Stuart Bell became the 14th president of the University of Florida on Wednesday after a high-stakes Board of Governors meeting during which he publicly repudiated “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives, aligned himself with longtime conservative priorities for higher education, and, under questioning, pledged his unbridled patriotism, borrowing words from former President Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Bell’s path to the presidency was a tricky one.

Although he had the support of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed his final budget this week before he terms out, Bell had to survive scrutiny from the chair of the Board of Governors, who blasted the management of UF and expressed outrage about a lucrative contract awarded to UF’s outgoing president. The chair, Alan Levine, staged a late-breaking coup last week to air out his criticisms, a remarkable turnabout in a highly politicized search process that almost entirely involves decisionmakers DeSantis himself appointed.

Ultimately, Levine and most of his colleagues solidly embraced Bell. 

“Dr. Bell just knocked the ball out of the park,” said board member Ed Haddock, who is also co-chairman/CEO of for-profit Full Sail University,  

Bell was the sole named finalist for the UF job – part of a larger trend where Florida’s university presidents are now regularly handpicked through a secret process, instead of having multiple finalists compete in public.  

Bell’s employment contract awards him a $2 million base salary, with the possibility of future “bonus and retention payments.”

Bell’s selection could bring long-awaited stability to Florida’s flagship university, where a revolving door of leadership led to three different presidents in the last three years. 

“I’m excited to begin my work, and I appreciate your support,” Bell confidently declared, before the board had even voted on his selection. 

Conservative credentials

At times, Bell’s candidacy was overshadowed by political infighting among the state’s Republican leadership, and intense scrutiny of Bell’s academia track record by conservative activists.

The final hurdle, Wednesday’s Board of Governors vote, required Bell to demonstrate his conservative bonafides, although the board’s deeply-ideological screening process used other targeted questions to determine whether Bell would be a good fit for Florida. 

For example, Bell’s prior support of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, while president of the University of Alabama, had to be convincingly disowned – and Bell disowned it, over and over again. 

“I am not coming to Florida to bring DEI or ‘woke” back to the state of Florida,’ Bell said to the board, at the very beginning of his comments. Bell said he had simply inherited diversity-focused programs at Alabama, and initially, he said, “there was an expectation” he would continue them. 

When Alabama’s Republican leadership later dismantled those programs, Bell said he complied fully with the new rules prohibiting DEI. In his comments to the board on Wednesday, Bell repeatedly stressed his commitment to recruiting “rural” students and in-state students in general. 

Last year, Florida’s Board of Governors rejected Santa Ono, the former president of the University of Michigan, for the UF presidency. That stunning vote against Ono, who had been unanimously selected by the UF board, was largely due to his prior support of so-called “DEI” initiatives. 

Bell escaped Ono’s fate, although that didn’t always appear assured. 

Last year’s rejection of Ono plunged UF into a period of chaos and uncertainty, which may have harmed the university’s overall standing within the American higher education landscape. The damage caused by last year’s vote could have discouraged Florida’s board from considering “prior DEI support” as an automatic disqualifier for the job this time around.

Bell also enjoyed a bit of deference about his past that education leaders seemed unwilling to extend to Ono. 

Time and time again on Wednesday, board members questioned Bell about his commitment to a politically conservative vision for how universities should be run. And in every case, Bell answered in ways that would be well-received by Florida’s Republican establishment. 

For example, when questioned about his vision for America, since this year is the nation’s 250th birthday, Bell explained his feelings by citing the words of Reagan and Rubio. 

Bell also proudly declared his patriotism and said he would bring that same energy to the classrooms and corridors of UF’s campus in Gainesville. 

“Students will know I love this country,” Bell said. 

During his back-and-forth with board members, Bell committed his full support for terms  like “civil discourse,” and “institutional neutrality.” While the phrases appear neutral, injecting those concepts into higher-education curricula has been a top priority for conservatives.

Bell also praised UF’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, which is one of several right-leaning academic centers built on Florida’s college campuses in recent years, and funded by the Legislature and governor. 

After the Oct. 7 attack in Gaza, Bell said he took aggressive measures to protect Jewish on campus from harassment, and even offered to let affected students sleep in his presidential home on campus, if needed. Bell said he told students that his wife “cooks super well” and “there’s lots of rooms.” 

Bell also told the story of a Jewish father, a surgeon, who wanted to assist volunteer efforts to help those wounded in Gaza, but he was worried about leaving his son, a student at Alabama. Bell said the father, who lived in California, emailed him to express gratitude for Bell personally comforting his son, and putting his arm around him, during an in-person meeting. The father wrote that he trusted Bell enough to take that trip to Israel. 

Bell told Florida’s board that these are personal values “you can’t fake.” 

“That’s who I am,” he said. 

On the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Bell promised to maintain hard limits on student protests in general. While pro-Palestinian protests caused disruptions at some colleges, that never happened at Alabama, Bell boasted.

“We never had encampments,” Bell said.   

Anastasios “Stasi” Kamoutsas, a board member, responded: “I think you said, if you did, you’d have a tent sale the next day.”

“We’ll have a tent sale,” Bell agreed. 

“I like that line,” said Kamoutsas, a former deputy chief of staff to DeSantis who became Florida’s education commissioner, and was recently named president of Polk State College.

Michael Vasquez is an investigative reporter at The Florida Trib. He can be reached at michael.vasquez@floridatrib.org.