Mike Gavin, the founder of Education for All, a grassroots group of community college administrators fighting legislative attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, will step down as president of Delta College in January. He has been in the post since 2021.
Gavin informed the Delta College Board of Trustees last week that he would resign to lead a national coalition focused on defending equity in higher ed.
“My whole career has been focused on equity and how higher ed is situated in the democratic experiment, so when I was asked to do the next thing, I felt compelled to do it,” Gavin told Inside Higher Ed.
“I was not looking for a job. Delta has been amazing. The faculty and staff are some of the most insightful and student-centered I’ve ever seen,” he said.
More information about the coalition, including its priorities and funding model, will be released soon, he added.
Since the early days of the second Trump administration, Gavin has been a leading voice in defending DEI work in higher ed, especially at community colleges. Participation in Education for All surged at the beginning of the year as college leaders sought advice on protecting programs and navigating compliance with Trump administration mandates.
“My scholarship rests on the great thinkers of our past, from Benjamin Franklin to James Baldwin. It is also grounded in the belief that our country depends on a higher education sector that must be free from partisan interference, in order to democratize higher education for all,” Gavin wrote in a letter to the Delta College community.
Delta College trustees said they will begin the process of appointing Gavin’s successor in the coming weeks.
Genevieve Bell resigned on Thursday. Picture: Martin Ollman
Australian National University chancellor Julie Bishop has rejected calls to step down following the exit of vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell – a resignation some staff openly celebrated following months of controversy.
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Northwestern University President Michael Schill announced his resignation Thursday, concluding a three-year tenure that brought record achievements alongside unprecedented federal challenges, including an ongoing $790 million funding freeze imposed by the Trump administration.
Schill, who became Northwestern’s 17th president in September 2022, cited the need for “new leadership to guide Northwestern into its next chapter” in his message to the campus community. His departure adds to a growing list of university presidents who have stepped down amid tensions with the federal government and campus controversies.
The resignation comes as Northwestern grapples with a federal funding freeze that began approximately four months ago, when the Trump administration halted $790 million in federal support. The action was reportedly connected to Title VI investigations, which examine discrimination in federally funded programs.
The frozen funds support what Northwestern describes as “innovative and life-saving research,” including development of the world’s smallest pacemaker and Alzheimer’s disease research. University officials warned that “this type of research is now at jeopardy” due to the funding suspension.
Northwestern joins other elite institutions facing similar federal actions, with universities like Cornell, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Virginia experiencing funding freezes or leadership changes amid disputes over diversity programs and responses to Gaza-related campus protests.
During Schill’s tenure, Northwestern reached notable milestones while navigating significant challenges. Schill oversaw major academic initiatives, including the establishment of research centers like the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago and the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky. He also championed free expression initiatives, launching the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement and establishing the President’s Advisory Committee on Free Expression and Institutional Speech.
However, his presidency was marked by significant controversies. Shortly after arriving on campus, Schill inherited a hazing scandal involving student-athletes, leading to new protective policies. More recently, he navigated campus tensions following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent protests.
Republican lawmakers, including House Education and Workforce Committee Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, had criticized Schill’s handling of campus antisemitism. Stefanik called his resignation “long overdue,” claiming he “failed to protect Jewish students” and “caved to the demands of the antisemitic, pro-Hamas mob.”
Northwestern officials counter that they have “fully cooperated with investigations by both the Department of Education and Congress” and implemented policy updates that resulted in a “dramatic decrease” in reported antisemitic incidents.
White House spokesperson Liz Huston said the Trump administration “looks forward to working with the new leadership, and we hope they seize this opportunity to Make Northwestern Great Again.”
The Northwestern Board of Trustees will name an interim president soon, with Schill continuing in his role until the transition is complete. Board Chair Peter Barris praised Schill’s leadership through “unparalleled challenges” and credited him with “lasting achievements that contribute robustly to Northwestern’s continued advancement.”
After stepping down, Schill plans to take a sabbatical before returning to teach and conduct research as a faculty member at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.
Jeff Stein was the first male president of Mary Baldwin University since 1976.
Liz Albro Photography/iStock/Getty Images
Mary Baldwin University president Jeff Stein resigned Tuesday after two years in the role, The News Leader reported. Fall classes at the formerly all-women private university in Staunton, Va., started Monday.
