By Dara Kam ©2025 The News Service of Florida
TALLAHASSEE — Scott Yenor, a Boise State University political scientist who faced an outcry after being appointed to the University of West Florida Board of Trustees, has stepped down from the board.
Gov. Ron DeSantis in January appointed Yenor to the UWF board, and he was quickly elected chair. The Idaho professor drew criticism for such issues as a 2021 comment calling working women “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be.”
In a letter Wednesday to UWF President Martha Saunders, Yenor blamed his resignation on opposition from “a group within Florida’s senate.” Senate Ethics and Elections Chair Don Gaetz, a Niceville Republican whose district includes the university, raised questions about the Idaho professor’s lack of ties to the community.
Yenor’s letter called higher-education changes led by DeSantis “models for the country” and said he was “looking forward to bringing the governor’s positive vision” for higher education to UWF as a member of the board.
“Patriotic reformers in higher education need to imagine a different future. We know that the higher education status quo is bad for the country. Eliminating pernicious practices from our universities is a start, and Florida has led the way,” Yenor, whose resignation was effective immediately, wrote.
Senate confirmation is required for trustees. Gaetz said DeSantis’ office had not referred Yenor’s nomination to the Senate before the resignation Wednesday.
“I believe that Mr. Yenor did the gentlemanly thing, because gentlemen don’t go where no one wants them, and his timely resignation takes much of the steam out of what otherwise might have been an unnecessary blowup between Gov. DeSantis and many of his Northwest Florida friends and supporters,” Gaetz told The News Service of Florida.
Gaetz said opposition to Yenor’s appointment had increased in the community in recent weeks.
“We live in a time when our words and our actions follow us everywhere. And Mr. Yenor’s background, including his most recent background, did not lend itself well to even the highly conservative population of Northwest Florida,” Gaetz said.
Yenor’s resignation letter said he intended to continue his work to “make America’s universities great,” adding that UWF “too has great potential to celebrate Western civilization while staying connected to dynamic economic changes.”
Yenor’s resignation came the same day the Senate unanimously passed a measure (SB 312), sponsored by Gaetz, that included removing the chairman of the UWF Board of Trustees from the board of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition — a move that had been aimed at Yenor. The institute, established at UWF, is affiliated with several Florida universities, according to its website.
DeSantis had steadfastly defended Yenor. The governor in February said he stood “100 percent” behind Yenor after the professor was called “a bigot” and “misogynist” by former state Sen. Randy Fine, a Brevard County Republican who was elected to Congress on April 1.
DeSantis at the time called Yenor, who is affiliated with the conservative Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, “a champion for the types of reforms at universities that we need” and called criticism of the professor “very flimsy.”
Yenor was part of a slate of UWF trustees appointed by DeSantis and the state university system’s Board of Governors amid the governor’s efforts to reshape Florida’s higher education system.
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