Ray Sansom, Florida’s new Speaker of the House, has landed a $110,000-a-year job as vice president for planning and development at Northwest Florida State College, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports.
Mr. Sansom, a Republican, is the latest in a series of legislators to be named to high-paying jobs at institutions they help to oversee, the newspaper notes:
“Last spring, Sen. Mike Haridopolos, an Indialantic Republican in line to lead the House in two years, was hired to a $75,000-a-year job as a professor at the University of Florida.
“Shortly after that, Sen. Evelyn Lynn, R-Ormond Beach, who has overseen state university budgets, was hired to a $100,000-plus job overseeing a satellite program at Florida State University. She subsequently agreed to fill the post for free.”
Follow On Hiring through your favorite RSS reader:
20 Responses to Key Legislator in Fla. Is Hired at State College
Vance Maverick - October 4, 2011 at 7:52 pm
“Eine Art Heimkehr” is not from a poem, but from Celan’s speech Meridian.
marcleavitt - October 5, 2011 at 8:06 am
I sorta, kinda, like agree with you.
v8573254 - October 5, 2011 at 9:18 am
And whence the need to waffle?
Christopher Tassava - October 5, 2011 at 9:33 am
This is wholly great, not just sort of great. Other tics I’ve long noticed are unnecessarily linking sentences with “that is to say” and beginning new sentences (sometimes, several in a row) with “so.”
jefftylerpmp - October 5, 2011 at 9:54 am
As with “kind of.” :)
josgirl13 - October 5, 2011 at 10:09 am
No “sort of” here. I definitely like this very much. And what are conversational idioms doing in formal writing or professional speaking, anyway?
Richard Grayson - October 5, 2011 at 1:19 pm
Teaching at a New York City college, I read a student’s paper that used this phrase: “I was sought of annoyed at this.”
JOI Students - October 5, 2011 at 2:16 pm
i like this “sor of ” thing.
jcowdery - October 5, 2011 at 3:54 pm
Reminds me of the use of scare quotes–another annoying crutch for insecure writers.
dank48 - October 5, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Also “actually” and “honestly,” which can sort of cast doubt on the accuracy of sentences the speaker utters without them. They seem kind of like “Simon says”; without them, apparently, sentences are unfraught with truth.
Noah Kaye - October 5, 2011 at 5:18 pm
I sort of hesitated to use, “as it were,” today in an academic presentation. A more obvious British import, but I admit to only sort of knowing what it means. Hence the hesitation.
jennyh - October 5, 2011 at 8:13 pm
Don’t you sorta expect this sorta thing in a country that uses ‘gotten’ for ‘got, and ‘fit’ for ‘fitted’?
Seriously though it is rather patheric when such language use appeard in academic publications.
AND we were taught to NEVER use ‘got’ when ‘have’ would do!!
jennyh - October 5, 2011 at 8:14 pm
“Eine Art Heimkehr” is not from a poem, but from Celan’s speech Meridian.
Hi Vance, Isn’t that sorta a poem, anyway??
jpminnc - October 5, 2011 at 10:55 pm
The cited blurb fulfilled its function perfectly — it made me want to ignore whatever it was shilling. How disappointing it would have been to read a well-written blurb, and then discover that the product advertised (in this case, “continuing poetry,” whatever that means) was subpar. False advertising is truly the worst form of fraud. But this was right on! . . . sort of.
electronicmuse - October 8, 2011 at 9:12 am
Maybe, but given the frequency of “like” in our students’ speech, “sort of” runs a distant one-thousandth in the rank order of “tics.”
Isn’t this “sort of” accurate?
bjhorwitz - October 10, 2011 at 10:53 am
What does “smarmy” mean?
Anne Macleod Weeks - October 10, 2011 at 11:48 am
Another great essay by Yagoda; especially the comparison to today’s “like.”
JD Eveland - October 10, 2011 at 4:15 pm
Speaking of “as it were”, my grandmother, who graduated from Colby College in the Class of 1903 with a degree in classics, once told me about a punishment that she received from the Dean of Women for being out after hours: she was required to write an essay on the subject, “The if-ness of the as-it-were, and the but-ness of the if”. Unfortunately, she had not retained a copy, but she said it was quite an entertaining exercise. Just imagine one of today’s students faced with the same assignment — the mind reels, sort of.
rhadmanthys - October 12, 2011 at 10:50 am
I too am bothered by the hyperusage of “sort of” these days, however to suggest a higher usage of the phrase among professors is a spurious claim. There is no evidence provided here regarding the existence of an “academic sort of” per se. The fact that Yagoda’s daughter noticed some professors saying it is hardly proof that this is a tic peculiar to professors. In fact, I have noticed this phraseology being used far more commonly among political pundits and journalists on US TV and radio (no doubt some of those are professors, but most are not) than among the faculty at my own and other universities. Perhaps this suggests it is a crutch for those who are required to do a lot of talking without necessarily having a lot of ideas in their heads, but I have certainly heard speakers who seemed intelligent use the phrase as well. The British origins make sense to me, since I frequently listen to the BBC and “sort of” seems to crop up there most of all. But again, there is nothing that limits the usage to professors; indeed none of Yagoda’s British usage examples have anything to do with professors as far as I can tell. So I only sort of agree with this post (notice how I did not put “sort of” in scare quotes, I fully embrace its ambiguity!).
rhadmanthys - October 12, 2011 at 11:20 am
Something is a bit unclear to me here about the first usage example given–is the e-mailed note containing a blurb about a collection of poems something that was written by a professor? Is this just a personal e-mail or is the blurb going to be published somewhere? (An internet search reveals no published book with this blurb.) We can only *sort of* get a sense of who uses this phrase and in what context when the context and writer are so vague.