A university spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that Stein resigned for personal reasons, and the university has not shared any other information about his departure.
Stein was the first male president at Mary Baldwin since 1976 and assumed the role in 2023 after former president Pamela Fox retired. The university’s Board of Trustees appointed Todd Telemeco, who was the vice president and dean of Mary Baldwin’s Murphy Deming College of Health Sciences, as Stein’s permanent replacement.
“We thank Dr. Stein and his wife, Chrissy, for their two years of service to the University, and we wish them the best in their future endeavors. We are especially grateful for Dr. Stein’s ability to reinvigorate the connection between the University and our alumni,” board co-chairs Eloise Chandler and Constance Dierickx wrote in a statement. “This renewed energy in alumni relations has also contributed to significantly higher alumni giving rates.”
Prior to becoming president at Mary Baldwin, Stein served as vice president for strategic initiatives and partnerships and an associate professor of English at Elon University in North Carolina.
The University of Virginia president James Ryan said Friday he was resigning after the Justice Department demanded he step down.
“To make a long story short, I am inclined to fight for what I believe in, and I believe deeply in this university,” Ryan wrote in a letter to the campus community. “But I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job. To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.”
The Justice Department has for months been quietly investigating whether the Virginia flagship complied with President Donald Trump’s order banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The university’s Board of Visitors voted to dissolve its DEI office in March, but multiple conservative alumni groups and legal entities complained that Ryan failed to eliminate DEI from all corners of campus. In many cases, critics argue that the university simply changed the names of programs but maintained their core function.
The New York Timesfirst reported on the resignation and the Justice Department’s demand Thursday evening.
Ryan wrote that he had planned to step down next spring for reasons separate from the investigation; he didn’t say when his resignation would take effect.
“While there are very important principles at play here, I would at a very practical level be fighting to keep my job for one more year while knowingly and willingly sacrificing others in this community,” he wrote.
Ryan took over at UVA in August 2018, steering the institution through the aftermath of the deadly white supremacist rally in August 2017, the pandemic and the racial reckoning in 2020. He also cracked down on pro-Palestinian protesters last spring—a move that Republicans in the state backed but students and faculty condemned. Ryan also embraced institutional neutrality and sought to make UVA a leader in the study of democracy.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement Friday that the Justice Department welcomes “leadership changes in higher education that signal institutional commitment to our nation’s venerable federal civil rights laws.”
DOJ hasn’t said publicly what laws UVA allegedly violated, though Dhillon’s statement noted that the agency “has a zero-tolerance policy toward illegal discrimination in publicly-funded universities.”
From the early days of his second term, Trump has made a point of dragging elite, largely Ivy League institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities into the national spotlight and berating them for their supposed liberal ideologies and alleged antisemitism. But this investigation of UVA, a public institution in a state led by a Republican, represents a new front in the administration’s war against higher education—and so far Trump is succeeding.
Brendan Cantwell, a higher education professor at Michigan State University, said Ryan’s resignation is a “major blow” to the independence of American institutions.
“It is a sign that major public research universities are substantially controlled by a political party whose primary goal is to further its partisan agenda and will stop at nothing to bring the independence of higher education to heel,” he told Inside Higher Ed. “It undercuts both the integrity of academic communities as self-governing based on the judgment of expert professionals and the traditional accountability that public universities have to their states via formal and established governance mechanisms.”
Legal experts who spoke with the Times struggled to recall other instances when the federal government has demanded a university board fire the chief official, saying it has only been done in the past when concerning corporate criminal cases.
Robert Kelchen, an education policy professor at the University of Tennessee, noted that Ryan’s resignation portends a future in which all public university presidents must conform to the political views of their state’s leadership or be kicked out of office.
“Trump pushing James Ryan to resign at UVA is important, but it happened in part because VA’s governor is also Republican,” Kelchen wrote on BlueSky.
Virginia’s two senators, who are both Democrats, said in a joint statement that the demand for Ryan to resign “is a mistake that hurts Virginia’s future.”
“It is outrageous that officials in the Trump Department of Justice demanded the Commonwealth’s globally recognized university remove President Ryan—a strong leader who has served UVA honorably and moved the university forward—over ridiculous ‘culture war’ traps,” said Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner. “Decisions about UVA’s leadership belong solely to its Board of Visitors, in keeping with Virginia’s well-established and respected system of higher education governance.”
Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin thanked Ryan for his service to UVA in a statement Friday afternoon. Youngkin, a Republican, has appointed a majority of the university’s board members.
“The Board of Visitors has my complete confidence as they swiftly appoint a strong interim steward, and undertake the national search for a transformational leader that can take Mr. Jefferson’s university into the next decade and beyond,” he said in the statement.
A Quiet Inquiry
While the administration’s campaign against Harvard and Columbia mostly played out in public, the UVA investigation was more quiet. The DOJ didn’t send press releases about UVA or make public hay about its demands. Instead it sent letters to the university about its inquiry and findings.
On April 28, DOJ cited complaints about how the university was handling its DEI programs, according to the Times and the Charlottesville Daily Progress. Initially the letter set a compliance deadline of May 2. That was then extended to May 30.
After that, the DOJ received multiple complaint letters from groups like American First Legal, a legal advocacy group founded by Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, suggesting the university had yet to comply.
In a final letter, dated June 17, the department laid out its demands yet again, this time noting the complaints it had received from groups like AFL and saying that the university needed to make swift changes or pay the price, the Times reported. The government’s lawyers, which include several UVA alumni, found that UVA considered race in its admissions and in deciding other student benefits, according to the Times.
“Time is running short, and the department’s patience is wearing thin,” the letter said.
Neither the White House nor the DOJ have released a public statement about their demands of UVA or Ryan’s resignation.
The university said in a statement Friday morning that it is “committed to complying with all federal laws and has been cooperating with the Department of Justice in the ongoing inquiries.” But it has not said anything further since Ryan announced his departure.
An environmental researcher at Tulane University resigned Wednesday after accusing campus officials, reportedly under pressure from Gov. Jeff Landry, of issuing a “gag order” that prevented her from publicly discussing her work, which focused on racial disparities in the petrochemical workforce.
“Scholarly publications, not gag orders, are the currency of academia,” Kimberly Terrell, the now-former director of community engagement at Tulane’s Environmental Law Clinic, wrote in her resignation letter. “There is always room for informed debate. But Tulane leaders have chosen to abandon the principles of knowledge, education, and the greater good in pursuit of their own narrow agenda.”
Terrell’s resignation comes amid wider efforts by the Trump administration and its allies to control the types of research—including projects related to environmental justice—academics are permitted to pursue and punish campus protesters for espousing messages the president and other public officials disagree with.
“It started with the pro-Palestinian activism on our campus and others across the country. It’s emboldened a lot of political leaders to feel they can make inroads by silencing faculty in other areas,” Michelle Lacey, a math professor and president of Tulane’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Inside Higher Ed. “That was the catalyst for creating a climate where university administrators are very nervous, especially now as we see the government pulling funding for areas of research they don’t like.”
Last spring, Landry praised Tulane president Michael Fitts and university police for removing students who were protesting Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Soon after, the Legislature passed a provision creating harsher punishments for protesters who disrupt traffic, which Landry later signed into law.
Landry, a Republican aligned with Trump, has a history of trying to exert control over the state’s public higher education institutions.
Last summer, he enacted a law that allows him to directly appoint board chairs at the state’s public colleges and universities. And in November, following Trump’s election, Landry publicly called on officials at Louisiana State University to punish a law professor who allegedly made brief comments in class about students who voted for the president.
Landry’s office denied to the Associated Press (which first reported on Terrell’s resignation) that it pressured Tulane to silence research from the law clinic. Michael Strecker, a Tulane spokesperson, also told the outlet that the university “is fully committed to academic freedom and the strong pedagogical value of law clinics” and declined to comment on “personnel matters.”
Strecker added in a statement that Tulane administrators have been working with the law school’s leadership on how the law clinics could better support the university’s education mission.
“Debates about how best to operate law clinics’ teaching mission have occurred nationally and at Tulane for years—this is nothing new,” Strecker said. “This effort includes most recently input from an independent, third-party review.”
But Terrell’s account of the events that led to her resignation call the universities’ academic freedom commitments into question, while also implying that Landry—and powerful industry groups—wield some influence over private higher education institutions in the state.
And it’s not something Tulane, a private university in New Orleans, should tolerate, Lacey said.
