Ben Sasse on Faith, Family, and Facing Death - Econlib

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Ben Sasse on Faith, Family, and Facing Death

Aug 10 2026

Six months into a stage-four pancreatic cancer diagnosis that gave him 90 days to live, Ben Sasse sits down with EconTalk's Russ Roberts for a conversation that refuses easy comfort. The former U.S. senator and University of Florida president is candid about his physical challenges but the heart of this exchange is elsewhere: what actually matters when time is short. Sasse reflects on faith and mortality, the "shattering of idols" like his own workaholism, and his pride in his marriage. Along the way he offers sharp diagnoses of Congress's abdication of responsibility, the crisis inside American universities, and a republic distracted by the "digital casino" in its pocket. Funny, unflinching, and deeply human, it closes with a meditation on raging against the dying of the light while walking with your head bowed.

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Deborah Salon

Aug 10 2026 at 12:18pm

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I’m a regular listener of your podcast, and I really appreciate a lot of the guests that you bring on. I’m also a university faculty member in the social sciences, and I teach urban planning courses at Arizona State University.

I’m writing today because I really hate when I hear people in positions of power making false claims, and that unfortunately happened in the middle of this conversation. The part of this conversation where Ben Sasse claims that faculty in humanities and social sciences are doing "faux research" immediately follows his discussion of the "numbers" around research productivity and teaching at the University of Florida, which is clever spin and placement because it almost sounds like he’s got "numbers" to back up his "faux research" claims.

The thing is, there may certainly be a real problem with faculty getting lower teaching loads when they aren’t bringing in much research money, or a real problem that too few faculty bring in research money at all. But Sasse’s "numbers" are extremely skewed (and wrong). They make the University of Florida look ridiculous, and Sasse claims that the same story is true everywhere, so it makes all of higher education look ridiculous.

I looked it up – Florida has around 2250 tenure eligible faculty (the ones who are evaluated based on teaching/research/service). Sasse’s claim of 6300 who teach a class isn’t wrong, but most of those people are part-time adjuncts or lecturers whose job is only to teach. They do not get reduced teaching loads because they bring in research grants.

Still, it sounds bad to say that only 100 or so of these 2250 people (i.e. ~5%) are bringing in 95% of the research dollars.

But this *also* is extremely misleading! Sasse is counting research grant money here as going only to the "Principal Investigator" – the top person on the team that brought in the money. In my experience, nearly every research project has a team – sometimes quite a large group, in fact – that work together to bring in the money and to do the research. I’m in the social sciences, I’ve worked on research proposals with between 2 and 25 co-investigators, and I’m not unusual. Teams in the natural sciences or in medicine are generally even larger.

So, making a guess that the average size of a research team is maybe 4-5 people and redoing Sasse’s "numbers" leads to about 400-500 people out of 2250 bringing in most of the research dollars. This is approximately 20% of tenure-eligible faculty bringing in 95% of the research dollars – not the 1% that Sasse claimed.

One could reasonably argue that this number should be higher than 20%, but when you hear that 20% of faculty at a particular institution bring in 95% of the grant money, it doesn’t make higher education sound like a joke. It makes it sound like higher education has something to work on, which I think is true.

Unfortunately, people like Sasse making higher education sound like a joke leads...