Tentative audit findings fail to back up the barrage of media attacks the former university president and senator has faced over expenses.
L ast week, the auditor general of the State of Florida released a long-awaited audit of executive expenses incurred while Ben Sasse was president of the University of Florida.
Well, kind of.
The auditor’s office released a “list of preliminary and tentative audit findings and recommendations.” The full, operational audit of UF has yet to appear. (Sasse served as president from February 2023 to July 2024; he resigned to care for his wife after she was diagnosed with epilepsy.)
The “Preliminary and Tentative Audit Findings — Not an Audit Report,” however, show no concrete evidence of financial mismanagement. Rather, the findings show numbers that appear excessive when devoid of context. The audit findings could say only that “the reasonableness of the costs was not always apparent,” but they did not prove that any specific costs were unreasonable.
For example, those who work in corporate event planning know well that there is nothing extraordinary about a formal, catered holiday dinner for 600 guests, with waitstaff, dinner, and an open bar — all costing $285 a head. (The holiday-party expense was previously misreported as $900 a head, owing to an incorrect estimate of the number of attendees.)
The audit also referenced a tailgating party for 478 people that cost $46,449, or $97.17 a head.
However, the practice of hosting similar “invitation-only football events at the President’s house and stadium” began before Sasse’s tenure — and has continued after. Kent Fuchs, who served as president of UF immediately prior to Sasse and is currently serving as interim president, has continued the tradition of hosting football tailgate parties at the president’s mansion.
The “tentative audit findings” did not say that these prices were above the market rate. Rather, they indicated that Sasse’s staff members failed to ask several caterers for quotes before choosing their favorite. (There is, however, no law requiring public university leaders to always choose the cheapest option.)
Perhaps the most quoted discovery from the audit is that Sasse’s office spent “$300,000 in university funds to charter flights on the University Athletic Association’s (UAA) private jets.” The UAA is a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the University of Florida and its intercollegiate athletic programs: “The UAA is a self-supporting entity. The UAA’s expenses are funded through event ticket sales, booster contributions and Southeastern Conference revenues. The UAA receives no direct state funds.”
The preliminary audit findings did not uncover information “to support and justify the necessity for the travel expenses or the business purpose identified,” but it did not prove that any of the travel expenses were actually unjustified.
Yes, Sasse and his team embarked on lots of executive travel during his time as president. But UF’s revenue rose to unprecedented heights under Sasse, thanks to his fundraising efforts, his negotiations with the state of Florida, his institution-building, and his investment in UF athletics.
The truth is that Sasse has cultivated a slew of enemies on both the left and the right, critical of his tenure on the Hill and then at UF. UF is a top-ten research university; Sasse’s expenses at UF are not extraordinary for a president of such an institution, but they are a tool useful for attacking his conservative legacy at UF.
So let us set the record straight.
The first major smear against Sasse was published last summer in The Alligator, a student newspaper. The piece, titled “Sasse’s spending spree: Former UF president channeled millions to GOP allies, secretive contracts,” was referenced — or even printed word for word — by other outlets that assumed The Alligator’s claims were airtight.
After this first attack came a barrage. Publications local and national took turns casting stones. The claims against Sasse became more and more absurd over time, with outlets reporting standard expenses as if they were obscene displays of decadence. The Miami Herald even raised an eyebrow over a $1.78 reimbursement to one of Sasse’s staff members for a four-mile drive in a car last fall (a standard cents-per-mile reimbursement for miles traveled for work).
This kind of howling began before Sasse even started the job. The Tampa Bay Times published an article headlined “UF adds a $300,000 pool to its president’s mansion as Ben Sasse starts work.” Sasse had nothing to do with the pool; it was donated before his arrival by John and Mary Lou Dasburg, after whom the UF president’s house is named.
In short, both Floridian and national publications were clanging metaphorical pots and pans over the role of the former GOP senator at UF ever since he was appointed. And even now that Sasse has resigned, they still can’t stop.
Outlets ranging from Inside Higher Ed and Higher Ed Dive to Bloomberg and local news sites expressed shock that Sasse received a salary of $1 million as University of Florida president — a salary that he will continue to receive until 2028 as he steps into his role as president emeritus, professor, and external adviser to the Board of Trustees chairperson.
Their ire is misdirected. In 2023, Sasse did not even make it into the top-ten list of highest-paid public university presidents.
With a total enrollment of more than 60,000 students in fall 2023 — with 55,000 of them on campus in Gainesville — University of Florida is one of the largest public universities in the country. A salary of $1 million is standard pay for the presidents of major public universities, but this doesn’t even scratch the surface of earning potential for the chief executives of private universities. Amy Gutmann, who served as the president of the University of Pennsylvania from 2004 to 2022, raked in a record-busting $22,866,127 in total pay (much of it deferred compensation from her time there) upon leaving the university. Lee C. Bollinger, who led Columbia University from 2002 to 2023, made $3,865,304 in his final year as president. Andrew Hamilton, now president emeritus of New York University, took home $3,554,120 in 2023 after having led the university for seven years.
Whether the mainstream media admit it or not, seven figures is the market rate for the president of a major university. And so, Sasse was paid as such. The media also made a racket over another standard practice among executives: the transition of administrative staff when a new president takes office.
The Tampa Bay Times published an article with the headline: “Sasse spent millions hiring GOP allies as UF president.” Salon published a similar article titled “Ben Sasse, former University of Florida president, spent millions hiring his Republican allies.”