Kimberly Terrell
“The academic freedom of all university researchers must be unequivocally defended at both public and private institutions,” Lacey wrote in a statement. “This includes the right to conduct and disseminate research that may be unfavorably viewed by government officials or corporate entities. Political demands to stifle controversial research are an affront to the advancement of knowledge and open exchange of ideas, as is the voluntary compliance with such requests by university leadership.”
The latest controversy at Tulane stems from a paper Terrell published April 9 in the peer-reviewed journal Ecological Economics. Her research found that while Black people in Louisiana are underrepresented in the state’s petrochemical workforce, they are overexposed to toxic pollutants the industry releases into an area of the state between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as “Cancer Alley.”
But according to emails obtained by Inside Higher Ed and other outlets, Fitts worried that publicizing Terrell’s research and the clinic’s other work, which includes legal advocacy, could jeopardize funding for the university’s $600 million plan to redevelop New Orleans’ historic Charity Hospital into residential and commercial spaces as part of a broader downtown expansion plan.
As Terrell explained in her resignation letter, Fitts and other top Tulane executives were at Louisiana’s state capitol on April 16 lobbying for the project when “someone accused the university of being anti–chemical industry” and cited her study, which was receiving media attention after it was published the week prior. According to Terrell, “the story that came down to me through the chain of command was that Governor Landry threatened to veto any bill with funding for Tulane’s Charity project unless Fitts did something about the Environmental Law Clinic.”
‘Complete Gag Order’
After that, Terrell says, she was “placed under a complete gag order,” which the emails appear to confirm.
“Effective immediately all external communications that are not client-based—that is, directly related to representation—must be pre-approved by me,” Marcilynn Burke, dean of Tulane’s law school, wrote in an April 25 email to law clinic staff. “Such communications include press releases, interviews, videos, social media postings, etc. Please err on the side of over-inclusion as we work to define the boundaries through experience.”
A week later, on May 4, Burke wrote another email to clinic staff explaining that “elected officials and major donors have cited the clinic as an impediment to them lending their support to the university generally and this project specifically,” referring to Fitts’s plans to redevelop the old hospital. Terrell wrote that when she pleaded her case to Provost Robin Forman, “he refused to acknowledge my right to freely conduct and disseminate research” and also “let slip that my job description was likely going to be rewritten.”
Terrell described the entire law clinic as being “under siege” and said she would rather leave her position “than have my work used as an excuse for President Fitts to dismantle the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic.”
Other academics, free speech experts and environmental justice advocates also believe Tulane’s moves to silence Terrell’s work amounts to an attack on academic freedom with implications beyond the campus.
“The administration of Tulane University, far from standing up for academic freedom, is participating in the effort to suppress free inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge by scientific methods,” Michael Ash, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “Any effort to reduce academic freedom for Dr. Terrell either by changing her job classification or by redefining whether the protection applies is a blatant and un-American attempt to suppress the type of free inquiry that has made this country great.”
Joy Banner, co-founder and co-director of the Descendants Project, a community organization that works in Cancer Alley, added that the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic is a vital public health resource.
Without the clinic, “it would be far more difficult to show the racially discriminatory practices of the industry, from preferential hiring practices to a pattern of concentrating pollution in majority Black neighborhoods,” she said in a statement. “President Fitts must commit to protecting it at all costs.”
Secretary Rubio directed officials to intervene in the final stage of the Fulbright selection process.
John McDonnell/Getty Images
All 12 members of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board have resigned over what they say is political interference in the selection process for recipients of the prestigious international grant, according to sources familiar with the program and a letter announcing their resignation Wednesday morning.
The FFSB normally has final say in the selection process, after initial application reviews by the Institute for International Education and host countries’ Fulbright commissions. This year was different. Inside Higher Ed broke the story last month that Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed State Department officials to intervene in the final stages of the selection process, adding a new step to cull proposals they felt did not comply with President Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders.
In their letter, posted to Substack on Wednesday, the former board members wrote that the State Department’s “unprecedented” intervention in the selection process was illegal and unethical and compromised national diplomatic and research interests.
“Under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, the Board has followed the law, operating with independence pursuant to its statutory mandate,” they wrote. “The current administration has usurped the authority of the Board and denied Fulbright awards to a substantial number of individuals who were selected.”
