When Santa J. Ono became president of the University of Michigan in 2022, he told students and faculty it was integral to “believe in and promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
This month, he was tapped to lead the University of Florida, and said that he was wrong about DEI.
Ono said last week that he believes DEI — a catch-all term that refers to offices, programs, and policies aimed at students and staff from minority backgrounds — has become “more about ideology, division, and bureaucracy, not student success.” He said he supports Florida’s vision for higher education, where lawmakers have enacted a blanket ban on public colleges’ diversity efforts. (His comments came in an opinion essay in Inside Higher Ed.)
He also took credit for rolling back Michigan’s expansive diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy in March, saying that executive orders and guidance from the Trump administration had sped up plans that were already in the works. “It wasn’t universally popular, but it was necessary,” Ono wrote. “I stood by it — and I’ll bring that same clarity of purpose to UF.”
In Florida, some are optimistic about Ono’s potential presidency and praised his handling of protests and social issues. (At Michigan, Ono had several run-ins with activists: He called police on a pro-Palestinian encampment that he said was a safety hazard, and in another case, striking grad students disrupted a dinner with Ono, resulting in two arrests.) Others in Florida’s furthest right wing say his past support for DEI effectively disqualifies him for the role.
A half-dozen Michigan faculty members who spoke to The Chronicle, meanwhile, described a version of Ono who retreated from public life when faced with controversy and appeared to bend easily to political whims.
“It seems like he is willing to adapt his views to whatever the environment requires for him to be successful,” said Julie Boland, a professor of psychology and linguistics at the Ann Arbor flagship.
The University of Florida has been searching for a new leader since last year, when its former president, Ben Sasse, stepped down after a 17-month stint, citing his wife’s epilepsy diagnosis. (Sasse came under scrutiny for tripling presidential spending from the previous year, which a state auditor later deemed excessive.)
Florida’s presidential search committee announced on May 4 that Ono was named the sole finalist in its search. When asked for comment this week, a Michigan spokesperson said that Ono is no longer with the university (Michigan named an interim leader on May 8) and referred The Chronicle to Florida. His three-year tenure was the shortest among all University of Michigan presidents. A Florida spokesperson did not respond in time for publication.
Mixed Feelings in Florida
Many reactions to Ono’s selection in recent days have revolved around whether he’ll embrace Florida’s view on DEI — namely, that diversity efforts have no place in higher education.
Republican lawmakers and other DEI opponents argue that diversity programs are exclusionary and amount to progressive indoctrination. DEI supporters say that critics are misconstruing the programs and that their purpose is to create more welcoming campuses for everyone.
Alan Levine, vice chair of the State University System of Florida’s Board of Governors, said Ono’s forceful response to tough situations, including to DEI and Gaza protests, makes him a strong pick for Florida. Levine said that he’ll likely vote yes to confirm Ono as president. (UF’s trustees have to advance Ono’s nomination before the system board votes.)
“He made a determination in his mind what was right, and he moved forward with those things, even if they made him unpopular among some in the university community,” Levine said of Ono’s leadership at Michigan. “And that’s what we want.”
But a Florida Republican congressman recommended the university abandon Ono as a candidate and find a new president, calling Ono’s statements on DEI “woke.” “It’s time to go back to the drawing board,” said Rep. Byron Donalds in an interview with Fox Business, which he shared on his X account.
Christopher F. Rufo, the influential conservative activist and trustee at the New College of Florida, similarly called Ono a “left-wing administrator” in a post on X. (Levine commented on that post asking Rufo to give Ono a chance to explain himself. To that, Rufo replied that he would “hear him out” but that trustees should ask “hard questions” about his past support for DEI efforts.)
Can we have a university president who won’t let politics dictate how the university is run?
Immediately after Ono’s selection, UF faculty members mostly talked about his extensive college-leadership résumé — as compared to Sasse, who had run a small college in Nebraska before resigning to serve as a Republican U.S. senator. Ono is a career academic and biomedical researcher who previously served as president of the University of British Columbia and of the University of Cincinnati.
