Good Luck, President Sasse

From Fremont to Florida

Yesterday brought the surprising news that Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse will be resigning from the Senate to take on the presidency of the University of Florida. One reason this was surprising is that Florida made public university searches exempt from Open Records laws. As Inside Higher Ed explained, this ostensibly opened the door for more diverse and better qualified candidates. Searches would only become public record when the final three contenders had been identified. Florida trustees settled on a single candidate: Sasse.¹

To be fair, public presidential searches can be messy. Not only are potential presidents outed to their home institutions, but anti-candidate lobbying can seriously damage careers of even the also-rans. Still, removing the University of Florida community from the search process is yet another anti-faculty move alongside the Woke act and the argument that Florida faculty are government employees who cannot criticize political policies.

Prior to his election to the Senate in 2014, Sasse served as president of Midland University, a Lutheran liberal arts college in Fremont, Nebraska. Before Midland, he was in government and a history professor at UT Austin.

So Sasse has experience in higher education² and made his views of it clear in a piece he wrote in The Atlantic back in May (in anticipation of the months-later Biden administration college debt announcement). I’ll explore his arguments in the piece, especially in terms of how his ideas might translate to the huge state university in Gainesville.

Midland University reached a new record for enrollment in 2021 (haven’t seen this year’s numbers). They had a total of over 1,600 students, of whom just over 1,100 were traditional undergraduates. By way of comparison, in 2019 the University of Florida boasted over 56,500 students of whom nearly 38,000 were undergraduates. As the Aladdin song says, “it’s a whole new world.”

There are, of course, some transferrable skills between the presidency of Midland and the presidency of Florida. Both presidents will need to spend lots of time cultivating donors, making speeches, and generally advocating for the values of higher education. They will need to manage internal crises, deal with accrediting bodies, and cheer for the football team³.

So what does soon-to-be President Sasse think we should do to improve higher education? There are clear sentiments in his Atlantic article.⁴ After dismissing the college debt conversation as “dominated by demagoguery”⁵, he moves on to his reform ideas. His first culprit: credit hours, semesters, and seat time.

Programs offering bachelor’s degrees are stuck in a predictable mold: Most classes are between three and four credit hours; each semester’s load is between 12 and 18 credit hours; each semester’s length is 15 weeks; each year is two semesters; four years makes a degree. In an economy and culture as dynamic as ours, this much standardization makes little sense. Not every 18-year-old is going to college full-time for four years (actually 5.5 years at many “four-year schools,” but we’ll set that ugly fact aside for now). Few students are taking classes at 8 a.m. on Monday—and fewer still are taking Friday classes. Not everyone is going to do eight semesters in a row. Our ossified, one-size-fits-all approach isn’t working for the majority of current students—let alone for the potential students sitting on the sidelines.

He offers alternatives of study abroad programs, intensive internships, or project-driven education. In many institutions, these avenues are currently available. Perhaps he wants this as the model for the majority of students. But there are significant scaffolding costs necessary to prepare students to make the most of these opportunities. And the vast majority of students will prefer the current model (which complements their non-classroom interests very well).

He calls for changes in the way the classes are taught. He’s a fan of the socratic method.

So, too, a pedagogically aware teacher of 19-year-olds realizes that a Socratically alive student usually begins with a genuine question, rather than with the professor’s declared truth. This happens more often via real-world struggle than via voice-of-God content bellowed from the “sage on the stage.” Not every course should have three to five weekly hours in class. Not every semester should have 15 weeks, nor every program eight semesters. Most simply: Not every major should have the same basic calendar building blocks that the accreditation bureaucracies inflexibly demand.

I haven’t heard the phrase “sage on the stage” in over a decade. Most professors I know, especially in liberal arts institutions, have shifted to “the guide by the side” model years ago. He doesn’t address the need for quality control and records office degree audits and how his multi-faceted degree design would be evaluated.

As the last sentence of the above quote telegraphs, he’s not a fan of accrediting bodies. He calls them “accrediting cartels”.

Each of these changes will depend on breaking up the accreditation cartels. College presidents tell me that the accrediting system, which theoretically aims to ensure quality and to prevent scammers from tapping into federal education dollars, actually stifles programmatic innovation inside extant colleges and universities aiming to serve struggling and underprepared students in new ways.

I have been an accreditation evaluator for twenty years, serving in three of the eight accrediting regions. I have done numerous comprehensive visits, focused follow-ups, and special evaluations. In every case, the team has explored how the institution meets the generic criteria for accreditation within the scope of institutional mission. As an accreditation liaison explained to me a few years ago, the goal isn’t standardization as much as truth in advertising. Students are at the institution’s mercy when it says it is providing such and such a program.

Just last month, I participated in a webinar on how evaluators should approach institutions who don’t use standard seat time or credit hour measures. We were told that this webinar was necessary to prepare us for the (still minority) approach toward competency education. It is institutional innovation that causes the accrediting bodies to adjust their practices.

When Sasse was at Midland, the regional accreditor — the Higher Learning Commission — put the institution “on notice” regarding finances and insufficient processes for assessing student learning. That is a designation that tells an institution that there is a significant issue that requires attention (and often comes after numerous discussion around the same topics). The good news is that under his leadership, Midland addressed those issues and the “on notice” designation was dropped.

It’s worth highlighting that the University of Florida resides in the Southern Association of Colleges, which is known by accreditation insiders to be the most proscriptive of any of the regionals.

He has several ideas about college financing. More direct aid. Institutional investment in future graduate earnings. Differential pricing for different programs.

Sasse ends his essay calling for open reform, a “bit of everything” approach. From the penultimate paragraph:

There are far too few innovators, too few institutions, too few models, and too few programs to meet the full range of needs. More schools—including those yet to be created—should compete to change the lives of their students, rather than compete to reject more applicants. We need more degrees, more liberal-arts programs, and more technical certifications. We need more nontraditional students and more nontraditional school years. And we need to reinvigorate the imagination and the energy to design and pave new pathways to success for every American with the appetite to go after it.

This may be true. Of course, all of that innovation would require either increased federal support or massive infusion of funds from private donors. One can’t say for certain how we get from here to there.

But I do know this. Reshaping a 50,000 student institution in a state that tends to be anti-faculty and has a governor who loves using the institution as a punching bag is going to be a gargantuan task. President Sasse is going to need everything he learned at Midland and a lot of luck to bring his desired innovations to Gainesville.

Good Luck, President Sasse. I hope you know what you’re getting into.

1. So much for the diversity claim.

2. I was surprised to see that Sasse does not serve on the Senate committee responsible for education policy.

3. Midland plays in the NAIA and the Gators are an SEC powerhouse.

4. He makes lots of arguments about college debt that I dealt with in an earlier newsletter, so I’ll ignore those for this one.

5. He talks about the demagoguery of those in favor of debt reduction after several spent demagoguing college debt reduction.