Sources familiar with the program, who spoke with Inside Higher Ed on background to avoid retaliation, said that State Department officials—led by Darren Beattie, under secretary for diplomacy and public affairs—ultimately rejected more than 20 percent of the FFSB’s selected finalists in a last-minute intervention. Of the approximately 900 approved applicants for the U.S. Visiting Scholars program, for example, Beattie vetoed roughly 200.
Many of the proposals that were cut focused on the effects of climate change or gender disparities; others seemed to have been denied based on their inclusion of words that triggered an anti-DEI keyword search that State Department officials used to conduct their final review, according to sources inside the selection process who shared details with Inside Higher Ed in May.
A person familiar with the program said the board members were stonewalled by high-level State Department officials throughout the process. When they learned that many of their selected finalists hadn’t received their acceptance letters by late May—more than a month later than anticipated—they wrote multiple letters to department officials asking for an explanation. None came; in fact, the person familiar with the program said the members only learned about the new step in the selection process from rumored communications between foreign Fulbright commissions and outside media reports.
Eventually, the person familiar with the FFSB said, the board members felt they had no choice but to resign.
The source also said that 1,200 applications from foreign faculty and researchers to the Fulbright Foreign Scholars program—all of which were reviewed and accepted by the FFSB—were still “sitting on Beattie’s desk,” and that he seemed poised to feed them through the same content filters he used on Americans’ applications.
A senior State Department official confirmed the board members’ resignations in an email to Inside Higher Ed, calling the move “nothing but a political stunt.” The spokesperson also said that the statute in the “Fulbright Hayes Act [sic]” does not give the FFSB “exclusive and final say” in the selection process, as the members argue.
“The 12 members of the Fulbright Board were partisan political appointees of the Biden Administration,” the official wrote. “It’s ridiculous to believe that these members would continue to have final say over the application process, especially when it comes to determining academic suitability and alignment with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”
The FFSB is a politically appointed board; the members who just resigned were indeed all appointed by President Biden. They include some big names in Democratic Party politics, such as Jen O’Malley Dillon, former White House deputy chief of staff and chair of the Harris-Walz campaign; Mala Adiga, Biden’s former deputy assistant; and Louisa Terrell, former White House director of legislative affairs. Others are business leaders and philanthropists.
Their resignations now open up all 12 seats, which are usually term-limited, to Trump appointees. One person familiar with the Fulbright program said the board members had factored this into their decision to resign. But after being shut out from the end of the selection process, the board members felt they had to leave.
“To continue to serve after the Administration has consistently ignored the Board’s request that they follow the law would risk legitimizing actions we believe are unlawful and damage the integrity of this storied program and America’s credibility abroad,” the members wrote in their letter.
President Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2026 budget eliminates nearly all Fulbright funding and would gut the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which houses the scholarship. The person familiar with the program said they believe the Trump administration is narrowing the funnel for Fulbright recipients and upending the selection process in order to undermine the program without eliminating it entirely, which only Congress can do.
If the administration continues unwinding the program, they said, they worry that the recently selected cohort will be left stranded without funding or resources once the new budget takes effect.
Pasco-Hernando State College president Jesse Pisors has resigned after less than 18 months on the job, amid scrutiny from Florida’s version of the Department of Government Efficiency, The Tampa Bay Times reported.
Pisors stepped down Thursday, the day before a special meeting called by board chair Marilyn Pearson-Adams to discuss concerns about student growth and retention, according to meeting documents. In a letter to other trustees, which included analysis from Florida’s DOGE on student growth and retention, Pearson-Adams noted the college was among the worst on those metrics.
Specifically, she noted PHSC was second-to-last in retention numbers, which she called “alarming.” She added that trustees “had not been made aware of these numbers” despite “our continued requests over the past 12 months regarding this type of information and data.”
The agenda shows only one action item for Friday’s special meeting of the Pasco-Hernando Board of Trustees: “Determination of Sustainability of College’s Future.”
Florida is one of several states that has sought to implement cost-cutting measures modeled on DOGE, the federal initiative led by billionaire bureaucrat Elon Musk to reduce government waste through layoffs and the elimination of various programs—an effort that has run into multiple legal challenges. DOGE-driven cuts have also fallen far short of their intended vision, with Musk often exaggerating savings for taxpayers in his work for the Trump administration.
Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of the National Science Foundation, resigned Thursday after nearly five years at the helm. His resignation comes less than one week after he issued sweeping priority changes—including terminating funding for projects that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion or combating misinformation—at the independent agency that funds billions of dollars to nonmedical university research each year.
