A Very Public Presidency’s Reality Check

Santa J. Ono is running late.

He’s supposed to be on the floor of the University of Michigan’s Crisler Center, hobnobbing with important guests: big donors, board members, executive officers, and politicians, including a congresswoman. And the clock is ticking quickly toward the kickoff of the football team’s homecoming game.

The good news is Ono has made it into the building. The bad news is he’s got to go down a long hallway full of revelers before getting to the stage, where he’s set to deliver short remarks. Ono moves slowly, shaking hands and even whipping out his own cellphone to take selfies with VIPs garbed in the university’s colors, maize and blue. At one point, Ono plays photographer, moving people into perfect position before snapping a shot with his phone. Later that photo will end up on Ono’s social media.

This is the Ono the university’s board hired one year ago with great fanfare and hope — the respected academician with the people skills of a U.S. senator, a tonic to soothe stomachs still churning from the discord between the former president, Mark S. Schlissel, and many on the campus of one of the nation’s elite public universities. But Ono’s honeymoon ended quickly. Shortly after he took office, labor conflicts culminated in a monthslong strike by the Graduate Employees’ Organization. Ono’s casual public visibility in the Ann Arbor community, which he’d already become known for, diminished. Questions intensified. Would the president hired to be more public and transparent in his work be able to restore trust?

“I’m optimistic,” he said in an exclusive conversation with The Chronicle. “But I’m also ambitious and aggressive for the university. This is a great university, and my primary job is to leave the university better when I leave, as compared to when I arrived. And I’m determined to do that.”

The university’s board hasn’t wavered in its belief in his ability.

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“President Ono has brought the light to our campus,” said board chairwoman Sarah Hubbard. “He has brought a change in attitude to people who had concerns about our former president.”

Others on campus are more guarded. They want to see if Ono is more than just the social-media president. The jury’s still out, they say, on whether he can be what the university most needs: a cultural changemaker.

Critics and supporters agree that the opportunity is there for Ono to deeply transform the culture of one of the nation’s leading institutions at a time when college after college is taking heavy blows to the head. It’s on the famously engaging president to keep the University of Michigan solidly on its feet and not staggering around the ring.

When Ono welcomed me to his office in mid-October 2022, days after starting his tenure, the only real personal touch in it was a football helmet given to him by head football coach Jim Harbaugh. As we walked in, Ono pointed to a photograph and asked a staff member where it had been taken on campus.

Despite his unfamiliarity then with the sprawling campus, Ono said he was already locked in on his No. 1 responsibility — rebuilding trust between the university and its leaders. Ono had spent the months since being named president, in July, in meetings on the phone, on Zoom, and occasionally in person about the state of the university.

The institution was at one of the lowest points in its history. Ono was taking over the presidency from Mary Sue Coleman, the interim leader who had been called out of retirement in January, when the board fired Schlissel as president.

While the reason given for firing Schlissel was an inappropriate relationship between him and an employee, he had been on shaky ground for some time. Often seen as aloof and uncommunicative, Schlissel had received the first faculty no-confidence vote against a president in the university’s history. That was based largely on Schlissel’s handling of the Covid years at the university, when debates roiled over when to return to in-person classes, who got to make that decision, whether living conditions in student quarantine quarters were up to par, and why athletes were getting rapid tests when others weren’t. Board members had also held several private, closed-door sessions with Schlissel, urging him to be more transparent with the campus and with them.

Schlissel was docked, too, for not embracing the performative aspects of the presidency — meet-and-greets with donors, interactions with students, ribbon-cuttings of new buildings. He showed up for those occasions, but many across campus believed he preferred working on the less-public parts of his job.

The administration was also under heavy fire for its handling of two sexual-misconduct scandals. One focused on a football-team doctor who was accused of sexual abuse several years after he’d died. One of the students he treated — a former star football player — pitched a tent outside of Schlissel’s university-owned house, asking for a one-on-one meeting with the president. But Schlissel refused. The university eventually reached a $490-million settlement with the survivors.

The second scandal revolved around a provost promoted by Schlissel who was found to have sexually harassed employees for two decades. An outside report found that warning flags had been raised to administrators for years. The provost, Martin A. Philbert, was fired, and the university reached a $9.25-million settlement with the accusers.

A bruised C-suite demanded steady hands. Schlissel had been hired with no presidential experience from Brown, a private university with a much smaller public footprint. Board members were determined not to go down that route again.

When Ono’s name came up in the presidential search, the regents were impressed with his résumé — president of the University of British Columbia since 2016 and president of the University of Cincinnati for four years before that. During his time at Cincinnati, Ono’s fame rose — he quickly developed a reputation as the “Twitter-savvy,” super-public leader built for a modern presidency.

