Cheers rang out from Key West to Pensacola and around the nation Tuesday when the Florida state university system’s Board of Governors voted 10-6 to reject former University of Michigan president and DEI fanatic Santa J. Ono’s candidacy for the presidency of the University of Florida.

Ono, who curiously was the only finalist advanced by the search committee for the job, came with their unanimous recommendation on May 4 and was unanimously approved by the university’s Board of Trustees on May 27. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has pledged that Florida is “where woke goes to die,” remained oddly reticent about Ono—stating first that he trusted the process, and later that the governors (15 of the 17 governors were appointed by DeSantis), should follow their consciences in deciding Ono’s fate.

Other Florida conservatives, including Senator Rick Scott and Congressmen Greg Steube, Byron Donalds, and Jimmy Patronis, denounced the appointment and outright called for a negative vote.

Ono’s rejection by the Florida Board of Governors is an unprecedented, but legally and procedurally correct, use of its powers. Ono’s demise followed a polite but charged meeting in Orlando on the campus of Central Florida University. Public comments included scathing denunciations and trenchant questions about his candidacy based on his well-documented record for supporting DEI, critical race theory, and radical gender ideology, among other leftist shibboleths.

Ono’s supporters offered fulsome but vacuous praise, mainly dwelling on the supposed stature of his last job, at Michigan, and unevidenced faith in his purported “evolution” from a DEI guru who wrote the playbook for that divisive ideology into a “visionary leader” with a newly awakened and principled alignment with the anti-woke principles that have characterized the DeSantis years.

Ono left the room jobless. The six governors who voted for him—and the UF trustees—should know only shame and should resign. UF’s 54,000 students can continue their studies safe in the knowledge that they will be evaluated on their academic merits rather than according to the color of their skin.

American conservatives rejoicing in Ono’s humiliating defeat should continue forth with a profound lesson. No matter what happens in elections, no matter what politicians promise, no matter how much progress appears to have been made, the scourge of DEI and its associated ideologies remains powerful force that is very much alive and with us, ever ready to recapture our institutions and impose their malign, hateful, and racist beliefs. DEI’s proponents, who are pathologically convinced they are right, will stop at nothing to reinstate their hateful beliefs in defiance of public opinion, evidence, and even law.

That Ono could have come so close to the presidency of our free state’s flagship institution shows how vulnerable our institutions remain, even in Florida, conservatism’s greatest bastion.

To those who continue to advocate DEI, people of true principle should have nothing to say. The enemy deserves no quarter, no tolerance, and above all no second chances. DEI must fall and be removed from our society, root and branch. For this, we must remain eternally vigilant, but eternal vigilance is the ultimate price of freedom.