Hi I'm Mike Sanderson. Some of you know me from my comments to the Board of Governors and otherwise.
This is my first time speaking to the UCF Board of Trustees— and my standard intro speaks directly to the legislative budget request. My grandfather Herbert Sanderson was born in Orlando in 1920 and was the first person from Orange County public schools to go to MIT, and in the 1950s the first person hired by Martin when it came to Florida, as he had previously worked for Martin in Baltimore. Martin was the largest employer in Florida before Disney.
My great uncle Carl Langford was elected Mayor of Orlando 4 times in the 1960s and 70s, when UCF was in its first decade as Florida Technological University under Charles Millican, but Charles Millican shows up in 1950s Martin materials when he was at UF.
Central Florida Future, Vol. 08 No. 01, September 26, 1975 (Source)
I was born and grew up in Miami, and was in high school when the Blair Witch Project came out, so for many years I associated UCF with spooky ghost narratives. People do love spooky ghost stories.
At the University of West Florida, last year a trustee said the legislature's intention was to remove the space program from general ed. That trustee, from out of state with no connection to Florida, has since been rejected by the legislature for the second time.
At Florida Atlantic, I am still waiting for President Hasner to say what someone would do with an on-prem quantum computer, and I assume taxpayers are picking up the $20 million price tag.
I went to New College, where in recent years Richard Corcoran has received tens of millions of dollars more every year and squandered it — he has built nothing of value. This has nothing to do with the stated intentions. In 2023 I spoke in favor of eliminating DEI. In 2023 the three most popular majors were Environmental Studies, Computer Science, and Economics. Nobody wants to go drop their kid off at a school that made its brand culture war antagonism and is staffed by the President's unqualified buddies.
If New College is the tragedy, Florida Poly is the farce. A UCF engineering degree is worth more than a Poly degree, and its President uses the average to directly assert otherwise. The students there are miserable, the administration has almost no one with any STEM background, and it's a PR machine whose concern is pushing out photos of people sitting side-by-side signing documents. Florida Poly is soaking up tens of millions of dollars and pumping out embarrassment.
https://mikesand.com/blog/2026/6/2/bar-complaint-2-millikins-merit
https://mikesand.com/blog/2026/5/24/52626-ilya-shapiros-hot-mic-misdemeanor
☆☆☆☆☆
Before I end, Trustee Jeff Vahle is retiring as head of Walt Disney World. I was going to offer — if the UCF archeologists who mapped Greenwood Cemetery, where 8 of my direct ancestors are buried, want to go digging for Sanderson family relics on Disney World's forbidden island, which we used to own. My grandfather could lead the project to accelerate a missile at 100Gs to hit an incoming Soviet ICBM, but he still got tricked out of my birthright by a wiley mouse. I have more to say about that. People do love spooky ghost stories.
A group of 14 couples including Herbert and Jean Sanderson owned Bay Lake (left) from 1955–1965
