In 2022, the University of Michigan PR team introduced Santa Ono to the campus with a jazzy Happy Days-style Welcome Video that created the impression of the new “president of the people” encountering dozens of student fans as he casually strolled through campus. In fact, the video was a highly choreographed piece of theater with a cast of students dressed in U-M gear and Ono as the leading character. This confluence of propaganda and higher education, and the contradictions of academic honest and spin inspired this work: the construction of Santa Ono, the Mascot, to star with an assembled cast in a recreation of the Welcome video, with the goal of enabling the implicit messaging to be more explicit.

The interpretation of President Ono as a Mascot, a malleable “passive vessel” without convictions, anticipated the events of 2024/2025. In his third year as president, Ono betrayed the university values of diversity and inclusion, anti-racism, and respect for scientific data and academic expertise. In a bid for the University of Florida presidency and a $1.5 million base salary, he shifted from wanting to dismantle the “tools of oppression” to dismantling the Office of DEI and trivializing its goals as “ideology” and “bureaucracy.”  During his final and very public interview, with the Florida Board of Governors, he denied the existence of systemic racism and questioned the threat of climate change and the value of vaccines. The Board rejected his candidacy.