Opinion | U-M regents have another chance at choosing a leader. Will they take it?

Changing leadership in wartime is risky — but wartime often forges the best leaders. American research universities are in a war right now, a war they did not seek, with a Trump administration that has radicalized itself against them. In this struggle, which is do-or-die for a great research, health care, cultural, educational and sporting powerhouse like U-M, we have not had much of a leader. Fortunately for us, we might get one now. 

The announcement that U-M President Santa Ono is the sole finalist for president of the University of Florida, at a princely salary of around $3 million, casts Ono in a bad light. Florida’s flagship university has become the plaything of a hard-right ideological governor, its last president a former Senator who left the president's office suddenly in a blizzard of financial foolishness. A president who is a good fit for today's Florida was never the right leader for Michigan.

Ono's politically inflected response to the second Trump administration made this point clear. He centralized decisions in his office, abruptly ended DEI initiatives that had been proven to work (and the DEI office of evaluations that allowed us to know what worked and did more of it) and offered no support to the students and faculty, targeted by Trump. His absentee leadership contributed to a pervasive climate of mistrust on campus. The announcement that he was Florida's choice came in the middle of the Ford School of Public Policy graduation ceremony. Our regents must be wondering if their choice was a good one. 

But Ono will be leaving now. What should Michigan citizens and all those around the world who value the University, its education, its research, its arts want in his replacement? 

First, Michigan's president should defend institutional autonomy and academic freedom. The Trump administration has used a variety of pretexts to attack universities, ranging from DEI to "antisemitism" to the amazing accusation that Penn should lose tens of millions of dollars because it had a competitive transgender swimmer who graduated years ago. Those aren't good faith critiques. To fend off the Trump attack, we need a leader who will stand up for our university and our state's commitment to freedom, inquiry, and knowledge.

Second, Michigan's president should restore and improve DEI. DEI at Michigan didn't mean that silly implicit-bias training you had to do 10 years ago. It was a well-researched and highly developed program focused on things that worked to make the university more welcoming to everybody, including first-generation students, students from all economic backgrounds, disabled students and students of every gender and color. Every initiative was legally sound, since the university has had to comply with a statewide constitutional ban on affirmative action since 2006. 

Third, lead nationally! The Trump administration has so far shown that its whole strategy is to pick off individual institutions — law firms, state governments, universities. The strategy worked brilliantly with Columbia University, which might never recover. University faculty senates have realized that the Scooby-Doo model of splitting up when you're in danger... isn't working. More than 20 institutions' senates, including Michigan's, have voted for a mutual defense pact that would commit institutions to supporting each other as they defend higher education against the endless legally doubtful attacks from the administration. U-M’s next president must be committed to take national leadership to defend higher education, the rights of international students, staff, and faculty, and federal support for essential research.

Fourth, Michigan's president should restore decentralized financial control to the schools and colleges. Michigan is immense, the second-largest employer in the state (after GM), and does everything from football to organ transplants to marine engineering to preservation of Egyptian papyrii. You don't make such an organization work by centralizing it. Michigan, traditionally and pragmatically, decentralized decisions to deans and schools, letting them manage in bad times as well as good. 

Finally, a new president should focus on rebuilding trust. Ono's departure and destination mean that key initiatives associated with him should be questioned and their value demonstrated. For example, the university's enormous investment in artificial intelligence might need to prove itself. From a teaching point of view, students using AI is often like somebody driving a rental car 26.2 miles and calling it a better way to run a marathon. 

Rebuilding trust includes engaging with the university's proud history of social movements — not just celebrating the past but in engagement with the actual flesh-and-blood protesters, students and faculty who have been a target for harassment under Ono. His mismanagement of entirely predictable campus protest created a polarized mess that hurt the university, and his intransigence led to staff being fired with no warning just weeks ago. A new president should accept that Michigan is a socially engaged and active university. 

How can the regents ensure that they do better in the do-over Ono gave them? The search for his successor should involve a committee of involved stakeholders and commit the successor to the principles of shared governance that could have prevented the Ono episode. 

The process that led to hiring Ono was highly problematic. At the time, the U-M-Ann Arbor AAUP chapter argued that (a) there should be broad representation of U-M stakeholders on the search committee and (b) that at the point of identifying 3-5 finalists an even broader group of U-M stakeholders, including the Faculty Senate, should be enabled to evaluate and engage with them, ideally by announcing the finalists publicly.  The concern that a public search would discourage qualified applicants is not evidence-based. In fact, through the appointment of President Lee Bollinger in 1996, all U-M presidential searches were public, and Bollinger's publicly named rivals went on to become the heads of UC Berkeley and UT Austin. Not exactly bad jobs. 

No one wants to change leaders in wartime, but sometimes you must. Michigan needs a wartime leader, a victor valiant who will stay and be a champion. Ono wasn't. The regents must make it clear that his replacement should be.