GAINESVILLE — Less than three weeks after taking over University of West Florida in Pensacola as interim president, Manny Diaz Jr. abruptly dismissed the school’s top legal officer after she objected to hiring one of his longtime allies: a politically connected law firm that earned millions in contracts when Diaz ran the Education Department under Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The same Tallahassee-based firm, Lawson Huck Gonzalez, is now helping steer that university’s search for a permanent president – a post Diaz has said he intends to pursue. Trustees last week approved an annual compensation range for the next president between $800,000 and $1.2 million.
The university quietly awarded the firm a contract capped at $100,000 in August, despite objections from its then-general counsel, Susan Woolf. Woolf warned trustees the firm lacked experience with higher education searches and that cheaper, more specialized alternatives were available, according to internal records. Hours after she put her concerns in writing to the board, Diaz fired her, according to internal emails and contract documents newly released under Florida’s public records law.
The records offer one of the clearest looks yet at the political forces reshaping the university’s leadership since DeSantis installed a slate of new trustees earlier this year, mirroring his overhauls at other campuses across Florida.
The move closely resembles the Republican governor’s makeover in 2023 at New College of Florida, where trustees swiftly replaced the school’s sitting president with Richard Corcoran, a former GOP House Speaker and education commissioner.
The leadership shakeups are part of a broader push by DeSantis and the Republican-led Legislature to steer Florida’s 12 public universities in a more conservative direction, alongside new laws banning diversity spending and restricting how race and gender can be taught. The governor in April charged UWF with harboring “Marxist professors” and “some of the most liberal programs in the state,” warning the university to “buckle up” for significant changes.
Home to more than 15,000 students, UWF is in the state’s reliably Republican Panhandle region with nearby U.S. Navy and Air Force bases and one of the largest concentrations of veterans in the U.S.
A former Republican state lawmaker and public school teacher from Miami-Dade County, Diaz championed many of the academic reforms that helped cement DeSantis’ culture warrior reputation. After the governor picked him as the state’s top education official in 2022, Diaz helped engineer new accreditation laws giving Tallahassee more sway over state universities and pushed to eliminate sociology as a core course for college students, saying the subject had been “hijacked by left-wing activists.”
To many in Pensacola, Diaz’ sudden arrival as interim president on a $744,000 contract – after longtime president Martha Saunders resigned in May under scrutiny from the DeSantis administration – seemed less like a caretaker role and more like a setup for a permanent appointment. Those suspicions intensified shortly after Diaz’ arrival in July, when he announced Woolf’s dismissal without providing a public explanation.
The records show that Lawson Huck Gonzalez’s hiring sparked a behind-the-scenes clash between Woolf and Rebecca Matthews, chairwoman of the Board of Trustees and a recent DeSantis appointee. In late July, Matthews was pressing Woolf to hire Jason Gonzalez, the firm’s cofounder and a well-connected Republican attorney, to serve as outside counsel for the presidential search.
Woolf pushed back, warning Matthews in a July 29 email that while Gonzalez is “very experienced in litigation work and has many political connections,” he had limited expertise in presidential searches and higher education law. Woolf relayed her concerns to the full Board of Trustees in a letter the following day, stressing that the search “will be closely watched and potentially audited” and recommending two other, specialized firms as alternatives.
At least one of the alternative firms’ billing rate was half as expensive as Gonzalez’s.
“Matthews has identified another attorney and his firm that she wants hired against my advice,” Woolf wrote, without identifying Gonzalez or his firm by name.
Five hours later, on July 30, a university vice president informed trustees on behalf of Diaz that Woolf had been fired “effective immediately.” Diaz has offered no public explanation for the decision, only that it came “after careful consideration and in the best interest of the university.”
Woolf declined to be interviewed. Before stepping in as the university’s general counsel in 2021, she had served in a similar position for the Pensacola Police Department and was a former Pensacola city attorney.
The circumstances and timing of her ouster were striking: Records show Diaz had already told administrators he intended to apply for the permanent presidency, raising questions about whether the search process was being engineered to benefit him.
Domani Turner-Ward, a longtime student activist on campus and part of the “Save UWF” movement, said the firing fit into a broader pattern. “It was inappropriate for the general counsel to have been fired for a simple recommendation to the board, and that seems like what it was,” they said. “Many believe that Manny Diaz will be the permanent president of UWF, and I’ve heard some people complain that this whole presidential search is just a show and a waste of money.”
Diaz and Matthews did not respond to calls and emails requesting comment.
The university formally launched the search last month and expects to announce finalists as early as January. Despite Woolf’s warnings that presidential searches at other universities typically don’t require outside counsel, Matthews moved ahead with Gonzalez.
Jeanne Godwin, a former trustee and vocal opponent of DeSantis’ new appointees, said she raised concerns to Matthews about the university incurring unnecessary costs for the search. “My verbiage was,” Godwin recalled, “‘I have a problem with the appearance of hiring a special firm when we all know that Diaz is going to be the president.’” According to Godwin, Matthews “never challenged that assumption. She said, ‘I have a problem with it looking like the committee made the choice.’”
The internal records do not explain Matthews’ rationale for hiring outside counsel for the search, or why she insisted on Gonzalez’ firm over more specialized alternatives.
Founded in 2023, Lawson Huck Gonzalez has quickly built a lucrative roster of state contracts, collecting $10.5 million in just over two years – including $2.5 million from the Education Department under Diaz. The firm is currently defending Diaz and the state in a pending American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit challenging the 2023 state law banning diversity spending and restricting college curriculum. The Education Department paid a flat $600,000 legal fee to Lawson Huck Gonzalez for that case.
Gonzalez did not respond to phone calls requesting comment. His contract strictly prohibits his firm from speaking to the media about the university without prior authorization from a university administrator, and it directs all inquiries to be referred to the school.
Gonzalez, a former two-term general counsel to the Republican Party of Florida and legal adviser to ex-GOP Gov. Charlie Crist, has represented major political and corporate clients. His firm’s website touts his work as lead counsel for the oil company Transocean Ltd. after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, where he successfully fought to have dozens of lawsuits dismissed in the Florida Panhandle.
Although his firm’s website does not list higher education law as one of its specialties, Gonzalez’s contract letter cites his firm’s role in the Miami-Dade College presidential search, as well as stints representing the University of Florida, University of Wisconsin, Broward College and Florida Atlantic University.
At the search committee’s first public meeting last month, Gonzalez offered a brief introduction, while another attorney from his firm gave a three-minute overview of state confidentiality laws. Earlier in the meeting, the school’s human resources chief spent 13 minutes delivering a more detailed presentation on the same content.
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This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at garrettshanley@ufl.edu. You can donate to support our students here.
