Ben Sasse’s surprise announcement that he is stepping down as president of the University of Florida

Photo: Shutterstock.com Al Teich

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resident Biden’s announcement that he will not be seeking reelection (though he will continue to serve as president, after a fashion), and the passing of the mantle to Vice President Kamala Harris, dominated the news cycle last week.

But for my money, another resignation a few days earlier may well have larger consequences for the United States and deprive America, at least temporarily, of one of its outstanding public servants. I refer to Ben Sasse’s surprise announcement that he is stepping down as president of the University of Florida, after only 17 months in the job.

His reason: His wife, Melissa, who initially suffered an aneurysm and a series of strokes in 2007, has recently been diagnosed with epilepsy and developed a variety of memory issues. In his announcement, Sasse said, “I need to walk arm-in-arm with my dearest friend more hours every week.... Melissa deserves a husband who can pull his weight, and my kids need a dad who will be home many more nights.”

That resignation provided an object lesson in spousal devotion. For there is no question that Sasse was stepping away from his dream job, not to mention an annual salary in excess of $1 million and a president’s mansion in which to live.

As president of University of Florida, he had the opportunity to shape one of America’s major public universities, with over 50,000 students, 15,000 academics and bureaucrats, and an annual budget of over $5 billion. And blessedly unencumbered by a DEI bureaucracy, which was explicitly outlawed by the Florida legislature.

The Wall Street Journal recently ranked the University of Florida as America’s top public university (on what basis, I know not), at a time when business leaders have grown increasingly skeptical of the value of an Ivy League degree and are eager to hire from top state schools. Sasse also acted forcefully to protect Jewish students from pro-Palestinian activists, banning from campus and suspending for many years students convicted of illegal disruptions.

In his acceptance of the position at the University of Florida, Sasse described it as the most important educational institution in the most economically dynamic state in the country. That made University of Florida, in his eyes, particularly well-situated to address one of the three great generational challenges he identified in his maiden speech in the Senate: “an age when work and jobs will be more fundamentally disrupted than at any time since the hunter-gatherers first settled in agrarian villages.” (The other two were developing a foreign and military policy for a period of jihad and cyberwarfare, and entitlement budgets that are completely false and unsustainable.)

EDUCATION IS BOTH SASSE’S vocation and avocation. He holds academic degrees from Harvard (BA, with a junior year abroad at Oxford), St. John’s College (MA), and Yale (PhD in history), and he taught in the LBJ School of Public Policy at the University of Texas. He was appointed president of Midlands College, in his native Fremont, Nebraska, in 2009, at the age of 37. In that role, he succeeded in turning an institution teetering on the verge of bankruptcy into the Middle West’s fastest growing college by the time he was elected to the Senate in 2014.

Even as a US senator, he appeared to view his role as primarily that of an educator. In his first campaign for political office in 2014, he did not run a single negative ad in either the heavily contested primary or in the general election. The National Review described his typical stump speech as turning into a “mini-lecture on constitutional principles, the primacy of local communities, civil society, and natural rights.”

When Chuck Todd asked him on Meet the Press to define what conservatism is, he had a ready and eloquent answer. He explained why the US Constitution is the best political document ever written, because it recognizes that government is neither the “author nor source of rights.” The purpose of government is only “to secure those rights” granted by G-d. “You do not make America great again by giving more power to one guy,” but by ensuring it remain a “constitutional republic” populated by those who view themselves as “servants” of the people.

“Some guy who says, ‘If I had more power, I could fix it all unilaterally,’ is not the American tradition,” he insisted.

Sasse similarly used the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh as an opportunity “to go back and do schoolhouse civics for our kids.” He proceeded to lament the hollowing out of the Article I legislative role of Congress and the transfer of vast law-making authority to “alphabet soup agencies,” given little guidance beyond the pro forma, “the Secretary shall promulgate rules....”

The primary political battleground ought to be Congress, whose members are subject to being periodically fired by the voters, not the administrative agencies, and certainly not the courts, he argued. When demonstrators are far more likely to be found outside the Supreme Court than Congress, and when every confirmation hearing begins with wild character assassination — in Kavanaugh’s case, the charge that he hated women and children, favored dirty air, and that “people will die” if he were confirmed — something has gone terribly amiss.

