I thought I’d update you on some news from my little hometown, which contains the state’s not-so-little University of Florida. Actually, it’s the Sunshine State’s biggest educational institution, and we love to brag about it, right alongside “Florida has the most lightning strikes per capita” and “our governor once wrestled an alligator, probably” (everybody has, at one point or another). UF has lacked a president since the tragic resignation of Ben Sasse, who was perfectly healthy until he announced his wife’s profound illness. Seventeen months later, Ben himself got a surprise diagnosis of Stage 4 turbo cancer. Since then, Ben has been fighting for his own life (and he’s on our prayer list). Anyway, bloodthirsty politics have dogged repeated, failed efforts to replace him. Last month, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, “U. of Florida Plays Punching Bag — Again”
“As an anti-DEI campaign tries to sink another presidential search,” the subheadline explained, “faculty see a beleaguered university that has lost its sheen.” A war has broken out between the State Board of Governors, which oversees all public universities, and UF’s Board of Trustees, which makes certain decisions for the school— a governance structure that, in terms of clarity and efficiency, closely resembles two rival HOA boards fighting over the color of a shared community mailbox.
Last year, the Trustees tried to install Santa J. “Oh, No!” Ono as UF’s next president. The Canadian-Japanese candidate was best known for his tenure at the University of Michigan, where he’d bragged about making it the top DEI school in the country. This was not a good look, especially not in Florida, where it went down about as well as a vegan influencer boasting about the virtues of all-plant diets during the keynote of a convention of big-game hunters. After much political infighting, Dr. Ono got the boot.
This year, the Trustees are back. This time, they are pushing Stuart Bell, who implemented the University of Alabama’s DEI program, though perhaps not quite as enthusiastically as Santa J. Ono at U. Mich. The far-left Chronicle explained the current climate with unexpected clarity:
In a telling sign of the times, the global reputation of a top-ranked public research university appears to hinge on whether a longtime administrator of limited national notoriety can convince the state’s political establishment that he is sufficiently hostile toward DEI and satisfactorily contrite about his past support of diversity programs.
I admit it all. Guilty as charged. That is all true. We conservatives in Florida do want academics to convince us they are “sufficiently hostile toward DEI.” And, if they did stupidly support DEI in their previous job, we do want them to be “satisfactorily contrite” about it.
The only thing remarkable about this is the left’s mystifying lack of self-awareness. These are, after all, the same people who invented loyalty codes, mandatory land acknowledgments, and the squishy concept of “lived experience” as a substitute for actual evidence that a fifth-grader could recognize.
Mr. Bell’s problem is that, while serving at Alabama, he was mentioned in unearthed post-meeting notes as reassuring faculty that, though he re-named that school’s DEI department to comply with that state’s new anti-DEI law, not to worry! because the renamed department would continue its same mission. Ruh-roh. This is the administrative equivalent of investigating yourself for ten seconds and then producing a three-volume exculpatory report.
Compounding Bell’s general sneakiness and willingness to defy at least the spirit of Alabama’s law in the name of woke, Bell then lied about it to Florida’s search committee. His opponents thus characterize Dr. Bell as a crook and a liar. His supporters insist his DEI beliefs have ‘evolved,’ like a new covid variant, or possibly a powerful new X-Men villain with the ability to change people’s pronouns at will.
So the State Board of Governors responded by pulling Dr. Bell’s approval vote off the agenda, attempting to castrate his candidacy using Robert’s Rules of Order. But the local Board of Trustees counter-moved, and plans to hold an emergency vote this afternoon to approve immediately hiring Dr. Bell as UF’s “interim” president— something within the Trustees’ power. They may not hire any permanent president, but they can hire ‘interim’ ones— a loophole that exists because the people who wrote these rules apparently never anticipated that anyone would actually use it this way.
More amusingly (or inflammatory), to hire Dr. Bell, they must release the current interim president before his contract expires in two months, incurring a $2 million severance bonus. That’s how badly the Trustees want a DEI-friendly president— badly enough to light two million taxpayer dollars on fire as a down payment. (In fairness, some may just want to end the DEI wars because they think any presidential candidate with recent experience will inevitably have some DEI baggage, which is a reasonable point, and also the most depressing sentence I have written this week.)
I heard from an insider contact who described the massive civil war brewing between and among Florida Republicans over UF’s presidency. It involves top lawmakers, think tankers, Governor DeSantis’s office, top (state) GOP donors, and, of course, various members of the dueling Boards of Governors and Trustees, all of them locked in mortal combat over a mid-tier administrator from Alabama.
It’s not enough anymore to fight with Democrats. There just aren’t enough of them. Absent any effective Florida Democrats, I suppose we must now battle each other, which at least keeps everyone’s knife-fighting skills sharpened. Oh well.
I don’t know Dr. Bell. He may be a terrific guy. And truthfully, I opposed Ben Sasse at first, since he was one of the Republicans in Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment. He got primaried for that, then he came to UF. But Sasse turned out to be great while he was here, and his anti-Trump bona fides lent just enough credibility with the far-left faculty for him to be effective. Maybe Bell would be the same. Maybe a state that idolizes Florida Man can’t afford to be too choosy.
It is true that you can’t let the activists drive everything, because they are nearly impossible to please, and sometimes, compromises become necessary, even inside one party. That’s politics for you. The Democrats are shattering right now thanks to their inability to compromise with each other. Don’t become Democrats.
At bottom, though, my sense is that installing a woke president at Florida’s flagship university despite credible red flags could be a self-inflicted political injury for the GOP that could really sting for a long time, like squatting on a fire ant mound while trying to make a nuanced point about institutional governance. Why poke yourself in a tender spot? Can’t we just find someone who stood up to DEI? Is there anyone?
Anyway, setting all that confusing intra-party conflict aside, there’s a more important silver lining. It might even be a gold lining. And that gold lining is the fact that, at least in the red states, DEI background is becoming professionally toxic. The Great DEI Purge will force aspiring top academics to stake out public positions for or against diversity, equity, and inclusion, making it cost-prohibitive to play both sides of the woke fence.
Which means, for the first time in a very long time, the people running our universities may actually have to clearly state what they believe —without any word salad— a common sense concept so revolutionary it could end up changing everything.
