Ben Sasse

And I was in the process of running for reelection, et cetera.

But ultimately, I left the Senate for the opportunity to help steer the University of Florida for a time.

friendliness ideological comedy everybody loves higher education i mean this must have been a big relief right to go we are doing this interview we're recording in austin and i was on faculty at the university of texas at austin from 2004 to 2009 and i remember the old quote you know it's attributed to dozens of people but one of them is kissinger

Academic politics are the most brutal because the stakes are so small.

I remember when I was on faculty, I'm a historian by training, but I taught at the Lyndon Johnson School of Public Affairs in the aughts.

And we were going through a building renovation and we had some faculty members basically chain themselves to the dean's desk.

Because one of them was going to go from 16 and a half feet of window to 15 feet of window.

Going to lose like 18 inches of window.

If I was losing a foot, but you were losing two feet, fine.

But not if I lose and you gain.

Right.

Academia is a total mess, obviously, and yet we need institutions to help people go from being 15 to 17 to 19 to 21.

You gotta do home leaving, you gotta do family formation, you gotta do first job, you gotta do a ton of habit and character formation stuff.

And higher education could be a really, really useful transitional institution.

Right now, it enables lots of endlessly deferred adolescent behaviors and not enough rigor and not enough clarity about either research or teaching or character formation.

But we need to build new institutions in that space.

And that was appealing.

So lots of people deserve credit for the founding of the Hamilton Center, became Hamilton School, will eventually be some form of Hamilton College.

I think it's worth backing up one step to one of the inherent tensions in the American Research University.

american research university is a hybrid of an english teaching college model oxbridge and a german research institute model and there's a lot about that that's great one of the things that's always a little under resolved is is our are our research universities for preparing people for life or preparing people for jobs