When Santa Ono first showed up at UBC in 2016, the general reaction was one of mild bemusement—or, more specifically, a feeling of “who dat?”

Although Ono is Canadian by origin (born in Vancouver), he grew up and spent more or less his entire career in the United States, apart from taking his doctorate in experimental Medicine at McGill. His last job before coming north was as president of the University of Cincinnati, which is a decent school with a reputation based mainly on being the original home of co-op education (at its birth, Waterloo was substantially influenced by Cincinnati), but still less prestigious that Northeastern, which still wanders around acting like it invented the concept). What provoked some mild shock and grounds for optimism was that Ono had accepted a fairly substantial salary cut to come to UBC. Even if this was a case of reculer pour mieux sauter—he was quite obviously taking a lower-paying job at a more prestigious institution for a few years to set himself up for a job at a bigger US research university in the future—it still seemed like a good deal.

(It was a relief to the UBC Board at any event. I have been told of a meeting between certain UBC staff and Board members and then-provincial Finance Minister—Mike de Jong, I guess—where salary for the new President came up for discussion and it was gently suggested that given the nature of Arvind Gupta’s departure and the fractious state of campus opinion thereafter, that it might be necessary to spend big to get a replacement. To which the minister, demonstrating all the ambition for which Canadians are celebrated, responded, “No NHL salaries! This is the Western Hockey League!” I digress.)

It was hard to know what to make of Ono at first. He was easily the most online university President in Canada. There were the Constant Selfies, the cello, the bowties (very Gordon Gee…that should have been a tip-off). The weird cult of personality that resulted in the bookstore selling Santa Ono-themed T-shirts. But it was his omnipresence and relentless optimism, plus aspects of his servant-leader shtick and his sheer charisma made him very much what UBC (which had gone through the wringer during Gupta’s departure and its aftermath) needed at the time.

It worked for a while. UBC calmed down. Some things got better; others festered. It didn’t go back to the go-go days of the late 1990s and early 2000s when it was making leaps and bounds and passing McGill to become the (IMHO) undisputed #2 university in the country, but it didn’t go backwards, either. There were a couple of eyebrow-raising personnel moves, but in the main, Ono acted the way all the other U-15 Presidents did and had some modest success in implementing Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), apologizing for Residential Schools, and bringing UBC top in some of the big new sustainability rankings.

But at the same time, after he was renewed for a second term in September 2020, I am not sure many people thought he would stick with the institution for the full five-year term. It wasn’t just that COVID tended to sour the relationship between campuses and Presidents everywhere (though, notably, his social media activity slacked off considerably after 2020). It was that having obtained and retained the leadership at a world top-40 public university, the logic of the whole reculer pour mieux sauter gambit always implied going back to the US at a bigger and better school. And so when the University of Michigan came calling in mid-2022 (with a salary worth $1 million/year in a non-comedy currency), he was off to Ann Arbor in a shot, leaving behind a middling legacy and a huge pile of carpet cleaning bills at the Presidential residence (I have been told that Ono’s pets may not have been entirely housebroken. I am not sure I believe it, but it is what I have been told).

I didn’t follow his career in Michigan that closely. He clearly relished the national attention the university got when UM football picked up the National Championship in January 2024. I get the impression he was less appreciative of the attention he received for his handling of the five-month graduate student strike, or for how he handled the campus’ Gaza protests. If you’re looking for continuity with UBC, I suppose it is that Ono seemed to shine only in moments where there are no strong conflicts and that strong differences of opinion make him seem uncomfortable.

But there was also the kerfuffle surrounding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Before Ono came, few flagship state universities went all-in on DEI like U Michigan (though arguably few had as abysmal a record of admitting Black students, even after the DEI measures were implemented). In the wake of the 2023 SCOTUS decision on affirmative action in admissions, Ono was a full-throated defender of the DEI strategy. But it was immediately apparent in January 2025 that his appetite for a fight with the Trump administration was basically zero; few public institutions dismantled their DEI efforts faster and more completely than Michigan did. 

Not everyone on campus agreed that folding like Superman on laundry day was a winning strategy. A number of elected members of the University’s Board of Regents (Michigan has state-wide elections to the University Board) wrote a public letter explaining the importance of fighting back against Trump. The University Senate endorsed a motion to join a Big Ten “mutual defence compact”, through which the organization’s members (of which, in truly inexplicable American fashion, there are not ten but eighteen) could jointly face down the Trump Administration politically and legally. Ono himself didn’t sign up to either of those measures, although he did put his name to the fairly weak A Call for Constructive Engagement open letter written by the American Association of Colleges and Universities saying.

And then, last week, came the news that he was leaving the University of Michigan to replace Ben Sasse as President of the University of Florida. This wasn’t just a case of leaving a highly-ranked university to lead a lower-ranked one in return for a boatload of money (the University of Florida was apparently prepared to pay up to $3M/year for its new President). It was a case of leaving (arguably) one of the five best public universities in the world, one with a proud of history of scientific leadership and discovery, in order to lead an institution whose greatest scientific contribution has been the invention of Gatorade, and which is in the midst of an incredibly politicized takeover by a science-hostile state government whose model is pretty clearly is Victor Orban’s Hungary.

(An interesting question, of course, is how Ono passed the ideological purity test Florida demands with all that EDI stuff in his background; an American colleague tells me not entirely jokingly that he suspects the Florida Men might have missed it in their web searches because Americans spell “EDI” differently.)

Let’s not mince words: there is a civil war underway across the west between those who believe in truth and knowledge as indispensable public goods, and those who believe these things are transactional goods meant to be wielded in the service of absolute political power. In taking this job, Santa Ono just crossed over to the side of the fascists. He is a Quisling. And to make sure everyone got the message about which side he was on, he removed his signature from that AACU letter.

You can read his apologia for it all in Inside Higher Education. I think we should take him at his word when he says that what makes him excited about the Florida opportunity was the “alignment between the Board of Trustees, the Board of Governors, the governor and the Legislature” because I think the record shows pretty clearly that he is uncomfortable with conflict. So, yes, the $3 million or whatever he ends up getting is a big financial incentive for switching sides, thirty pieces of silver and all that, but I think what he really liked about this job was the promise that by working for a thuggish big brother he wouldn’t have to worry about all the “divisiveness.”

None of this has anything to do with UBC, of course. But I get the sense that many folks out there feel kind of sideswiped by all of it. A “don’t judge us just because this guy is now in bed with DeSantis” kind of thing. Which, you know, fair enough. His tenure at UBC wasn’t a bad one, and his later fecklessness shouldn’t be held against anyone out there. But it’s easy to understand the feeling of ickiness by association.