“I remember thinking, ‘I hope this guy is as good as he looks,’” said Mark J. Bernstein, a U-M regent. “We didn’t have any room to screw this one up. We needed a candidate with experience. That reduced our risk.”

Ono struck the board as a very modern president — “an institutional cheerleader with gravitas,” Bernstein said. Board members said they needed someone who had the academic chops to resonate with faculty at a premier research university but was also comfortable interacting with students on the sidelines at a football game and on social media.

For Ono, institutional cheerleading serves a critical university function.

“When you’re a leader, people watch you,” he said. “And people are affected by your demeanor and your outlook. Also, we’re in the business of building hope for the next generation. And so if you’re moping around, then you don’t have hope. You’re not optimistic. We’re modeling behavior and wanting to encourage the next generation.”

“There was a sigh of relief” when Ono was hired in the summer of 2022, said Thomas M. Braun, a professor of biostatistics in the School of Public Health and chair of the Faculty Senate’s executive committee. “We have to get out of this disaster we are in now. There was a feeling of not being heard. People thought they were being talked to, not being heard.”

As he began his time in Ann Arbor, Ono was all over the place, documenting his interactions on his X (formerly Twitter) account. He posted his delight with the cheesesteak at Mr. Spots, the surprise of finding frozen Skyline chili at the Ann Arbor Kroger grocery store, video of the student sections at hockey and football games. And he solicited advice on matters from where to eat to a good local bike store.

He also was all over the university, seemingly ending each meeting by taking a photo or two and posting them with complimentary captions. He even admitted to being lost on occasion: “I felt like a transfer student trying to figure out where the entrance to Canham Natatorium is located,” he posted in January.

The meeting and greeting were all about understanding “the ethos of the institution,” Ono said. And he realized that, while he understood complex organizations from his previous presidencies, U-M was on a different level.

“The University of Michigan is kind of unique in how strong it is in scale and breadth in academic disciplines, but also how serious it is about intercollegiate sports,” he said. “There aren’t many schools like that in the United States, certainly not in Canada.”

Athletics has baffled many a new president, but in Ann Arbor, trouble was looming on another side of campus: The contract for the Graduate Employees’ Organization, a labor union that represents about 2,300 graduate-student instructors and graduate assistants, was up, and negotiations had begun.

In the early days of negotiations, the union wondered if a new president would mean a new approach to bargaining. “Ono was supposed to represent a big turning over of a new leaf on campus,” Jared Eno, president of GEO, said. “We were pretty hopeful — the bar was pretty low.”

The group felt like it got an answer quickly.

“Basically, we didn’t detect a difference between the Ono administration and Schlissel administration in terms of approach” toward bargaining strategy, particularly its appetite for concessions and its attitude toward striking workers, Eno said.

Ono said he wasn’t directly involved in the talks, instead leaving them to the deans and provost.

“It’s not a good thing when the president steps in and micromanages that negotiation, for a variety of reasons,” Ono said. “The graduate students are embedded within schools, and their responsibilities, their interactions, happen at the unit level in departments within schools. And it involves a lot of people. And I’m not there, I’m not in the departments. I’m not in the units.”

He added: “I’m not directly involved in setting the agenda or setting the position of the institution. But, certainly, I’m apprised of that.”

By April, talks had broken down, and the union went out on strike. A battle in court erupted as the administration unsuccessfully sought an injunction to force the union back to work. Eventually, at the end of April, the administration docked the pay of those striking.

That all led to a confrontation on April 20 between GEO protesters and Ono at an Ann Arbor restaurant. Protesters banged on the windows of the restaurant to get Ono’s attention. When he attempted to leave, they blocked his SUV, driven by a campus police officer. Two protesters were briefly detained.

After that incident, Ono, who plays the cello, canceled an appearance with the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, which was scheduled to take place on campus. As the strike wore on, Ono became less visible around campus in casual settings, and his social-media posting died down.

“Ono basically avoided us when we picketed events,” Eno said. “He wouldn’t show up like he was scheduled to.”

Ono said part of the reason for the slight pullback from the Ann Arbor scene was schedule-related — he was traveling to meet alumni, donors, and public officials around the country and in Washington, D.C. But part of it was also intentional, including skipping the symphony performance.

“I made a strategic decision not to go because I didn’t want to get in the way of the enjoyment of, you know, 3,000 people going to listen to the Ann Arbor symphony,” he said, adding: “Strategically, at certain times, I did not attend things because it’s not about me.”

The strike was resolved in late August, just before the start of fall classes. Since then, Ono has again become more visible around campus.

