It was billed as a wide-ranging search to find the best candidate to run the University of West Florida. More than 80 candidates were nominated.
In the end, it was a one-man audition.
Over the past weekend, the UWF presidential search committee abruptly cut short the winnowing process and announced it was designating a single finalist: former Florida Rep. Manny Diaz Jr., who was approved in May by the UWF Board of Trustees to fill the job on an interim basis.
Unless there is a last-minute snag, Diaz will become the latest Republican politician and ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis installed as president of a Florida university. He’ll join the former speaker of the House in charge at New College of Florida, the former GOP majority leader heading up Florida Atlantic University, and DeSantis’ former lieutenant governor, who is president at Florida International University.
The term-limited governor has aggressively pushed to inject a more conservative culture into Florida’s public universities, which has at times meant having supporters pressure existing university leadership to quit.
His influence has been seen in the removal of LGBT-focused student protections on campus; the shunning of “diversity” as both a word, and a concept; and efforts to purge certain college courses, or even whole college departments, from a standard undergraduate education, because they are too liberal, or “woke.”
Under state rules, Florida public universities are required to hold a presidential search before hiring a permanent president.
UWF did that, but Diaz immediately had the inside track. He nestled himself comfortably in a role billed as interim – eyeing, for example, a pricey refurbishing of the president’s office, according to public records.
He took over as interim president with a contract calling for a $643,000 base salary – about $100,000 more than the base pay his permanent predecessor made – and enjoyed a number of perks, including a $60,000 housing stipend, a $14,400 car allowance and an unusual stipulation that a two-thirds vote of the university board was required to oust him, instead of the typical majority vote. In its specifications for the permanent post, the board also rescinded a preference that the new president have a terminal degree, such as a PhD, which Diaz did not possess.
Diaz’s deal was so generous that Eric Silagy — former Florida Power & Light CEO and a member of the Florida Board of Governors that oversees higher education — expressed fear last summer that it would send a message that Diaz had the job locked up.
“The process is going to be undermined by this document,” Silagy said at the time of the contract.
The board OK’d the contract, with only Silagy voting against.
Silagy wasn’t the only one raising questions. In July, UWF’s then-general counsel, Susan Woolf, objected to the university’s plan to hire a DeSantis-linked law firm to assist with the presidential search.
Woolf emailed the entire UWF board of trustees — warning that the law firm was unnecessary, and unqualified.
Diaz fired Woolf that same day, and the DeSantis-linked law firm was quickly hired.
When announcing Diaz’s selection as sole finalist on Saturday, UWF described him as “uniquely prepared” for the role of president, thanks to his time spent in the Legislature representing a Miami-Dade district, combined with other experience.
“He is a lifelong educator, whose career spans roles as a teacher, coach, assistant principal, and chief operating officer of Doral College, followed by service as Florida’s Commissioner of Education and a member of the Board of Governors,” the university said in a statement.
‘Political cronyism’
Chasidy Hobbs, a UWF environmental science professor who also heads the faculty union, called it “incredibly unfortunate” that the search committee “didn’t at least complete the search process and interview all of the top candidates.”
The decision to name a single finalist was made possible by a 2022 law sponsored by former Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes, which allowed the names of presidential applicants during the initial phase of a search to remain secret.
In an interview with The Tributary, Brandes, who now runs the Florida Policy Project think tank, said the governor is misapplying the law he sponsored, which was designed to expand the pool of job-seekers by ensuring that their interest in Florida would not filter back to their current employers. The idea, he said, was to attract more top-tier finalists.
Once the field had been winnowed to a handful of “finalists,” the public would be able to weigh in, he said.
“The whole point here was to get to a final group of applicants,” Brandes said. “The governor has defined ‘group’ as ‘one.'”
“He’s taken a word that was blatantly plural and made it singular,” Brandes continued. “And that has led to, basically, political cronyism, where the university presidents are now all the friends of the governor.”
Because the identities of Diaz’s scores of competitors for the top UWF job are a secret, it’s impossible to know how the qualifications of the first-time interim university president stacked up. But Diaz possesses one valuable attribute: his conservative personal politics.
Neither Diaz nor the governor’s office responded to a request for comment.
Hostile takeover of UWF
DeSantis has pushed for conservative-minded college presidents to take the reins statewide, including at UWF.
DeSantis has ridiculed college campuses as out-of-control leftist indoctrination camps, but Pensacola, in the ruby-red Florida Panhandle, is proud of its fast-growing university and has bucked at the swift changes being made to its school.
UWF has succeeded in all the metrics that matter: enrollment growth, strong fundraising, and rising national prestige.
Even its Division II football team has achieved success.
Nevertheless, DeSantis attempted a makeover through an overhaul of the UWF board of trustees in January.
By allowing board vacancies to stockpile over time, DeSantis quietly accrued leverage. Then, suddenly, he appointed five new conservative UWF board of trustees members all at once.
University leadership found out about it from the governor’s press release.
The new slate of trustees included individuals with little connection to the Pensacola region, and some who didn’t live in Florida.
Even in conservative Pensacola, some of the new trustees’ political views were considered extreme.
For example, appointee Scott Yenor, a professor in Idaho, had previously blamed the LGBTQ community for bringing “dreaded diseases,” and he had mocked career-oriented women as “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.”
