GAINSVILLE: Far Leftist Santa Ono picked as next President of University of Florida
This is a total outrage — All you Gators out there should be raising Hell about selection of this far left Marxist Santo Ono former President at Uniniversity of Michigan who is both a Climate Change and DEI supporter as the next President of University of Florida.
Conservative voices are pushing back on UF presidential pick Ono
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University of Michigan president Santa Ono faced backlash from conservative activists and lawmakers after University of Florida announced Ono as its sole candidate to fill the seat Sunday.
Christoper Rufo, a conservative activist who serves on the board of trustees at New College of Florida, took to X on Monday to criticize Ono’s handling of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at Michigan.
“The finalist for the University of Florida presidency is a left-wing administrator who recently declared his support for ‘D.E.I. 2.0′ and claimed that ‘the climate crisis is the existential challenge of our time,’” Rufo wrote. “Florida deserves better than a standard-issue college president.”
In a Fox News segment Tuesday, U.S. Rep Byron Donalds said he “didn’t know how this guy became the only finalist, but they need to go back to the drawing board.”
Those comments were in reaction to a 2023 commencement address in which Ono said, “Racism is one of America’s original sins.”
Based on those comments, Donalds said, Ono “has no business being the president of the number one university in the state of Florida. We need to do better.”
At a Wednesday roundtable in Tampa, Gov. Ron DeSantis defended the university’s selection process and said the state rejects “woke ideology” and added that Florida was the first state to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion offices from its public universities.
“I don’t think a candidate would have been selected who wouldn’t abide by those expectations,” DeSantis said.
Ono addressed his changing attitudes toward these controversial issues at a series of town hall meetings with faculty, students and staff at UF’s Gainsville campus Tuesday, saying that he felt “in total alignment” with Gov. Ron DeSantis and state legislators’ priorities for the state’s public university system.
Over his 15 years of holding presidential positions at the universities of Cincinnati and Michigan, he said, “a lot has changed” and “we have a lot of data that we’re basing our decisions upon, and I personally have made decisions based upon that data.”
His decision to close down the diversity office at Michigan came after it became clear the programs were having little positive return on investment, he said.
“When we looked at the actual impact of the DEI programs there, the sense was that too much of the investment was not going to the faculty and students and was going towards the offices and bureaucracy,” he said, “and not everyone seemed included in the support that’s provided.”
Ono added that Florida’s ban on diversity offices at state colleges and universities came just one year before he made the same decision.
“I have the same views as this governor,” Ono said.
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