When Sasse became UF president, he took a team of trusted advisers and communications staff with him — as any other new executive would have done. That Sasse’s team used to work for him on the Hill does not mean they were “political appointees” — i.e., appointed to a job solely for their allegiance to a party rather than for their merit. And as I have written previously, their merit speaks for itself — the amount of work the Sasse administration accomplished in less than two years is nothing short of extraordinary.
Four new offices were created under Sasse, each with a new VP to spearhead its distinct mission. Raymond Sass (no relation) was placed as VP of innovation and partnerships, Penny Schwinn as VP of PK-12 and Pre-Bachelors Programs, Dan Dillon as VP of marketing, and Kurt Dudas as VP of Jacksonville programs. As none of these offices existed before Sasse’s presidency, the compensation came from the presidential budget.
The original Alligator piece fixated on the $12 million gap between the spending of former president Kent Fuchs and that of Sasse. Fuchs spent $5.6 million in his last year in office, while Sasse spent $17.3 million in his first year as president. However, the additional money under Sasse went to fund these four new initiatives, spearheaded by Sasse and approved by the board. These new initiatives account for, in part, the $4.3 million increase in salary expenses for his office.
Raymond Sass was one of the new hires derided as a “GOP appointee,” because he had served as Sasse’s chief of staff from 2017 to 2023 in the Senate. However, Raymond had worked for Sasse even before the latter became a senator. Raymond directed the MBA Program at Midland University from 2011 to 2014 while Sasse was then university president. In short, Raymond had worked for Sasse for nearly a decade, predating any “political appointments.”
Dillon, then the VP of marketing, came under The Alligator’s fire for his $570,000 salary. They failed to note, however, that Dillon, who joined the UF cabinet in the spring of 2024, took a pay cut of 25 percent in order to take the job at UF. In his former position as director and CEO of the Arizona State University Foundation, he made over $865,000.
Dudas, who was tapped in October 2023 to spearhead UF’s Jacksonville project, left a lucrative job on Wall Street to lead the $300 million initiative to bring health and tech-focused UF graduate degrees to Florida’s biggest city. His expertise paid off — he raised almost all of the necessary $300 million for the project in just one academic year. Before he moved to Florida to take on his new role, Dudas was a partner at New York wealth-management firm Ehrenkranz Partners L.P., where he managed $16 billion. Like Dillon, he took a massive pay cut to work for Sasse – his salary went from seven figures to six.
Amid the news cycle of the first Alligator allegations, Sasse stated on X:
With each new initiative comes new staff — and new investment expenditures. So did we hire some new staff? Yep. And did all of them move immediately to Gainesville full-time? Nope. And did some top-tier consulting firms compete to advise on important initiatives like those itemized above? Of course.
In the original Alligator piece, the author cites the travel expenses of Sasse’s office: “In Sasse’s first full fiscal year at the university’s helm, travel expenses for the president’s office soared to $633,000 — over 20 times higher than Fuchs’ annual average of $28,000. Sasse spent more on travel in his 17 months at UF than Fuchs’ entire eight-year tenure.” The Miami Herald published an article headlined “Sasse’s UF GOP hires racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel costs.” The Tampa Bay Times wrote that “UF staff spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel after Sasse OK’d remote work.”
Lost in the coverage is how those expenses paid off.
During Sasse’s presidency — from the third quarter of fiscal year 2023 to the third quarter of fiscal year 2024 — UF’s total revenue increased by $370 million, seeing a net income of $34 million. The increase in revenue resulted from strong investment performance, growth in UF’s research portfolio, and, especially, increased financial support from the state. Although president for a short time, Sasse negotiated an increase of $30 million (with $10 million recurring annually) in funding from the State of Florida to expand new initiatives at UF, such as the Hamilton Center and the new Jacksonville satellite campus.
And those numbers only account for the university itself. UF’s main campus is located in Gainesville, but the university also operates UF Health, which has outlets in every county across the state. The university also has a Federal Relations division – which operates out of a permanent office in Washington, D.C. With such ground to cover, administrative travel is a given.
University of Florida Health — the health arm of UF that operates sites across the State of Florida — increased its revenue by $428 million; Florida athletics saw a total revenue increase of $8 million; and the University of Florida Foundation’s revenue increased by $106 million. In total, the entire UF domain saw a revenue increase of nearly $1 billion during Sasse’s presidency. So I think they can afford a nice Christmas party for their biggest donors.
Funding exploded under Sasse’s tenure — and multimillion-dollar fundraising requires regular travel. For comparison, from June 2022 to June 2023, the University of Florida Foundation — which exists “to exclusively support and enhance the University of Florida . . . creating awareness, building relationships, securing private support, recognizing donors, and performing all business-related matters to accomplish these purposes” — spent $1,445,439 on travel. While Thomas J. Mitchell served as executive vice president of the foundation, with a salary nearing $1 million, a familiar name also served as a director of the foundation: Kent Fuchs.
Now, there is nothing scandalous about a foundation — with total assets nearing $3 billion — that spends $1.5 million on travel expenses in one year. And, as the head of a $9 billion operation, there is certainly nothing scandalous about Sasse’s office spending $600,000 on annual travel expenses.
As poorly founded accusations of financial mismanagement continue to accumulate, the context of each claim must be examined on its own merits. And, it is crucial to recall that the “longstanding and well-staffed audit function inside UF did not raise any concerns about any of these matters” with Sasse while he was president.
The continual barrage of attacks has been, instead, ex post facto political retribution for Sasse’s monumental efforts to reform the university.