Ben Sasse, a former U.S. senator from Nebraska who was president of the University of Florida and Midland University in Fremont, Neb., said on Tuesday that he has stage 4 pancreatic cancer and is going to die.
“Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff. It’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week, too—we all do,” he said in a lengthy statement. “I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers. As one of them put it, ‘Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.’”
“Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all,” the 53-year-old added.
Sasse, who drew widespread well-wishes, including from U.S. Vice President JD Vance, stated that “there’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer, but the season of advent isn’t the worst.”
“As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come,” he said.
Sam Markstein, political and communications director at the Republican Jewish Coalition, told JNS that the “RJC is saddened to hear the news about Sen. Sasse’s dire health situation.”
“We join in prayer for his speedy and full recovery,” Markstein said.
Academia has lost its way
Sasse received the Tikvah Fund’s 2024 Herzl Prize, its “highest honor, given every year to a leader who embodies our highest ideals as patriotic Americans, proud Zionists and committed Jews,” in 2024 during the organization’s leadership conference in New York.
During the event, Tikvah announced a bachelor’s program, which it launched with the University of Florida.
“Ben Sasse is an American treasure and a real leader in renewing the best of western civilization,” Eric Cohen, executive director of the Tikvah Fund, told JNS.
“He is also a man of inspiring religious faith, who has been a remarkable friend to the Jewish people, Israel and our shared Hebraic heritage at this moment of civilizational upheaval,” Cohen said. “In the face of all things, he is a beacon of moral, intellectual and spiritual courage. I admire him deeply.”
Sasse told attendees at the 2024 event that when Tikvah told him he would be that year’s winner, “I thought they were very confused and had dialed the wrong number.”
“I thought it was strange. Why would you be calling a Christian kid, who grew up working on farms in the Midwest, to New York to win a major Jewish intellectual prize?” he said at the time. “My wife also was very confused.”
“Another way of saying this is what hath Fremont, Neb., to do with New York or Jerusalem?” he said, adapting the question of the early church father Tertullian.
At the event, Sasse spoke about the revolution in higher education, saying future historians will look back on today for reasons beyond contemporary politics.
“They will talk about the fact that we were living through a digital revolution we didn’t really fully apprehend,” he told attendees.
He added that academia has lost its way.
“Institutions ostensibly dedicated to the search for truth and to the exploration of ideals and to the advancement of human flourishing instead have devoted themselves to inquisitions and struggle sessions,” he said at the event.
“Students are urged to catalog microaggressions and to conflate comfort with safety,” he added. “Faculty, who dare to treat students like adults with a sense of grit and a grand sense of potential, face professional consequences. Administrators police language.”
That has gotten worse since Oct. 7, he said.
“We could spend a whole day on the absurdities just a few dozen blocks north of here at Columbia University,” he said. “Constant antisemitic babble. Taking janitors hostage. Disrupting classes. Vandalizing buildings. No real consequences.”
The good news, he said at the time, is that Americans now see the absurdity and want something better.