But his early withdrawal from the public eye signaled a setback for the president. “I think the labor tumult smothered his honeymoon with a strong dose of reality,” said Bernstein, the regent. “It really started to throw off the optimism,” said Braun, the faculty leader.

Faculty members watched the back-and-forth between the union and the administration, and wondered: Did the university’s ethos overwhelm Ono just a few months in? Or was this just a matter of a new president unable to change a behemoth bureaucracy quickly?

It’s just over 16 minutes since Ono finished his speech to those gathered on the floor of the Crisler Center. Most of the crowd is gone, making their way to the football game.

Not Ono. He made it about five feet from the stage before a line formed, full of people waiting for pictures with him and a chance for a 30-second conversation. As he meets and greets, Ono creates a bit of space between him and them but leans forward slightly with his upper body, creating the illusion that he’s closer than he actually is.

Now the line is gone, and Ono sweeps up the hallway toward a large parking lot where fans hustle from their tailgates to their seats. He pauses to chat with former basketball coach John Beilein. Several people greet both men, but for the first time all day, Ono isn’t the star attraction — it’s Beilein, who took the U-M Wolverines to two NCAA Final Four championships in his dozen years as the head coach. Ono quietly heads for the football game. Later that night, he’ll post photos from the meet-and-greet and the game on his X account.

It’s not just VIPs who get the in-person treatment. Braun said Ono has attended meetings of his committee and the Senate Assembly to speak with faculty members and hear what they have to say. And he meets with Ono once a month.

“He’s very engaged,” Braun said. “He listens well. He’s taking notes. He’s asking questions. He comes across as very sincere.”

Ono’s sunny disposition made him an attractive pick for a campus that has faced dark questions about its culture. And fixing that takes more than pressing the flesh. “To me, the key question is, What does he do now?” Eno said. “Is he willing and able to turn over that new leaf? There definitely is a deeply ingrained culture here. It’s going to take a lot to change that.”

Braun said rank-and-file faculty members have questions. “There are those who are getting anxious. They want to see some production.”

Now that Ono’s had a year to listen and formulate plans, faculty members want to see those plans put into action.

For example, at his first board meeting, Ono announced the formation of a new ethics, integrity, and compliance office, a step that was recommended in response to the sexual-misconduct cases. But faculty and staff members are waiting for details on how that office will function.

Also on the laundry list of issues for Ono to tackle is Michigan Medicine, the university’s large and growing health system, where Ono said he was deeply involved in recent expansions. Margins are slim, and competition is fierce for what is the largest chunk of the institution’s budget.

The president also faces issues familiar to many campuses: How does it handle free-speech controversies? How does it increase diversity on a campus where multiple Supreme Court cases about limits on affirmative action have originated? How does it handle growing calls to change policing on campus? What happens when the next union contract is up?

Ono said he’s fixated on earning, and keeping, the campus’s trust. One way to do that is by embracing the fact that the buck stops with him: “All people are human, and all people make errors, but it’s part of my responsibility through the reporting lines to ensure that those sorts of issues, whenever they arise, that I hold them accountable and in an empathetic way, but to say, you know, this kind of behavior, this kind of action, is not consistent with the institutional values and to be very explicit about what I expect needs to happen moving forward.”

Accountability, or lack thereof, was a key criticism of the Schlissel era. An independent review of the Martin Philbert scandal found that Schlissel, who had appointed Philbert to the position in 2017, heard about a lawsuit accusing the provost of misbehavior but did not think it disqualified Philbert. The review concluded that Schlissel did not know of multiple other complaints that had been filed in the years before Philbert’s promotion.

Many are hopeful that reforms put in place following that scandal and similar ones are actually followed.

Close observers of the university believe one thing Ono has going for him is his relationship with the board, which has, both in public and private, coalesced around him in a way it didn’t for his predecessor.

With the strike settled and a new academic year underway, Ono is again posting on his X account about his activities around campus, mixing in random moments from his life, including a rave review of the #86 at Maize & Blue Deli, with more-official proclamations of university successes. He’s also attending events open to the public that he ditched during the labor unrest, including a visit to the University Symphony Orchestra.

He said he’ll continue to be the smiling public face he was hired to be. He feeds off that kind of work.

“Earlier today I went to a lecture,” Ono said. “I was with 300 students, postdocs, and faculty members. I went around looking at posters, talking about their science, just looking at people loving their research and learning. And then faculty members mentoring them. That’s a privilege for me, and it gets me excited. I’m gonna conduct the marching band. I’m gonna actually go down to practice this week and, in one of the upcoming home games, I’m gonna get up there and conduct them. And how can you not be energized by that?”