There’s a push to make Manny Diaz Jr. interim president of University of West Florida
Just weeks after Gov. Ron DeSantis told the University of West Florida to “buckle up” for significant changes, multiple insiders say the Pensacola school will soon hire Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. as interim president.
Sources say Diaz’s appointment is expected to be finalized at a Board of Trustees meeting on Tuesday, with a start date in July. That timing would allow Diaz — who has served as the state’s top education official since 2022 — to close out the fiscal year before stepping into the $536,000-a-year role.
“It’s a done deal. It’ll be Manny,” said one person close to UWF leadership, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive process of naming a replacement for longtime President Martha Saunders. “It makes sense based on everything we’ve seen coming out of the DeSantis administration.”
Diaz, a central architect of DeSantis’ education agenda, would be the latest political ally to move into higher education leadership as the term-limited governor works to cement his legacy on the state’s universities. Diaz, a Hialeah native and former teacher in the Miami-Dade public schools system, would also become the second Miami-Dade political insider this year to earn the top job at a state university after former Lieutenant Gov. Jeannette Nunez took over at Florida International University in February.
When asked about his potential appointment at a Pensacola press conference on Friday, Diaz said he was open to taking on the job.
“What I’ll tell you is that the board is clearly meeting,” he told reporters. “That’s a decision for the board to make, and if they were to call, I’d obviously be willing to have a conversation with them about that. But that’s up to the Board of Trustees of the University of West Florida.”
A UWF spokesperson didn’t respond for comment on Friday.
The appointment would come on the heels of a contentious shakeup at UWF since DeSantis installed a slate of new trustees earlier this year, some with close ties to national conservative organizations. The overhaul prompted swift bipartisan backlash from lawmakers and Escambia County locals, who raised concerns over some of the appointees’ ties to national right-wing organizations and lack of familiarity with the community.
Tensions came to a head during a May 8 trustee meeting when newly appointed board member Zack Smith, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, confronted Saunders over what he described as “deeply troubling” university-sponsored programming, including two drag shows in 2019. Saunders, who had led the university since 2017, resigned days later.
Behind the scenes, Diaz’s name has quickly emerged as the frontrunner to succeed Saunders. State Rep. Michelle Salzman, a Pensacola Republican, told the Miami Herald that she has been advocating for Diaz for months in conversations with donors, local leaders and the governor’s team — including Diaz.
“I hope the governor picks him,” said Salzman, who in the past has argued for limiting the governor’s influence over selecting university presidents.
Diaz has been a key player in reshaping Florida’s education system, pushing policies that expanded school choice, curtailed diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and placing restrictions on discussions of gender identity and race in classrooms. The former Miami-Dade lawmaker played a central role in implementing new accreditation laws that give Tallahassee more sway over state universities, and pushed for the removal of sociology as a core course for college students, saying the subject had been “hijacked by left-wing activists.”
His appointment would follow a growing trend of politically aligned candidates taking the reins at Florida campuses — similar to the presidential appointments of former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse at the University of Florida, Adam Hasner at Florida Atlantic University and Richard Corcoran at New College of Florida.
While Diaz is widely seen as the frontrunner for UWF’s top job, several procedural steps remain before any appointment becomes official — or permanent.
Under Florida law, university boards of trustees are tasked with conducting presidential searches, but any final candidate must be confirmed by the university system’s Board of Governors. In 2022, lawmakers made those searches largely opaque by shielding finalists’ names from public view until 21 days before a hire is made.
That secrecy has raised alarms among some local lawmakers, including State Rep. Alex Andrade, a Pensacola Republican who has clashed with DeSantis in recent months over funding transparency in the First Lady’s Hope Florida initiative.
“I think [Diaz] would do a fine job, but I don’t think it’s going to be an open process,” Andrade told the Miami Herald. “I think it’ll be pretty much baked — kind of similar to the UF situation where we’re not going to have a slate in the competition for it. It’ll be whoever DeSantis wants.”
Andrade also pushed back on the governor’s public claim last month that UWF had the “most liberal programs in the state.”
“The whole claim that UWF is super liberal and that’s why they needed to stack the board — it turned everybody off over here,” Andrade said. “It’s an inorganic, false argument to say the UWF is some bastion of liberal thought. I think ultimately what’s motivating all of this is DeSantis wanted to have his hands on every single university in the state, and this was just the last one that he hadn’t touched.”
