Board of governors’ 14 of 17 seats held by DeSantis appointees
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will leave office in less than four months, but the network of appointees he has installed across the state’s higher education governance is positioned to outlast his tenure. The placement of Alex Kelly, the governor’s former deputy chief of staff and current Florida commerce secretary, as the sole finalist for the presidency of Pensacola State College marks at least the 12th such ally-led appointment to a state university or college presidency.
If confirmed at the salary of Edward Meadows, the college’s outgoing president, Kelly’s pay would rise from $186,000 at the commerce department to more than $353,000, according to the Miami Herald. The placement continues a pattern in which DeSantis has placed allies with no previous experience of higher education administration into the top roles of state universities and colleges.
The placements reach the state’s largest historically Black public university. Marva Johnson, a lobbyist and businesswoman nicknamed “Maga Marva,” became president of Florida A&M last year over fierce objection from students, faculty, alumni and four board trustees. Jeanette Nunez, DeSantis’s former lieutenant governor, was installed at Florida International University despite protests. Republican former state representatives Mel Ponder, Tommy Gregory, Fred Hawkins and John Temple also secured college presidencies, as did three of DeSantis’s former education commissioners — Anastasios Kamoutsas, Manny Diaz and Richard Corcoran.
All of the presidents have been selected by university boards of trustees and confirmed by the state university system’s Board of Governors, a 17-member panel on which 14 seats are direct DeSantis appointees. The system’s chancellor, Ray Rodrigues, is a long-serving Republican politician.
William Johnson, Florida director of PEN America, the free expression advocacy group that has challenged many of DeSantis’s policy changes and political maneuvers, said the governor “made public education an apparatus of the state.”
“Political influence over higher education isn’t new. Rick Scott [DeSantis’s predecessor] did something similar, but the difference is the scale and the explicit ideological goals behind it,” Johnson said. “It’s been this gigantic sea change on how higher ed is run. One of the key differences between DeSantis and everyone else is basically that you know these appointments have no experience in higher ed, so we can infer their main skill set is simply to follow the administration’s ideological mandates.”
“I can’t speak to the cronyism aspects,” Johnson added. “What I am interested in is cross-checking how many folks have come from any kind of higher ed background and understanding of academic freedom and has that ever been the focus of any of his appointees? That’s what I’m curious about. And I would imagine that the answer is very few, if any.”
Amanda Phalin, an associate professor in the University of Florida’s school of business, served as a faculty representative (not appointed by the governor) on the Board of Governors from 2023 to 2025. She said her view of the system shifted after watching the board reject Santa Ono, an experienced academic whom UF’s own trustees had chosen as president, after his earlier advocacy for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives came to light.
“My position and opinion about the state university system changed pretty dramatically after the despicable and borderline insane treatment of Dr Ono by the board of governors,” Phalin said. “You had members of the board of governors who were going against the choice of the board of trustees. They were all DeSantis appointees, but they were having sort of an internal squabble.”
“The two years I worked on the board of governors, I approached everything in 100% good faith. I had, and still have, strong political disagreements with folks, but I did my best to take them at their word, hear their concerns and really try to work with them constructively and productively,” Phalin said.
“What I saw during the whole Santa Ono debacle is that these people do not actually have the best interest of the state university system at heart. For them, the project is either ideological, or about personal power, or both.”
DeSantis has never made a secret of his desire to impose his Florida “blueprint” nationally, and his legacy, Phalin said, could ultimately become other red states following his lead in injecting more politics and dollars into higher education and tightening their grip on how it is run by appointing faithful followers to key roles.
Phalin argued that DeSantis’s legacy in higher education extends beyond the individual presidencies. “The way the state university system of Florida is structured is that each university has a board of trustees, the governor controls who’s on those boards of trustees, and the boards of trustees ultimately answer to the board of governors, and the governor also controls everyone on the board of governors, except the student representative and faculty representative,” she said.
“So it’s not even about the presidencies. That is almost beside the point. What DeSantis has really done is, in a behind-the-scenes structural way, politicized the entire system, top to bottom, in terms of its governance structure.”
DeSantis’s higher-education agenda has included his takeover of New College, the former liberal arts college, and a push to end campus diversity, equity and inclusion programs and stifle free speech that a federal judge struck down in July.