Whatever gets you thru the night
By 
Great piece by UM Comparative Literature professor Silke-Maria Weineck on the Santa Ono debacle:
In voting no, the Board of Governors achieved the rare feat of giving delight to both the right and the left. At least I imagine CommiesOnCampus hollered just as loudly as I did when the “no” votes rolled in. Though at least in my case, schadenfreude quickly gave way to that other German emotion, fremdscham, the shame you feel on behalf of another.
In a grueling struggle session before the Board of Governors, Ono repudiated every dearly held belief he had confessed to in the past. He no longer believed climate change was an existential threat (because apparently the science had changed over the last two years). He asserted with robotic conviction that there are two sexes and also two genders. He bragged about closing the office of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Michigan (but neglected to mention that most of our DEI programs themselves survived the alleged purge). He simply did not know whether our university hospital “had ever cut off the penis of a boy or the breasts of a girl” (and yes, this was an actual question asked in precisely those terms). “Systemic racism”? Too divisive a concept, we shall not talk of it. He proudly related that he had declined to sign an op-ed vowing to fight Trump’s vandalization of higher education. Perhaps the funniest moment arrived when one of the governors pressed him on his mandate that students living in our dorms be vaccinated against COVID. Had that been the wrong decision? He could not tell; he was merely following the advice of experts. “But you are an immunologist!” responded his questioner, with incredulity. “I am just a mouse doctor,” Ono replied, “a test-tube guy.”
How did Ono — the sole finalist for the job, enthusiastically backed by Morteza (Mori) Hosseini, a DeSantis megadonor and Florida trustee — manage to lose a one-man race? Perhaps it’s simple: The board wanted a committed conservative and did not believe Ono when he tried to impersonate one. Perhaps they did not want to find themselves targeted by Rufo’s crowd. Perhaps it was the instinctive bipartisan contempt most of us feel for blatant pandering: Ono’s frequent assurances that he would follow orders had an abject air to them, an eagerness to humiliate himself that does not, let’s say, signal leadership. The contract he was willing to sign is itself a document of submission: It stipulates that “Dr. Ono will commit to working with Florida and Federal DOGE to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse,” that “Dr. Ono will make it a priority to fill the interim dean positions with individuals who are firmly aligned with and support the principles guiding Florida’s approach to higher education,” that “Dr. Ono will prohibit the use of any public or private funds from being spent on DEI or political or social activism.” A knife twist on paper.
In the end, there was something deeply sad about the spectacle of a gifted and accomplished man trying so hard to meet the litmus tests of the crowd who claims to disdain litmus tests, a man scurrying to hold all the correct views to please the people who endlessly crow about “viewpoint diversity,” a man who praises the “alignment” of Florida politics and Florida higher education, as if political alignment, known as gleichschaltung in German, were not the antithesis of academic and intellectual freedom. But the ruination of Santa Ono also teaches us that culture warriors wield more power than billionaires now, that higher education is quickly becoming as brutal a political battlefield as any congressional race, and that the borders between red-state and blue-state colleges are not as permeable as they once were. The university is no longer universal.
Ono, needless to say, got exactly what he deserved, but the process that gave him that is a testament to the openly fascistic agenda of the Trump administration and its enablers in regard to the higher learning in America.
Ultimately the gleichschaltung is unfortunately of a lot more relevance here than the schadenfreude.
A brief snippet from THE TRIUMPH OF STUPIDITY on this farce:
This sordid little saga is a nice encapsulation of how the contemporary American university offers possibilities for both collaboration with, and resistance against, the authoritarian threat to liberal democracy posed by Trump and Trumpism.
Even before the latest wave of attacks against it, it was clear that the American university was one of the most crucial sites for resistance to the Empire of Stupidity. Such potential resistance, however, has been hampered by the fact that so many of these institutions have been taken over by an administrative class that models itself on C-suite executives, who spout the sort of empty consultant-ridden jargon that makes genuine intellectual life so difficult to maintain.