“I believe that I have done all I can to advance the mission of the agency and feel that it is time to pass the baton to new leadership,” Panchanathan wrote in a resignation letter, first reported by Science. “I am deeply grateful to the presidents for the opportunity to serve our nation.”
Although it’s not immediately clear what prompted his resignation, Panchanathan is among the latest top federal officials who have resigned since President Trump started his second term in January. The administration has also fired thousands of other federal employees, including dozens at the NSF, and terminated many grants that don’t align with the agency’s new anti-DEI priorities. Additionally, Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas has been targeting the agency for months, calling it a bastion of “a far-left ideology.”
According to Science, even more changes are coming to the NSF. The Department of Government Efficiency reportedly told Panchanathan earlier this month to plan to fire half the NSF’s 1,700-person staff; the Office of Management and Budget reportedly told him that Trump only plans to request 55 percent of the agency’s $9 billion budget for fiscal year 2026.
“While NSF has always been an efficient agency,” he wrote in his resignation letter, “we still took [on] the challenge of identifying other possible efficiencies and reducing our commitments to serve the scientific community even better.”
Trump picked Panchanathan, a computer scientist from India who previously worked as a top research administrator at Arizona State University, to run the agency during his first term in office. But soon after Panchanathan started his six-year term in 2020, voters rejected Trump’s bid for re-election, and most of Panchanathan’s work at the NSF happened under former president Joe Biden’s administration.
Under Panchanathan’s leadership, the NSF’s stated priorities have included increasing diversity in the STEM workforce, forming industry partnerships, job creation and broadening research opportunities for smaller universities and community colleges. In 2022, Panchanathan oversaw the creation of the NSF’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships, which is focused on “accelerating breakthrough technologies, transitioning these technologies to the market, and preparing Americans for better-quality, higher-wage jobs,” according to the NSF’s website.
Despite the second Trump administration’s quick and radical changes to some of those Biden-era policies, Panchanathan was seemingly adapting—up until his resignation Thursday—while many other scientists sound the alarm that Trump’s policies will hurt research and innovation.
In his statement on the NSF’s reoriented priorities last Friday, he said that any NSF-funded activities in support of “broadening participation” in STEM “must aim to create opportunities for all Americans everywhere” and “not preference some groups at the expense of others, or directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups.”
Scott Yenor, chair of the Board of Trustees at the University of West Florida, resigned Wednesday ahead of a looming fight with lawmakers, The Pensacola News Journal reported.
Yenor, a political science professor at Boise State University, made national headlines in 2021 when he made misogynistic remarks at the National Conservatism Conference, taking aim at feminism and arguing that women should not pursue certain career fields, such as engineering.
He also described “independent women” as “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome.”
Yenor and other conservative trustees appointed at UWF in January faced protests from the community. But it was ultimately pressure from state lawmakers over other remarks that seemed to push Yenor out. In a series of social media posts in February, Yenor seemed to imply that only straight white men should be in political leadership posts. Some critics, including Randy Fine, a Republican state senator at the time of the post, read his remarks as exclusionary of Jewish men. (Fine recently won a special election to represent Florida’s First Congressional District.)
Under Florida law, a trustee appointed by the governor can begin serving immediately, before confirmation by the State Legislature. With the confirmation process underway, Yenor stepped aside amid speculation that lawmakers could refuse to sign off on his appointment.
“Gov. Ron DeSantis’ higher education reforms are models for the country,” Yenor wrote in a resignation email obtained by The Pensacola News Journal. “I was looking forward to bringing the Governor’s positive vision for higher education to the University of West Florida (UWF) as a member of the Board of Trustees. Opposition to my nomination among a group within Florida’s senate, however, leads me to resign from UWF’s Board of Trustees effectively immediately.”
The potential rejection would mark a rare break between DeSantis and Florida’s Republican-dominated Legislature, which has largely supported the governor’s agenda during his time in office. Earlier this year, the Senate Appropriations Committee did not confirm Adam Kissel, another UWF board appointee, though there is still a path for him to be confirmed anyway. In 2023, the Florida Senate rejected another DeSantis pick and bumped Eddie Speir from the New College of Florida board simply by not taking action on the confirmation rather than rejecting it.
