Hey what’s even dumber than hiring a football coach – at a king’s ransom – on the expectation that he’s gonna quickly win a national championship?
How about hiring a university president on the expectation that he will successfully manipulate a national news magazine’s algorithms.
Sunday morning brought interesting news to GNV on two – as it turns out not unrelated – fronts.
First, Billy Napier is, somehow, a hometown hero again, having knocked off LSU.
This despite the fact that IT’S THREE YEARS ON AND HE STILL HASN’T WON A NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP!
What’s the deal?
The other, perhaps less noticed, news came in the form of a New York Times article titled: A Star President’s Resignation Was a Mystery. Was It All About Rankings?
Which basically lays out a case that ex-Prez Ben Sasse was really forced out of Tigert Hall because he committed the cardinal sin of allowing UF to slip two notches – from 5th to 7th – in the U.S. News & World Report’s annual Best Colleges rankings.
“Perhaps few places have been more obsessive followers of the rankings than Florida, where a state law encourages public universities to aim for high rankings…the chasm between the president and the board of trustees seemed to develop as the university’s rankings status became more tenuous. Some on campus are convinced it explains his departure from the presidency.
UF law professor Danaya Wright, one time faculty representative to UF’s Board of Trustees told the Times: “The board saw us dropping in the rankings and said, We’ve got to stabilize the ship.
Apparently, Board Chair Mori Hosseini has been obsessed with the rankings since his daughter decided to enroll at the University of Michigan because no Florida university was deemed good enough for her.
As per the Times: “Mr. Hosseini set out to change that, mainly by pushing the university ever upward in the U.S. News rankings. In 2021, the school achieved the status of a top five public university. Mr. Hosseini believed Dr. Sasse could take Florida even further. (Michigan is now No. 3 among public universities, behind only the University of California’s Los Angeles and Berkeley campuses.)”
And all this time we thought it was his free spending ways and his habit of hiring high level staffers who couldn’t be bothered to actually live in GNV that led to Sasse’s downfall.
But it may just as well have been his own big mouth.
At a 2023 UF Faculty Senate meeting Sasse had the temerity to say the quiet part out loud.
“I don’t think we should outsource our judgments about the most important things to whatever a given rating agency happens to measure. U.S. News & World Report could go bankrupt or they could change their algorithms.”
Wow! That heretical utterance must have given Mori conniptions.
But of course, Sasse was correct.
Again as per The Times’ reporting: “It is a common perspective among university leaders. U.S. News uses a proprietary formula that incorporates a host of metrics to sort all manner of higher education institutions and programs. The formulas include graduation rates but also other things, like surveys about a school’s reputation. In recent years, the company jettisoned metrics like class sizes and giving by alumni and added others, such as how first-generation students fare.”
So what extremes has UF gone to to try to stand out in one news magazine’s arbitrary rankings?
Consider the spending spree that The Times said ensued at the Leven Law School so as to hike per student expenditures and satisfy U.S. News’ metrics.
Michelle Jacobs, former Florida law professor told The Times: “One summer when we returned to school, every single chair from every single classroom had been put in the dumpster. They were perfectly good chairs.”
Talk about giving new meaning to the old academic chestnut “distinguished chair.”
William Jennings Bryan once compared a political rival to the Platte River: A mile wide at the mouth and an inch deep.
Who could have imagined that comparison would ever come to describe the ruling ethos at Florida’s most prestigious university?
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