Last month, Santa Ono was vying to become the next president of the University of Florida, and declared in an opinion essay that he believed in Florida’s “vision for higher education.”
But on Tuesday, the state’s higher education leaders said they did not believe in Dr. Ono.
A board overseeing Florida’s public universities unexpectedly rejected his bid to lead the 60,000-student Gainesville campus. The officials expressed concerns about his leadership at the University of Michigan, where he was president, criticizing its sprawling diversity, equity and inclusion program and what they characterized as its failures to curb antisemitism. Even though Dr. Ono sought to distance himself from those efforts, board officials said they did not find his new posture credible.
The state-level saga over Dr. Ono’s candidacy comes as the federal government wages an assault on the nation’s colleges, revealing how deeply politicized higher education has become. His failed bid was welcomed by those on the right and even some on the left who believed he had tailored his message depending on the audience he was addressing.
In May, the Gainesville campus’s board of trustees unanimously approved Dr. Ono for the job, but the Board of Governors, which oversees the 12-institution state university system, shot down the nomination in a 10-to-6 vote. The decision came after a four-hour hearing during which the governors peppered him with questions about his time at Michigan.
It did not seem to matter to the Florida officials that his previous university’s diversity program had preceded Dr. Ono, who arrived in 2022, and that he had presided over its dismantling. Supporters of pro-Palestinian activism on Michigan’s campus also said that Dr. Ono had taken a hard-line approach against them.
Dr. Ono’s effort to leap from Michigan to the red-state higher education politics of Florida, known for trying to stamp out “woke ideology,” ended with him out of a job and the $1.5 million base salary it came with.
Efforts to reach him were unsuccessful, and he has not made public remarks since the vote.
“This should teach a lesson to academics across the country: MAGA’s goal is the complete transformation of our education system,” the College Democrats, an organization on the Florida campus, said in a statement after the vote, noting, “They cannot be appeased.”
Many on the Florida campus expressed deep unease about the future of the university. Even those who voiced reservations about Dr. Ono said that he was an accomplished academic who knew the complexities of large universities. He had also served as the president of the University of British Columbia and the University of Cincinnati.
“This outcome will make it exceedingly difficult for the University of Florida to find qualified candidates willing to undergo the same gauntlet,” said Nathan S. Collier, an alumnus of and a donor to the university who also teaches at its business school.
Sarah Lynne, the faculty representative on the board of trustees, said she was not aware of any previous instance when the Board of Governors had contradicted the unanimous vote of university trustees.
“If higher education was the N.F.L., the University of Florida is a Super Bowl contender, and we were just about to hire Vince Lombardi,” Dr. Lynne said in an interview. “Instead, the Board of Governors decided that they disagreed with a few plays he called a couple seasons back.”
But Paul Renner, a member of the Board of Governors who voted against confirming Dr. Ono, said he was not worried about finding a qualified president because Florida is “one of the top universities in the nation and not everybody has the same awful record that Dr. Ono has.”
Mr. Renner, a former Republican speaker of the Florida House, said he had not found Dr. Ono to be sincere. He cited Dr. Ono’s signing of a letter in April, endorsed by more than 600 college presidents, that opposed “undue government intrusion” into higher education. But Dr. Ono took his name off the letter as his candidacy for the Florida position became public, Mr. Renner said. No Florida university president signed the letter.
Higher education, Mr. Renner said, “can’t operate where there’s this heavy-handed, ideological orthodoxy lording over people.”
Many conservatives welcomed the rejection, especially those who saw Dr. Ono as an establishment type who would not bring revolutionary change to higher education. The activist Christopher Rufo had argued that Dr. Ono would “almost certainly buckle to the prevailing culture of academia and make the Sunshine State a haven of wokeness once again.”
But to many faculty members, it was the Board of Governors that was politicizing higher education.
Danaya Wright, a recent chair of the University of Florida Faculty Senate, said Dr. Ono would have represented much-needed stability for the institution. He would have replaced Ben Sasse, a former Nebraska senator who abruptly resigned last summer.
“All of this culture-war stuff is a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of what an institution is,” Dr. Wright said.
Meanwhile, back in Michigan, the news of Dr. Ono’s failed bid elicited delight among some who felt betrayed by him.
Silke Maria Weineck, a professor at Michigan, has become a frequent critic from the left of Dr. Ono’s leadership. On Tuesday, she listened to the Board of Governors hearing while she was on a road trip to South Dakota.
She said she had jeered as Dr. Ono, who once decried systemic racism and recited land acknowledgments in Michigan, stumbled during the hearing. Even so, she expressed worry about the process.
“There’s a level of hypocrisy on the right in the discourse about free speech, and viewpoint diversity and intellectual freedom, that’s just belied by everything they do,” Dr. Weineck said in an interview. “You cannot hire a leader and then bind his hands like that and say, ‘You must believe this, you must believe that.’”
Stephanie Saul contributed reporting.
Vimal Patel writes about higher education with a focus on speech and campus culture.
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