Michigan faculty say Ono cut DEI, clamped down on activists to impress UF

Elliot Tritto, Gainesville Sun, USA TODAY NETWORK

Following the University of Florida’s announcement on May 4 that Dr. Santa Ono, the current president of the University of Michigan, is the only finalist to serve as its 14th president, many Michigan faculty members are relieved at his potential departure.

Citing inconsistencies with a wishy-washy stance on DEI and creating a state of paranoia for student activists, UM faculty believe Ono’s move from Ann Arbor will help the institution find a president that celebrates free-thinking education and honor its strong activist tradition.

Rebekah Modrak, a UM professor who served as Faculty Senate chair from May 1, 2024, through April 30, 2025, wrote in an email to The Sun that she met monthly with Ono and served on his President’s Council. She said faculty governance at the University of Michigan are happy to see Ono leave. 

‘We recognize that, for most of the past year, he was not setting ‘policy’ in consideration of the best interests of our community but was trashing and burning our institutional values and norms as a performance for University of Florida trustees,’ Modrak said.

Modrak said faculty believe a part of Ono’s audition for UF’s presidency was the closing of UM’s DEI offices in March, an initiative he originally supported.

Modrak said that Ono told her DEI was personal to him as he came from an immigrant family and grew up primarily in white middle-class neighborhoods where he experienced some systemic racism.

‘Yet, on March 27th, President Ono, who we now know was being considered to be the next president of the University of Florida, discontinued the DEI 2.0 plan, closed the Office of DEI at U-M, and fired valuable staff who led key assessment and strategy work for DEI, among other measures that took the university more than two steps back,’ Modrak wrote.

In an op-ed, Ono defended his actions and wrote that DEI became more about ideology, division and bureaucracy, and redirected resources toward academic support and merit-based achievement.

‘It wasn’t universally popular, but it was necessary. I stood by it — and I’ll bring that same clarity of purpose to UF,’ Ono wrote in the op-ed.

Modrak said when Ono was hired at UM in 2022, he made a point of how much he would interact directly with students and faculty. Despite crowd-surfing during football games and taking selfies with students, the most common complaint among faculty was his absence.

UM professor and former faculty chair Silke-Maria Weineck called Ono a mascot president — merely serving more of the students’ best interests like collegiate sports and research-based learning than faculty’s needs.

Weineck said Ono was selected to lead UM after President Mark Schlissel was fired following a sexual harassment investigation led by its Board of Regents. Weineck said he felt the board seized an opportunity to push Schlissel out and to choose a safe, obedient and pliable candidate.

‘What was very unusual when he got hired was that he had a clause in his contract that if he got fired, he would lose his tenure protections at the University of Michigan,’ Weineck said. ‘This is highly unusual since most universities offer tenure protections and for Dr. Ono to accept this means he’s saying to UM, you don’t have to worry about me, I’ll do your bidding.’

Derek Peterson, a UM professor and current chair of the Faculty Senate, told The Sun that UM has a history of student activism in which Ono created a state of paranoia by increasing surveillance on campus with new security officers and cameras.

‘He’s been trying to protect a certain kind of reputation in the university in part by clamping down on student activists and its them who have suffered most in the past year as he’s brandishing his credentials to be the next president of the University of Florida,’ Peterson said. ‘So, for us in Ann Arbor all this retrospectively now makes sense.

Ono wrote in his op-ed that while ‘peaceful protest has a place in campus life,’ UF is not a place for ‘disruption, intimidation or lawlessness.’

‘If I am approved, UF will remain a campus where all students are safe, where differing views can be heard and where the rule of law is respected,’ he wrote.

Despite the controversies, UM faculty like Peterson believe Ono did some good for the University of Michigan.

Collaborating with the Board of Regents, Peterson said Ono helped to expand The Michigan Blue Guarantee, which offers Michigan residents free tuition to attend UM if they earn under a certain household income, and create new historical institutions and programs.

Peterson said UM has already launched a presidential search and has appointed Domenico Grasso, chancellor of the school’s Dearborn campus, as interim president.

‘I think there’s an opportunity here for us now to get a president that’s willing to do what needs to be done and who’s loyalties are no longer divided,’ Peterson said.

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