Our new president is old. Did the Board of Trustees purposefully pick a short-term president to wait out the current governor?
Bell is 67 or 68 (Wikipedia only says he was born in 1957). This is only 3 years younger than Fuchs, who notably has been trying to retire as university head for 3+ years. Desantis's term ends in Jan 2027. Given the debacle of the UF presidency the past few years, it probably would have been untenable to wait until after then to nominate a president. I predict that the BoT intentionally named him as a placeholder for a couple years, hoping that the political climate in Florida becomes mildly less right wing after DeSantis leaves office. Then, they can hire a more suitable candidate like they were trying to do with Ono. Fully acknowledge that this could just be my cope explanation for Florida shooting their flagship university in the foot by scaring other suitable candidates away with the Ono catastrophe