days later, the Florida chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, tweeted out that he had concerns over, “exorbitant spending” out of the president’s office and called for an investigation. We know there will be an audit. There’s a regularly scheduled audit and that will include a review of Sasse’s expenditures.

Jack Stripling So some accountability may be coming here possibly. What about the administration? Who’s running the show now?

Garrett Shanley Well, as expected, Kent Fuchs is brought back again as interim president. And then the day after our spending report was published, Fuchs’s former provost Joe Glover announced he was resigning as provost from University of Arizona so he could come back to work under Fuchs again. And this was significant in part because Glover was provost at University of Arizona for about a month before he came back to UF.

Jack Stripling Wow, I mean, I don’t know what this says to you, Garrett, but this signaled to me just a complete return to the old way. You could not have two figures that are sort of more closely associated with the old order than Joe Glover, you know, who if people know the University of Florida, they would know him. He has been around here, I like Joe, but since the earth cooled, probably. And of course, Kent Fuchs, who’s got a classic academic background that is, you know, as a provost at Cornell and would not at all be considered like an outsider candidate in the way Sasse is. Do you see this as kind of a return to normal, at least for now?

Garrett Shanley Yeah, I mean, they got the gang back together very quickly.

Jack Stripling Has Sasse said anything? Has he defended these expenditures?

Garrett Shanley Yes. A couple of days after The Alligator’s initial report, he sent out a 1700 word defense to X. In that he said that, “It’s not true there was any inappropriate spending by his office.” And he detailed a lot of the strategic initiatives he had. Like one of them was a ten by ten by ten initiative to have ten top ten programs at the university in ten years, a charter school program, the Hamilton Center. And he spent about two paragraphs addressing, you know, his political hires, the consulting contracts. But yeah, it was a lengthy defense. It was longer than my article.

Jack Stripling And most of it is about his record, right? So what initiatives did Sasse point to as measures of his success?

Garrett Shanley The main one that he pointed to was the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at UF. So, it was founded in 2022. UF had been lobbied by a little known organization to start it, and it has since received $20 million injections from the state legislature. So its focus is on teaching about Western civilization, conversations about the great books, stuff like that.

Jack Stripling Very popular with conservatives, right?

Garrett Shanley There is a lot of controversy over a supposed rightward tilt towards things. Sasse has come out and said that it is not a partisan academic center. The concern certainly existed and there’s also concerns over duplication of efforts with certain liberal arts programs like history departments, religion departments, English departments, stuff like that.

Jack Stripling And as far as we know, Ben Sasse is going to have a job in the Hamilton Center. Is that right?

Garrett Shanley Supposedly, yeah. He taught a class there in the spring semester, actually, with Will Inboden, who’s the current director of the center and a long time friend of Sasse. Sasse says he intends to stay in Gainesville and teach as a professor. So it will likely be for the Hamilton Center teaching history or political science. And he’ll be making a lot of money doing it. Under the terms of his employment contract, he will continue to earn his presidential salary of $1 million into 2028.

Jack Stripling Wow.

Garrett Shanley But a lot of the people he hired won’t continue to stay at UF. Among the dozen people that Sasse’s inner circle was comprised of, all but two received non reappointment letters after Sasse resigned.

Jack Stripling How does your reporting on Ben Sasse perhaps upend some narratives about him?

Garrett Shanley I think that his reputation as a senator was based around this image of him being a Boy Scout Republican. Very moral. Very by the books. Liberal media outlets often wheeled him out as you know, one of the reasonable Republicans, sought his insight into the Trump administration. And his image as a senator and his legacy as a senator was very much defined by his oppositional relationship to Trump. That was his view. So I think that, coupled with his wooing of the board coming into the job, propping himself up as a, you know, higher ed thinker, revolutionary, it gave people, at least at the administration level, high hopes for his presidency. But I think the reporting on the spending kind of contradicts his stated stance as a fiscal conservative. You know, he wanted limited spending in government but wanted to fund all these new initiatives and give people he knew jobs. And I think the general opaqueness of his administration, especially when it came to those hires and consulting contracts, contradicts some of his values as a Republican and as a politician about how government should operate and how it should be open for the public view, and contradicts his own statements made at his inauguration, committing himself to radical transparency in the job.

Jack Stripling So it strikes me that there’s sort of two ways of looking at this. One point of view might be: Ben Sasse did exactly what he said he was going to do. He came in and brought a very new perspective to a university operation. And part of doing that was bringing in a lot of outside people, including people whose expertise he respected, old political allies, people who had worked in D.C., people in consulting firms. Another way of looking at it is this is sort of a classic political stereotype of a guy who got the keys to the treasury and used it to hire a bunch of his old friends. Are you hearing both perspectives from people in Gainesville?

Garrett Shanley Right. I mean, I think it was a priority of my reporting to just lay out the facts and let the public litigate it. But I have not seen many people come to his defense publicly after this. I mean, the Florida chief financial officer has called for an audit into him. John Morgan, the prominent lawyer and Democratic donor, has been going back and forth with the Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz on Twitter about how corrupt they think the whole situation is. I have not seen any major entities come to his defense on this.

Jack Stripling So I’m curious. This is a huge story because of the people involved. It’s a major public research university and it involves a former United States senator. But this is a little personal for you as a student at the University of Florida and a reporter at The Alligator. Why is this important to students in particular?

Garrett Shanley I think there’s kind of two prongs to the way that I can answer that question. One is the general student body opinion and the other is kind of my view and other student reporters’ views as journalists. So first on the student view, I think this report comes out at a time when beloved student programs are being cut from the university. So the past year there was five million in diversity equity and inclusion funds that were cut off from the university. So that at the top level that resulted in the chief diversity officer and her office being axed. But on the student side, what that resulted in was the closure of campus multicultural and engagement offices, which are currently being repurposed to fall in line with state legislation regulating DEI spending. And, you know, there’s also 24-7 libraries are being cut. Local bus programs that the university went in on with the city. The university is considering pulling out of there under the agreement. There’s a lot of programs that are important to students that are...

Jack Stripling Under threat or being cut, it sounds like.

Garrett Shanley Yeah. So I think seeing this report about how money is being handled at the top level kind of put things into perspective for students, and may have realigned conversations about what is important to them. And as a student journalist, I think it was very exciting in a moment of pride for us at The Alligator to be able to break this story, especially because after his resignation, I mean, that was basically a starting gun for a race against multiple, you know, national and statewide publications for any kind of follow up reporting on what might have been going on behind the scenes or other new reporting, putting his presidency into perspective. So I knew, at least from requesting the public records logs that, you know, the Associated Press is looking into it. Tampa Bay Times is obviously looking for something. So it was a team effort from the managing editors, other editors who looked at my story, my brother who read and reread the copy for me like five times before I put it out. It was just really cool to do that all from like a student journalist perspective, to do that all from like the ratty Gainesville Sun office.

Jack Stripling Hey, I used to work there. It is actually kind of ratty.

Garrett Shanley Yeah. From, you know, just from the scrappy little Gainesville Sun office. It was cool to do it from there.

Jack Stripling I think a lot of people look at this as a bit of a David and Goliath story, a former United States senator against a student newspaper. What do you make of that comparison?

Garrett Shanley A bit self-important.

Jack Stripling That’s too much?

Garrett Shanley I just did my job.

Jack Stripling Well, great job you did, Garrett, thanks for discussing it with us. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Garrett Shanley I appreciate you having me. Thank you.

Jack Stripling College Matters from the Chronicle, is a production of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen and remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our original podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Laura Krantz, Sarah Brown, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.