Again, not tech related but it does speak to the way systems are used for good or ill.
DeSantis, governor of Florida and weird boot wearing man has leaned into warping Florida’s higher education. First, he destroyed the New School. What had been a top notch, affordable liberal arts college had its teaching and programs gutted, along with student art, in an attempt to make it into a conservative indoctrination center. Tenure has bene effectively gutted, allowing DeSantis cronies to pick and choose which professors get to stay based on their political leanings. And, of course, there is the grift DeSantis engineered at the University of Florida. None of these acts are especially surprising coming from a huge fan of book banning such as DeSantis, but it does highlight just how conservatives see education: as a means to grift and indoctrinate.
Ben Sasse, former republican Senator, effectively stole from the state of Florida residents to line the pockets of his friends and fellow conservatives:
In his 17-month stint as UF president, Ben Sasse more than tripled his office’s spending, directing millions in university funds into secretive consulting contracts and high-paying positions for his GOP allies.
Sasse ballooned spending under the president’s office to $17.3 million in his first year in office — up from $5.6 million in former UF President Kent Fuchs’ last year, according to publicly available administrative budget data.
…
But the senator-turned-university president quietly broke that promise in his 17-month term at the university’s helm, hiring six ex-Senate staffers and two former Republican officials to high-paying, remote jobs at the university.
Under Sasse’s administration, two of his former Senate staffers — Raymond Sass and James Wegmann — were among the highest-ranking and highest-paid officials at UF. Both worked remotely from the D.C. area, roughly 800 miles from UF’s main campus in Gainesville.
Sass, Sasse’s former Senate chief of staff, was UF’s vice president for innovation and partnerships — a position which didn’t exist under previous administrations. His starting salary at UF was $396,000, more than double the $181,677 he made on Capitol Hill.
Wegmann, Sasse’s former Senate communications director, is UF’s vice president of communications, a position he works remotely from his $725,000 home in Washington, D.C.
Salaried at $432,000, Wegmann replaced Steve Orlando, who made $270,000 a year in the position and had nearly 30 years of experience in media relations at UF before he was demoted to be Wegmann’s deputy.
This is graft — a fancy word for theft — on an amazing scale. Sasse made sure that his friends were given huge contracts, much larger than the previous people who did the work, and hired McKinney at an exorbitant rate to bless his decisions. Sasse used the University of Florida as conservative welfare, ensuring that his friends and staffers were well paid, even when they hardly set foot on the campus.
If I sound a wee bit cranky, it’s because I am. That tripling of the budget for the office of the president at UF represent money that did not go to hiring fulltime professors, to keeping the tuition reasonable, to providing services for students. It is a complete abdication of the responsibility of a university president in service of making his friends richer. It is graft.
And it fits entirely within the bounds of Project 2025.
Project 2025 hates the idea of student loan forgiveness the way non-weirdos hate COVID or some businesspeople hate wages. And part of that is graft. They explicitly call for “… student loans and grants should ultimately be restored to the private sector”. Meaning that instead of seeing education as the boon it is for all citizens, much like pre-college education, they see it as a means of lining the pockets of banks and other lending institutions. Loan forgiveness and federal student loans take away that grift. Arguing that schools should be expensive (which is what this is an argument for since private loans will always cost more than direct tuition or government loans since private companies need to make money on the loans) is arguing that poor kids shouldn’t have a chance to better their lot. It is arguing that we should erode society’s ability to grow and improve itself in order for a private group to collect rents. And they are rents. Given the modern economy, most middle-class jobs require some post-high school education, whether it be apprentices, technical training, or traditional college degrees.
We should be better than this. We used to be better than this. Before the Reagan Revolution, people understood that looking out for everyone was the same thing as looking out for yourself. People understood that money was not the be all end all of every endeavor. People understood that there was value in investing in their fellow Americans. Today, we see the end result of forgetting that common sense: political hacks destroying education in a fit of pique and lining their own pockets and the pockets of their fellow travelers in the process. It is special pleading, an attempt to keep the disadvantaged in their place and tax dollars away from the common good and into their pockets. We don’t have to pretend otherwise.
