University of Michigan President Santa Ono’s Move: a Realignment in Higher Education

For these efforts, he was booed at Saturday’s commencement ceremony—the reaction of a campus activist class furious that a university president dared to champion institutional integrity over ideological appeasement.

This reaction illustrates the core dilemma facing reform-minded leaders in elite academia. Even modest steps to restore legal and intellectual norms now spark open rebellion from leftist faculty and students who see the university not as a place for truth-seeking or public service, but as a vehicle for political revolution. Many presidents have chosen appeasement to preserve their positions. Ono made a change—and that may be why he is now moving on.

Nonetheless, Ono’s new destination is revealing. The University of Florida, despite the recent resignation of former president Ben Sasse, remains the most serious challenger to the ideological monopoly long maintained by America’s elite public universities. 

Florida’s transformation has outlasted any one leader. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, the state has aggressively overhauled its higher education system, cutting DEI bureaucracies, anchoring general education around the Western canon, and establishing new academic centers committed to free inquiry. Under the guidance of Will Inboden, UF’s Alexander Hamilton Center, in particular, has quickly become a national model for restoring academic seriousness and civic education, backed by real resources and political will. Florida’s leadership understands what so many legacy institutions have forgotten: that public universities must answer to the public, not to insular activist cliques.

A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for a University of Michigan president to view Florida as a step up. Today, it makes perfect sense. The balance of moral and intellectual seriousness in American higher education is shifting southward.

via www.city-journal.org

University of Florida is the place to be. Florida is the place to be for young persons who can tolerate the heat and humidity and the raucous culture.