They tried to brand Stuart Bell a DEI activist. But Florida wasn’t buying it.

The University of Florida’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously last week to make former University of Alabama President Stuart R. Bell the school’s 14th president, which defied weeks of coordinated online attacks aimed at sinking the candidacy of arguably the closest acquaintance of President Donald Trump in American higher education.

Bell ran the Capstone for a decade, from July 2015 to July 2025. The headlines during those years belonged mostly to championship-caliber football. But no university president in the country tied his institution’s brand to President Donald J. Trump more directly than Bell did.

He hosted Trump in Tuscaloosa three times: the 2019 Alabama-LSU game, the 2024 Alabama-Georgia game, and the 2025 spring commencement, where Trump became the first sitting president to deliver a University of Alabama graduation address.

That came on top of the December 2023 Republican presidential primary debate, staged on Bell’s campus at the Moody Music Building.

From that commencement stage on May 1, 2025, Trump thanked Bell for “ten years of distinguished service” and called him a “highly respected” gentleman before a packed Coleman Coliseum.

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None of it mattered to the campaign that erupted after Bell was named UF’s sole finalist last month. 

A wave of conservative critics, including U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, the Manhattan Institute’s John Sailer and Florida U.S. Senator Rick Scott, moved to recast Bell as a closet diversity, equity and inclusion advocate. Influencer Laura Loomer, with more than a million followers, joined the pile-on, casting Bell as a DEI champion who damaged Alabama.

UF Board Chair Mori Hosseini refused to dignify it. Ahead of the vote, he told the room the decision was too important to be hijacked by personal grievance or by people “getting paid by somebody to tweet.” The board, he said, was not going to give in.

Hosseini, a Florida homebuilding magnate, GOP mega-donor and close ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has chaired the UF board since 2018, has been a target of the same online campaign.

RELATED: Bell: University of Alabama’s ‘fundamental’ mission is student success

Bell gave the trustees exactly what they needed to hear. “I am not coming to Florida to bring DEI or ‘woke’ back,” he said, telling the board he dismantled Alabama’s DEI operation in 2024 to comply with state law and that he intends to build “a great institution based on merit.”

In 2024, Bell’s administration closed UA’s DEI offices to comply with the Alabama Legislature’s ban on taxpayer-funded diversity programs, which went into effect in October 2024. When Bell told UF’s board he scrubbed DEI in 2024, he was describing a closure he personally oversaw and executed compliance with.

The fight isn’t finished, however. Bell’s hire still must clear the Florida Board of Governors – the same panel that sank UF’s last presidential pick, former University of Michigan President Santa Ono, in 2025 over his DEI record.

But the trustees made their position unmistakable. The orchestrated effort to turn one of Trump’s favorite university presidents into a DEI villain ran straight into a board that saw through the noise.

Grayson Everett is the editor in chief of Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on X @Grayson270.