“We were understandably leery of who might be our next president, given our past experience,” said Danaya Wright, a professor of law at Florida. “So I think most people are breathing a sigh of relief that we’ve got a president who understands what the job is about.”
W. Kent Fuchs, a former longtime Florida president who stepped in as its interim leader last year, praised Ono’s history of relationship-building across different institutions. “If I could select a dream candidate for the university’s next president, it would be Santa Ono,” Fuchs said in a May 4 news release.
Connor Effrain, a student and president of UF’s chapter of College Democrats, said he initially had mixed feelings about Ono. Though some of Ono’s decisions at Michigan, including conflicts with student protesters, could be cause for concern, he said, he believed that Ono was a “huge improvement” over Sasse.
But Effrain said his opinion changed after the May 8 opinion essay where Ono endorsed “Florida’s vision for higher education,” including staunch opposition to diversity programs.
“Can we have a university president who won’t let politics dictate how the university is run?” Effrain said.
A Contentious Reversal
Several Michigan professors said Ono’s recent change of heart on DEI seemed like an attempt to appease administrators at Florida. For much of his tenure, Ono was a vocal champion for Michigan’s vast diversity programs and even increased resources.
He pushed forward the DEI 2.0 plan — a sequel to DEI 1.0, one of the country’s most robust efforts to diversify the student body and open diversity offices throughout the university — in his March 2023 inaugural address. In July 2023, just after the Supreme Court ruled to ban race-conscious admissions, Ono announced that he’d put nearly $80 million toward recruiting faculty who had “demonstrated commitment to equity and inclusion.”
Around that time, some on campus were criticizing the DEI 1.0 plan. Black student enrollment had hardly changed, and Black students continued to feel isolated, The Chronicle reported. Then, last fall, an article in The New York Times magazine cast Michigan’s diversity apparatus as expensive and ineffective, sparking national debate about the value of colleges’ diversity programs. The issue became more urgent in January, when President Trump asserted that DEI was illegal — without clearly defining it — and signaled that colleges could face punishment for practicing DEI.
This spring, six weeks before announcing his departure from Michigan, Ono said that the university would eliminate its formal DEI bureaucracy.
Abandoning something you’ve invested in because you are willing to admit you were wrong is refreshing.
Ono’s prospective destination, Florida, has led the conservative charge to eliminate campus diversity programs. In the spring of 2024, the University of Florida closed its DEI office and laid off the office’s staff to comply with new state laws. In February, it indefinitely paused nonacademic affinity housing — dorms geared toward Black, LGBTQ, and international students.
For Levine, the vice chair of the Florida university system’s board, Ono’s decision to shutter DEI units at Michigan was courageous.
“His choice was a hard one,” Levine said. “Abandoning something you’ve invested in because you are willing to admit you were wrong is refreshing. Personally, those of us who are conservative in our approach should warmly embrace those who openly reject these failed policies.”
College leaders should acknowledge when diversity programs don’t work and admit they can be done differently, said Amna Khalid, an associate professor of history at Carleton College who has written for The Chronicle Review about academic freedom and DEI. But maintaining diversity on campuses should still be central to higher education’s mission, Khalid added.
“That’s very different from saying, We did something poorly, so we’re not going to do it at all,” she said.
These days, public university presidents in particular may feel obligated to play the role of a politician in order to secure a job, said Dwayne Kwaysee Wright, an assistant professor of higher education administration at George Washington University.
“If you are an academic administrator,” he said, “you’re probably not going to survive unless you actually share the political leanings of your Board of Regents, Board of Trustees, and ultimately the legislature there. And that’s new in the history of higher ed.”
Some Michigan faculty members said Ono’s about-face on DEI came across as spineless. They said he also rarely responded personally to emails, if at all, harming their trust. Some who spoke to The Chronicle said they were initially optimistic about Ono’s presidency, but are now happy to see him go.
The last few months of Ono’s presidency felt like he was auditioning for the job at Florida, according to Yi-Li Wu, an associate professor of women’s and gender studies and history.
“I felt he was cheating on us,” Wu said. “He was having relations with Florida when he was supposed to be taking care of us.”
