Florida f—ed up.

Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Jun 08, 2025

Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.

This is Seeking Rents, a newsletter and podcast devoted to producing original journalism — and lifting up the work of others — about Florida politics, with an emphasis on the ways that big businesses and other special interests influence public policy in the state. Seeking Rents is produced by veteran investigative journalist Jason Garcia, and it is free to all. But please consider a voluntary paid subscription, if you can afford one, to help support our work. And check out our video channel, too.

Moments after a bitterly divided Board of Governors rejected Dr. Santa J. Ono as the next president of the University of Florida, one of the board members who opposed Ono approached a University of Florida trustee who had supported him.

Alan Levine, a hospital executive who has served on the board that oversees the state university system since 2013, had been one of the ringleaders in the case against Ono, a former University of Michigan president who had just been unanimously selected by University of Florida trustees as the next president of Florida’s flagship school. Levine repeatedly pressed Ono to answer for past positions on topics like diversity in education, transgender healthcare and Israel protests — using his time to amplify a series of culture-war attacks that had been whipped up against Ono online by the likes of Donald Trump Jr. and Christopher Rufo.

In fact, the entire three-and-a-half hour meeting was more MAGA pandering reality show than rigorous job interview: Another board member at one point asked Ono — an immunologist with a PhD in experimental medicine who was coming to Florida from one of the most prestigious public universities in the world — whether any of his former schools “have ever cut off minor boys’ genitals or girls’ breasts?”

The circus culminated with the Board of Governors — a body originally created to ensure the independence of Florida’s public universities — voting 10-6 to block Ono’s appointment as president of UF.

As the meeting broke up, Levine approached UF trustee Patrick Zalupski and extended his hand — as if the two were battled-scarred hockey players from opposing teams that had just completed a grueling playoff series.

Zalupski, according to the Miami Herald’s Garrett Shanley, refused the handshake.

“You f—ed up, man,” he told Levine.

Levine did f— up. And so did the other nine members of the Board of Governors who voted to tank Ono (one of whom was a former Republican House speaker who had quietly tried and failed to get the UF job himself.)

But they are by no means the only ones at fault.

Because as stunning this moment was — when a group of civic and business who are supposed to know better decided to sacrifice the reputation of Florida’s most important academic institution rather than stand up to the MAGA purity mob — it was also inevitable.

It was the logical conclusion of a years-long campaign in Florida by far-right leaders to eliminate academic independence in higher education and transform public universities into partisan instruments of the state — places used to push an ideological agenda and provide easy jobs for political cronies.

It began, as it always does, with weaker targets — schools that don’t have vast networks of wealthy and influential alumni to defend them.

Like New College of Florida, where DeSantis dropped an entire slate of ideologues onto the state’s smallest public university with orders to make it an explicitly conservative institution — and then watched gleefully as the school abolished programs, destroyed books, and lowered admissions standards, while the new Republican-politician-turned-university-president pocketed a $1 million pay package.

Or like South Florida State College, a tiny community college in a rural corner of the state, where DeSantis made school leaders cancel a presidential search, drive off a qualify group of finalists, and give the job instead to another Republican politician who was, quite literally, unqualified for the job.

Or like Florida Atlantic University, the mid-tier school where DeSantis openly admitted to trying to use the top job as the dumping ground for yet another Republican politician that he wanted to be rid of in Tallahassee.

The political takeover is now rapidly expanding across the state. In just the past year, the DeSantis administration has helped install Republican politicians as presidents of Florida Atlantic, Florida International University, the University of West Florida, Northwest Florida State College, and State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota. Florida A&M University — the state’s only public historically Black college — handed its presidency to a telecom lobbyist and DeSantis education appointee.

The idea that Florida’s most prestigious university would somehow remain above this fray was always fantasy.

To be clear: University of Florida leaders are not entirely blameless here. They contributed to the devolution of Florida schools into political tools when they abused a new state law to hire former Republican U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse as their last president.

It’s not that Sasse was completely unqualified for the job; he was the former president of a small university and an accomplished academic with a PhD in history. But Sasse was probably not the most qualified candidate for the job — though we’ll never know for sure because UF leaders picked him behind closed doors. And then his brief tenure ended in embarrassment.

Still, this week’s rejection of Santa Ono was something different.

There were fair reasons to be skeptical of Ono — he, too, was essentially selected in secret under a state law that should have been repealed long ago, and his shifting positions on hot-button cultural issues made it hard to know if Ono was a leader or a follower.

But nobody, not even his most unhinged critics, could argue he wasn’t eminently qualified for the top academic job in Florida. He would have arrived at UF from a school that UF has been chasing in national rankings for years.

And yet he was ultimately rejected because MAGA influencers decided that he wasn’t a member of their team — and therefore he couldn’t be trusted atop a university that they expect to control.

It’s hard to see how the University of Florida’s reputation ever recovers from this. Bernie Machen — who spent a decade as UF president spread across the very different administrations of former Florida Govs. Jeb Bush, Charlie Crist and Rick Scott — told the Miami Herald after the meeting that university leadership is now in a state of “total confusion.”

“I think we’re in a deep hole right now,” he said.

And it all could have been stopped.

People of influence around Florida — high-ranking civic and business leaders and deep-pocketed political donors who know the value of an independent and accomplished higher education system to the state’s reputation and economy — could have shut this movement down in its infancy. They could have spoken out when the mob came for New College or South Florida State or Florida Atlantic.

But far too many powerful people in Florida chose to either cheer the mob on or sit in silence, hoping it wouldn’t come for their school.

To all those people:

You f—ed up, man.

*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.

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