The Ruination of Santa Ono

On Tuesday, June 3, Santa J. Ono, former president of the University of Michigan, learned that the world loves treason, but it does not love the traitor. In a 10-6 vote, the Board of Governors of the State University System of Florida rejected his bid to lead the University of Florida, a position for which the university’s Board of Trustees had recommended him unanimously. It was “like a bomb went off,” Garrett Shanley, a young reporter at the Miami Herald (and former Chronicle intern), who has followed the saga closely, told me. My son, a UM alumnus, had a more brutal reaction: “Tough break for a swell guy,” he deadpanned over text.

Ono, who could have learned from Steven Salaita that you do not give notice before the ink is dry on your contract, has contributed another scalp to Christopher F. Rufo’s growing collection. Rufo had gone on a no-holds-barred crusade against Ono’s candidacy the moment it was announced. His campaign was effective because it consisted almost exclusively of video clips and screenshots featuring — Ono. Ono reciting a land acknowledgment. Ono intoning that “systemic racism is embedded in every corner of any institution.” Ono telling us that we “must work together to dismantle the tools of oppression and white supremacy that remain prevalent and entrenched in our everyday systems.” And so on. Others on the right jumped in, including congressmen like Byron Donalds and Greg Steube, Sen. Rick Scott, and a guy who goes by “CommiesOnCampus.” It got ugly — one of them dug up Ono’s acknowledgment of his struggle with bipolar disorder and two suicide attempts as a reason to reject him.

In voting no, the Board of Governors achieved the rare feat of giving delight to both the right and the left. At least I imagine CommiesOnCampus hollered just as loudly as I did when the “no” votes rolled in. Though at least in my case, schadenfreude quickly gave way to that other German emotion, fremdscham, the shame you feel on behalf of another.

In a grueling struggle session before the Board of Governors, Ono repudiated every dearly held belief he had confessed to in the past. He no longer believed climate change was an existential threat (because apparently the science had changed over the last two years). He asserted with robotic conviction that there are two sexes and also two genders. He bragged about closing the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Michigan (but neglected to mention that most of our DEI programs themselves survived the alleged purge). He simply did not know whether our university hospital “had ever cut off the penis of a boy or the breasts of a girl” (and yes, this was an actual question asked in precisely those terms). “Systemic racism”? Too divisive a concept, we shall not talk of it. He proudly related that he had declined to sign an op-ed vowing to fight Trump’s vandalization of higher education. Perhaps the funniest moment arrived when one of the governors pressed him on his mandate that students living in our dorms be vaccinated against Covid. Had that been the wrong decision? He could not tell; he was merely following the advice of experts. “But you are an immunologist!” responded his questioner, with incredulity. “I am just a mouse doctor,” Ono replied, “a test-tube guy.”

How did Ono — the sole finalist for the job, enthusiastically backed by Morteza (Mori) Hosseini, a DeSantis megadonor and Florida trustee — manage to lose a one-man race? Perhaps it’s simple: The board wanted a committed conservative and did not believe Ono when he tried to impersonate one. Perhaps they did not want to find themselves targeted by Rufo’s crowd. Perhaps it was the instinctive bipartisan contempt most of us feel for blatant pandering: Ono’s frequent assurances that he would follow orders had an abject air to them, an eagerness to humiliate himself that does not, let’s say, signal leadership. The contract he was willing to sign is itself a document of submission: It stipulates that “Dr. Ono will commit to working with Florida and Federal DOGE to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse,” that “Dr. Ono will make it a priority to fill the interim dean positions with individuals who are firmly aligned with and support the principles guiding Florida’s approach to higher education,” that “Dr. Ono will prohibit the use of any public or private funds from being spent on DEI or political or social activism.” A knife twist on paper.

In the end, there was something deeply sad about the spectacle of a gifted and accomplished man trying so hard to meet the litmus tests of the crowd who claims to disdain litmus tests, a man scurrying to hold all the correct views to please the people who endlessly crow about “viewpoint diversity,” a man who praises the “alignment” of Florida politics and Florida higher education, as if political alignment, known as gleichschaltung in German, were not the antithesis of academic and intellectual freedom. But the ruination of Santa Ono also teaches us that culture warriors wield more power than billionaires now, that higher education is quickly becoming as brutal a political battlefield as any congressional race, and that the borders between red-state and blue-state colleges are not as permeable as they once were. The university is no longer universal.

Universities are under unprecedented assault by the very people Ono was so eager to persuade of his Pauline conversion, even though he could not quite get himself to disavow the benefits of vaccination or pretend that racism is merely a thing of an unfortunate past. Wartime, however, is not the time to hedge your bets. Nobody actually wants “institutional neutrality,” least of all the far right, which demands full allegiance to its ideological goals and will spit you out if they catch even a whiff of the woke on you — and Ono came cloaked in a cloud of near-jubilant past endorsements of everything the right disdains.

Ono’s personal tragedy may well be that the right suspects he never stopped believing, and that the left suspects that he never believed in the first place. Listening to his performance before the board, it was difficult not to conclude that the man believes nothing at all, will say anything, holds no convictions. My own most conservative belief is that we need to revive the concept of honor if we want to survive the present moment. If so, the mouse doctor deserves to spend more time with his family.