Supreme Court justices have come to be viewed as supra-legislators, wearing red and blue jerseys. Yet in a properly functioning constitutional republic, the battleground would be Congress, and the primary question to be asked of justices would be whether they possess the “character and temperament to put aside their personal policy preferences.”

Similarly, Sasse’s maiden speech in the Senate, which he waited a full year to give, was a lecture on the structure of the Constitution and the rules of Socratic debate, free of any partisanship. Under the Constitution, he urged, the Senate, once described as the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” must regain its former status, as the place for addressing the greatest national challenges.

The six-year term for senators and other constitutional features, Sasse lectured his colleagues, were designed to allow the Senate to focus on long-term problems and avoid an obsession with “short-term popularity” and the next election. He challenged them to again address issues big enough that they might be worth losing one’s next election over.

Though he acknowledged the need for greater civility, Sasse emphasized that he was not calling for less fighting but “for more meaningful fighting” — arguments designed to actually reach solutions to real problems. Socrates, he said, called it dishonorable to distort someone else’s argument to avoid engaging its strongest points; but in the Senate, he noted, most of the argument was “robotic recitation of talking points.” As a historian, he had learned that reducing everything to good and evil, rather than trying to understand different actors, different motivations, and competing goals, is both bad and boring history. To talk socratically, one must present alternate arguments — not strawmen. (Sasse’s frequent references to Socrates suggest that he was more influenced by his St. John’s education, where they still read Plato and Aristotle, often in the original Greek, than by Harvard or Yale.)

And as a management consultant for McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group, he had quickly learned that anyone who presented his ideas as the “only” solution would be fired immediately. That is why the Senate must once again engage in substantive debate about long-term threats. The public is right to despise Congress, he charged, because “we are not tackling the generational crises we face.”

Again as an educator, Sasse called for frequent pauses to reaffirm “the larger American principles that bind us together... our shared stories, our exceptional dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Just as in marriage, the only way to navigate small and medium disagreements is by pausing to embrace shared commitments and history together, so too for Americans and their representatives. “Thus, we need Democrats who will speak up when a Democratic president exceeds his or her powers. And I promise you that I plan to speak up when the next president of my party exceeds his or her proper power.”

WHILE STILL IN THE SENATE, Sasse showed that he was a good as his word. In a manner that Jews engaged in constant Torah study can appreciate, he demonstrated that he took seriously both the constitutional and religious principles he espoused as guides for life.

He was from the first appalled by the takeover of the Republican Party by Donald Trump. He announced that he would not vote for him in 2016, and began to describe himself as a “conservative who caucuses with the Republican Party.” And he voted to convict Trump on the second articles of impeachment after January 6, for violating his oath of office by threatening the orderly transfer of power that is one of the “beauties” of the American constitutional system.

When the Nebraska Republican Party voted to censure him, he remained unrepentant. He pointed out that Trump had failed in 60 cases alleging fraud, many of them in front of Republican judges. “Personality cults are not conservative; conspiracy theories are not conservative… politics as religion is not conservative,” he insisted. “Politics” — at least his small-government view of America politics — “isn’t about the weird worship of one dude.”

In his press release explaining his vote, he repeated his frequent point that Congress had become a weaker institution vis-à-vis the executive branch than the founders intended, largely due to the abdication of its legislative role. But “if Congress cannot forcefully respond to an intimidation attack on Article I [the legislative branch] instigated by Article II [the president], our constitutional balance will be permanently tilted. That’s unacceptable. [The Senate] needs to respect itself enough to tell the executive that some lines cannot be crossed.”

ONE CAN AGREE or disagree with Sasse’s vote for any number of reasons. But one must respect his determination to fulfill his pledge to “vote my conscience even if goes against the partisan stream.”

That is why he was such an inspired choice to lead a restoration of American higher education to first principles, and why his absence from the rebooting of American higher education is so lamentable.

Fortunately, he has promised to keep up his schedule of classroom teaching. And he will continue to educate by example about what it means to live according to one’s principles.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1022. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)