Florida’s bipartisan Jewish legislative caucus called Yenor “antisemitic.”
Another trustee, Adam Kissel, had openly advocated for the privatization of public universities in his home state of West Virginia.
Pensacola’s ire over the UWF appointees sparked a “Save UWF” grassroots opposition movement. The community pushback prompted Yenor and another of DeSantis’ appointees to resign their UWF posts. And Kissel, a visiting fellow for higher education reform at the Heritage Foundation, was rejected by two committees in the Florida Senate, though DeSantis reappointed him.
The DeSantis overhaul pushed forward anyway.
“University of West Florida, buckle up,” DeSantis said at an April press conference in Pensacola. “You’re going to see a lot of changes there for the better.”
In May, DeSantis appointed another Heritage fellow, Zack Smith, to the UWF board.
Just one day after he was appointed to the board, Smith led the charge to oust the university’s then-president, Martha Saunders,
Smith aggressively questioned Saunders at a public board meeting — demanding justifications for diversity-related events or initiatives that occurred years ago.
Those included a student-organized drag show in 2019, which was co-sponsored by the university’s Office of Inclusion.
“Why did the university think it was appropriate to sponsor a show, a drag show entitled ‘Drag Me to Hell,’ that I think certainly religious students and others on campus might find offensive?” Smith asked.
Saunders, who resigned soon after, responded that she was unaware of the event.
“The university was shook up at the resignation of Dr. Saunders,” said Suzanne Lewis, a former UWF trustee. “It set a tone.”
More recently, Smith assumed a new, second title: chair of the UWF Presidential Search Committee.
Rebecca Matthews, the chair of UWF’s board of trustees, has lauded Diaz’s qualifications for the job.
“He boasts a 30-year career within Florida’s education system, ranging from K-12, colleges, and the state university system,” Matthews told Florida’s Board of Governors. “He’s a proven leader in this field.”
But Diaz’s educational track record is not spotless.
His time as a social studies teacher at Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High was later tarnished by allegations he had interacted inappropriately with students. The issue made headlines in 2021 when a former student publicly accused Diaz of being a “pervert” teacher who talked to students about doing ecstasy at Miami clubs.
Diaz denied the allegations at the time, and called them a “slanderous political attack” orchestrated by “Democrat operatives.”
As a state lawmaker, Diaz was known for his staunch support of charter schools. But his financial ties to the industry prompted conflict-of-interest concerns when Diaz sponsored legislation that could benefit charter-school operators. At the time, Diaz told the Miami Herald he was operating in a “fair-and-balanced” manner.
Presidential privilege
As interim president, Diaz has already joined the Pensacola Country Club, according to public records, and the Irish Politicians Club, where well-connected Pensacola powerbrokers dine in private. He also rearranged the senior administrative leadership team – while creating a new, permanent VP position for a trusted advisor – and budgeted up to $1 million for renovations to his presidential office space, including a “new furniture budget” of up to $75,000.
The furniture items being considered include “guest chairs” that cost $2,341 apiece, “lounge seating” that costs $15,516, and a “Desking System (Credenza and Hutch)” that costs $18,928, according to public records.
Prior to Saturday’s announcement, Judith Wilde, a national expert on college presidents’ employment contracts, reviewed Diaz’s interim contract at the request of The Tributary.
“This reads more like a contract for a permanent president than for an interim,” Wilde said. “Interims usually are brought in to maintain stability while a search is underway — not to establish or entrench new patterns of presidential privilege.”
While Diaz is now the sole finalist, he is not yet the permanent president.
Diaz must attend an open public forum, as well as an interview with the UWF board of trustees, who must vote on his candidacy.
Those meetings will be open to the public, and livestreamed. Diaz’s permanent hire must also be approved by Florida’s Board of Governors.
If those final approvals occur as expected, Diaz will be rewarded with a new, permanent contract. The board of trustees has said annual compensation will likely be between $800,000 and $1.2 million.
Brandes, the former state senator, said Diaz’s route to the likely permanent job should spur action by lawmakers.
“This is something that the Legislature should absolutely step up and address, and if necessary, override the governor’s veto, because clearly he can’t be trusted to recognize the spirit of the law,” he said.
Diaz has been steadily networking with the locals, and his charm offensive earned a few supporters, such as Dick Appleyard, a former 1970s-era point guard for the UWF Argonauts who is in the UWF Athletics Hall of Fame.
“He spoke to my Rotary Club one time, and answered a lot of difficult questions about whether UWF will go to Division I in football,” Appleyard said, adding that Diaz has “worked very hard to be involved in the community, to go to things and connect to people, and to listen to people … that’s a part of being president.”
After cutting a $358 check, Diaz was also welcomed into the Irish Politicians Club with an orientation lunch and an invitation to join the group for an August social, according to correspondence between Diaz and Jim Reeves, a former Pensacola elected official and real estate lawyer who started the IPC in the early 1980s.
Lewis, the former UWF trustee, is less impressed. Her description of Diaz:
“An interim who had no connection to Pensacola whatsoever. No PhD.”
Michael Vasquez is an investigative reporter at The Tributary. He can be reached at michael.vasquez@jaxtrib.org.
