Florida Governor Ron DeSantis famously described his state as the place “Where woke goes to die.” When it comes to the presidency of Florida’s flagship public university, however, it could end up being the place where woke goes to lead.

Following last year’s widely reported and humiliating rejection of former University of Michigan president Santa J. Ono from the top job at the University of Florida (UF), this week the university announced that its search committee had unanimously chosen former University of Alabama president Stuart R. Bell as its “sole finalist” for recommendation to the university’s board of trustees. Unfortunately, despite this outpouring of support, Bell turns out to be yet another disciple of the woke religion infecting our universities.

If UF’s trustees approve Bell, Florida’s state Board of Governors will have the final say, likely at a public meeting scheduled in late June at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.

In 2025, Ono, on closer inspection, turned out to be a rabid proponent of DEI on his campus in Michigan and in his previous post leading the University of British Columbia. He was suspiciously also the UF search committee’s only finalist and was unanimously recommended to the UF trustees, who then unanimously voted to hire him. After a major media outcry, political opposition, and behind-the-scenes advocacy, the Board of Governors voted 10-6 to reject Ono, who left the room jobless and shamefaced. A similar outcry is needed now.

Distinguished medical academic and American Academy of Sciences and Letters President Donald Landry was hired to serve as UF’s interim president in the 2025-2026 academic year. During Landry’s nine-month tenure, according to news reports, he promoted institutional neutrality on political and social issues, pledged to enforce state and federal laws to demolish UF’s DEI policies and institutions, stood up for free speech and free inquiry, and built up UF’s conservative-leaning Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education into what he called “the remedy for what ails the academic enterprise of this nation.” Landry is understood to have been a candidate for the full-time job, but it now appears he has been passed over for Bell, who will be presented to the trustees with no competition.

UF’s Board of Trustees chairman Morteza “Mori” Hosseini, an Iranian immigrant real estate developer and notable state-level Republican donor, heavily advocated for Ono and is now pushing Bell’s candidacy, calling him in UF’s official press release “a candidate whose academic achievements and experience at a flagship state university makes [sic] him the obvious choice to lead UF going forward.” DeSantis, who has held out education reform as a major focus of his administration, almost immediately—yet inexplicably—congratulated Bell in an X post, declaring “He is a great selection and has my full support!”

Bell may be the “obvious” choice because UF’s search committee made him the only choice, but who is he really?

According to publicly available data analyzed in a 2023 report by Claremont Institute fellow and center director Scott Yenor, Bell jumped on the DEI bandwagon as soon as he became the University of Alabama’s (UA) president in 2015. Within a year under his leadership, UA launched a long-term DEI-infused “Advancing the Flagship” program that built on UA’s earlier commitment to “diversity as part of its educational mission.” This included race-based recruitment programs for students and faculty members. In 2017, Bell hired DEI guru G. Christine Taylor as UA’s new Vice President and Associate Provost for DEI, a role that, in 2023, paid her nearly $300,000 per year. By 2021, she was joined by 30 other dedicated DEI personnel, including DEI deans in six of UA’s nine colleges, at a cost of $2 million per year, according to Yenor’s estimate. By 2019, UA boasted that 36 percent of its undergraduate courses were “diversity-related,” a statistic that Bell repeated in a 2021 promotional video, in which he added that UA has “over 70 student organizations which have diversity and inclusion as a focus.”

Reflecting on George Floyd’s death in 2020, Bell stated in an official message to the campus community that UA’s “core principles” included “fostering a culture of inclusivity.” That same year, Bell convened a presidential advisory committee on DEI, chaired by Taylor and, as documented in Yenor’s report, adopted a stricter protocol for implementing DEI.

In what Yenor suggests was an illegal act under an Alabama state law protecting historical monuments, UA under Bell’s leadership renamed one campus building that had been dedicated to a previous state governor, who was white, in favor of the university’s first black student. Another building that had been named for the first dean of UA’s graduate school, who was also white, was renamed for its first black faculty member. Among other measures under Bell, UA opened a dedicated “Intercultural Diversity Center,” a “Hate & Bias Hotline” for anonymous denunciations of alleged discriminatory conduct, and a “Safe to Pee” initiative to combat “discrimination against gender variant people in public restrooms.” Perhaps predictably, between 2016 and 2021, as documented by Yenor, whites declined as a percentage of UA’s faculty and student body, while the percentage of blacks and Hispanics in both categories increased.

When state law prohibited DEI on UA’s campus, Bell altered the presentation of the university’s DEI efforts to conform but followed the path of some 43 percent of university presidents who, according to an Inside Higher Ed survey, self-reported either restructuring or rebranding DEI initiatives under alternate frameworks. Citing an official statement that appears to have been scrubbed from the university’s website, Bell promised that nothing substantive would change, while a subordinate confirmed that no DEI personnel were terminated. According to G. Christine Taylor’s LinkedIn page, she remains employed at UA as its “Vice President and Associate Vice Provost Opportunity, Connections and Success,” a designation also adopted by what used to be UA’s “Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” UA’s “Intercultural Diversity Center” is now identified on its website as merely the “Intercultural Center,” though its LinkedIn and Facebook pages still retain the old name.

As Stuart R. Bell’s dubious leadership at the University of Alabama shows, a leopard cannot change its spots. If the UF trustees have any integrity, they will reject his candidacy. If they don’t, the Board of Governors should show the backbone it had last year when confronted with the horror of Ono and add a “Bell” to the sleigh on which they drove “Santa” out of town.