UF trustees advance President-elect Stuart Bell to final state board vote

The University of Florida’s Board of Trustees on Wednesday mounted a full-throated defense of Stuart Bell, unanimously voting to make him the university’s next president and signaling that UF’s leadership has little appetite for another politically driven collapse of a presidential search.

The vote advances Bell, the former University of Alabama president, to the final stage of a hiring process that has become entangled in culture-war battles over diversity, equity and inclusion. Since a search committee named Bell the sole finalist on May 18, conservative activists and high-ranking Republican officials have scrutinized his past support for DEI initiatives at Alabama, raising the same concerns that derailed UF’s previous presidential search.

But if Bell arrived in Gainesville expecting the kind of bruising ideological cross-examination that doomed Santa Ono’s candidacy last year, he found something closer to a show of institutional solidarity.

Throughout a meeting at UF’s Emerson Alumni Hall that stretched for two hours, trustees repeatedly vouched for Bell’s qualifications, dismissed right-wing commentary and sought to defuse many of the political landmines that blew up Ono’s failed bid. Rather than putting Bell on trial — as they did with Ono in an apparent attempt to assuage his conservative opponents — board members repeatedly made the case for the former Alabama leader.

The display reflected both the unusually high stakes surrounding Florida’s flagship college presidency and a growing sense of fatigue on a campus that has spent years navigating political battles, leadership turnover and increasingly contentious fights over the direction of higher education in Florida.

Mori Hosseini, the politically connected chairman of UF’s board and a prolific ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis, delivered what amounted to an unusually direct rebuke of a conservative campaign to shut down Bell’s candidacy. Critics have pointed to statements Bell made following George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and questioned whether his administration merely repackaged diversity programs after Alabama lawmakers banned DEI initiatives at public universities in 2024.

“You have been getting emails. You have been getting people… sending tweets, writing op-eds, and so on and so forth. But this is your responsibility. You make your decision based on your own conscience,” Hosseini told trustees. “Put politics aside. It is not about personal vendetta. It’s not about jealousy. It’s about the future of 67,000 students.”

“This is too important to have your personal reason or paying somebody to tweet,” the chairman added. “This board is not going to give in. This board is going to do the right thing.”

Hosseini noted that many university leaders — including officials in Florida’s own higher education system — embraced diversity initiatives during the years when such programs were widely encouraged across academia. He argued that universities were responding to directives and expectations that were commonplace at the time, long before Florida’s political leadership turned sharply against DEI.

It was just a few years ago, Hosseini reminded the boardroom, that the Board of Governors ordered state universities to inject DEI into curriculum after Floyd’s murder. It was only when DeSantis began questioning DEI programs, he added, that the political winds shifted to the right.

“So what should we do? Go kill everybody on the Board of Governors?” Hosseini quipped.

Bell, for his part, forcefully rejected suggestions that he would attempt to revive such programs in Florida.

He said Alabama conducted a “top-to-bottom” review of its diversity initiatives after state lawmakers approved restrictions and eliminated programs that conflicted with a merit-based approach to education. Bell noted that the Alabama legislator who sponsored the law later told him the university had fully complied with its requirements.

“I’m not coming to Florida to bring DEI or woke back. Period,” Bell said.

Wednesday’s meeting, however, featured relatively little discussion of DEI. Trustees steered most of their questions away from politics and toward what faculty and staff see as some of the most pressing issues of the time: athletics, research funding, UF’s sprawling hospital system and climbing the U.S. News and World Report college rankings.

The unanimous vote tees up what could be another closely watched showdown before the Board of Governors, where Bell’s nomination is expected to face scrutiny from some of the same conservative figures who helped derail Ono’s candidacy last year.

The 17-person body’s current leadership — Chairman Alan Levine and Vice Chair Tim Cerio — were among the 10 board members who voted against Ono last year. But Bell will arrive for his confirmation vote with the public backing of DeSantis, who in January appointed a slate of six new state board members who are generally aligned with Hosseini.

And Bell already has the backing of at least one state board member. Former State Sen. Keith

Perry, a new DeSantis appointee, endorsed Bell on Wednesday, telling UF trustees that he had met with Bell and determined that he was “a good choice.”

Perry noted: “I’m also not speaking on behalf of the Board of Governors.”

This story was originally published June 10, 2026 at 4:47 PM with the headline "UF trustees advance President-elect Stuart Bell to final state board vote."