Greetings from Orlando, where I am sitting in a hotel lobby in between days of enduring blazing heat at theme parks on a family vacation. We have been on the road since Friday morning, and I will not have the mental bandwidth to write a full post for several more days, so I thought I would provide a brief update on the whirlwind in Tallahassee.

Our state government still has no budget. The two chambers have extended the legislative session to June 6. They had agreed on a framework that included a small sales tax cut relative to what the House had originally wanted, but then the governor threatened to veto any budget that favored sales tax cuts over property tax cuts. So the president of the Senate said the budget plan was DOA, and the Speaker of the House accused him of breaking faith. So now everything is up in the air again, with no serious progress likely to be made before Memorial Day. The House has passed a resolution to extend the session to June 30, but the Senate has not joined it yet.

But that’s not even the most important news for me in my job.

UWF President Out

About ten days ago, the University of West Florida had a pretty contentious meeting of its board of trustees. After some initial discussion of the need to revise the school’s DEI-laden strategic plan to bring it into alignment with current Florida statute, the board entered into an agenda item for “General Discussion” that ran between two and three hours. During this time, several trustees asked some pointed questions of the president and the provost.

Several of the questions related to the federal grant relating to teaching social justice principles that had recently been identified by Florida’s DOGE team and subsequently canceled by the federal DOGE team. Why was this this grant still being administered in apparent violation of Florida statute? Was this going to be the tip of the iceberg? Etc., etc. Other questions related to university-sponsored events that had occurred earlier in the president’s tenure, such as drag shows.

Things got pretty heated among some of the trustees as well. One accused another of “ambushing” the president.

I watched a fair amount of this meeting on Zoom, but had to miss a crucial 45-minute segment of it to attend a staff meeting. The gist of the whole thing was this: The president was perfectly willing to bring programs and other initiatives into compliance with the law when told directly to do so, but in her heart of hearts, she is still a supporter of DEI. (She told the trustees this.)

By the end of the meeting, it seemed an open question whether the president would make it to the end of her contract (Dec. 2025). Sure enough, a few days leader she announced that she had decided to “conclude her presidency.” So now there will probably be an interim president and a search.

Refer a friend

New Presidents at UF and FAMU

A couple of weeks ago, University of Michigan president Santa Ono was presented by the University of Florida’s trustees as the sole finalist for the vacant UF presidency. (The trustees had selected three finalists, but each one declined to make his or her name public unless he or she was the sole finalist. Ono has provoked some controversy because he has also made public statements in support of DEI in the past.

On the other hand, he also dismantled the large DEI apparatus at Michigan and took a lot of heat for doing so, both from his trustees and from the faculty and students there. After the announcement of his candidacy, he published an editorial in Inside Higher Ed to explain why is on board with Florida’s higher ed vision now. So maybe he has been red-pilled. If the Board of Governors ratifies his selection next month, I guess we’ll find out.

As we were driving toward Orlando on Friday, Florida A&M’s trustees were meeting to choose that university’s next president. Four finalists had been on campus for interviews earlier in the week. One of them, FAMU’s current COO, had declared himself “FAMU’s next president” during his interview Thursday. But the trustees went in a different direction, selecting Marva Johnson on an 8-4 vote.

The presidential search was full of drama, some of which I wrote about a few weeks ago. This past week, I was one of the (many) recipients of a letter from the NAACP threatening vaguely unspecified legal action if Johnson was chosen as president.

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I can only assume that things will get somewhat normal at some point, but so far this job is giving me a front-row seat to all kinds of things I had not expected.