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Petition to Chairman Don Gaetz and members of the Florida Senate Ethics and Election Committee 

We, the undersigned, respectfully request the Florida Senate Ethics and Election Committee reject Gov. Ron DeSantis’ nomination of Mr. Scott Yenor as a member of the University of West Florida board of trustees, thus nullifying his selection as board chair.

Yenor’s appointment would represent a step backward for a forward-moving university, which the U.S. News and World Report placed in the top 10 public schools in the regional south for 2025 and the Military Times ranked first in Florida for veterans this year.

Our concerns are many:           

• As a professor at Boise State University in Idaho, Yenor has no publicly revealed connection to Northwest Florida.
• Yenor espouses long-discarded views on women, a particularly troubling philosophy in a university that has thrived for the past nine years under President Martha Saunders and whose student body is 60 percent female. He characterizes women who pursue higher education and careers as more “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome”  than those who eschew those endeavors to become mothers at an early age. He believes that men, not women, should populate fields such as engineering, medicine, law “and every other trade.”
• As the bipartisan Florida Legislative Jewish Caucus has noted, Yenor’s stunning antisemitic commentary suggests that only non-Jewish “white men” are viable leaders.
• Yenor also has pointed to the unacceptable criteria of race and sexual orientation to question leadership viability.

There is no place for misogyny or bigotry at any university, including UWF. Again, we implore the Florida Senate to block Yenor’s nomination.