The University of Florida Board of Trustees unanimously voted Wednesday to hire Stuart Bell as president, pushing his candidacy to the next and final approval stage. Bell, who led the University of Alabama from 2015 to 2025, is now one step away from taking over UF.
The vote mattered because Bell had been named the sole finalist for the job, making Wednesday the moment the search turned from possibility into action. For UF, the decision also revived a question that had hovered over the process for weeks: whether the board would move ahead with a pick that had drawn sharp conservative criticism over DEI programs at Alabama.
That criticism did not stop the trustees. Their unanimous vote came after a nearly 90-minute public interview in which Dan O’Keefe pressed Bell on why those programs existed and what they were meant to accomplish. Bell said the efforts helped boost minority enrollment during his tenure, though he added that they later morphed over time.
He also tried to draw a line between Alabama and what he would do in Florida. Bell said he was not coming to Florida to bring DEI or woke back, and said UF would be a merit-based institution rooted in hard work and accountability. He said the university would follow the law of the land and the direction set by the legislature and the people of Florida.
The search itself had already become a test of how much scrutiny UF would absorb before naming a president. Mori Hosseini said the board was not going to give in, while Rahul Patel said the search committee complied with Florida law and met the letter of the law on transparency. That mattered because critics, including Rick Scott, had accused UF of not being open enough during the search.
Even after Wednesday’s vote, Bell is not finished. The Florida Board of Governors still has to give final approval, and that body has already shown it can reject a permanent UF pick. If it signs off, Bell will become the school’s next president. If it does not, the search will return to the same uncertainty that has shadowed it from the start.
