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Standing at a podium labeled “Higher Education Reform,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Tuesday announced a wide-ranging plan to shake up the state’s colleges. The plan includes a Western-civilizations-based core curriculum; greater authority for boards and college presidents to hire and fire even tenured faculty members; and other proposals that would, if enacted, encroach on the autonomy of the state’s public colleges.
We are going to “eliminate all DEI and CRT bureaucracies in the state of Florida.”
“We’re centering higher education on integrity of the academics, excellence, pursuit of truth, teaching kids to think for themselves, not trying to impose an orthodoxy,” DeSantis said during a news conference to announce the plan.
“It’s re-establishing public control and public authority over the public universities,” Christopher F. Rufo, a conservative activist whom DeSantis recently appointed to one Florida college’s board, said during the same conference.
DeSantis’s proposed higher-ed legislative package adds to his already aggressive posture toward higher education, which he has escalated in the new year. His actions in recent weeks, coupled with Tuesday’s announcement, stake out an expansive vision for state intervention at public colleges. If realized, it would leave few areas of the enterprise untouched by government regulation or scrutiny.
Meanwhile, evidence of resistance is arising at at least one university after a month during which Florida’s Republican leaders suggested they might strip public campuses of their diversity efforts, curriculum on certain topics such as critical race theory, and health care for transgender students.
DeSantis’s proposals include requiring that students at the colleges take certain core courses “grounded in actual history, the actual philosophy that has shaped Western civilization.” He also wants to allow certain recently established research centers at Florida International University, Florida State University, and the University of Florida to operate more independently. The centers were modeled after Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, DeSantis said, and he wants at least two of them to create K-12 curricula.
Last year, the state passed a bill that allowed Florida’s Board of Governors to require professors to go through post-tenure review every five years. On Tuesday, DeSantis proposed giving college presidents more power over faculty hiring and allowing presidents and boards of trustees to call for a post-tenure review of a faculty member “at any time with cause.”
The governor said he would recommend the legislature set aside $100 million for the state universities to hire and retain faculty members. He recommended $15 million for recruiting students and faculty members to the New College of Florida, a small, public liberal-arts college whose governing board DeSantis recently overhauled with the appointment of six new members. One of the new trustees then wrote that he intended to see if it would be legally possible to fire everyone at the college and rehire only “those faculty, staff, and administration who fit in the new financial and business model.”
“We are also going to eliminate all DEI and CRT bureaucracies in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said without specifying what “DEI and CRT bureaucracies” were. “No funding, and that will wither on the vine.”
DeSantis presented eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion projects as a way of saving wasted money, although a previous Chronicle analysis found that such projects make up 1 percent or less of the state universities’ budgets.
Some evidence of fresh opposition to DeSantis’s broader agenda is emerging on Florida campuses.
Last week, faculty-union leaders at four Florida universities criticized the governor’s recent maneuvers in a press release put out by the United Faculty of Florida, the umbrella union organization. DEI policies, programs, and courses help make campuses a place where everyone belongs, Liz Brown, president of the University of North Florida chapter, said in the release. “Because of the escalating attacks on these programs,” she said, “our best and brightest students are approaching faculty and asking if the classes they have elected to take will be canceled.”
In January, Paul Renner, Florida’s Republican House Speaker, asked Florida colleges for a laundry list of DEI-related documents, including communications to or from DEI faculty committees regarding various topics. Renner defined communications expansively as “all written or electronic communications, including but not limited to emails, text messages, and social-media messages.”
On Monday, the United Faculty of Florida told Florida Atlantic University’s interim provost that, in an attempt to comply with Renner’s directive, the university has asked some faculty members to turn over materials that go beyond the House speaker’s scope. FAU has also caused “confusion and panic” by telling professors that, “All records related to university business are public records, even if they are transmitted through personal devices, personal emails, or personal social-media accounts,” Cami Acceus, a UFF staff member, wrote to Michele Hawkins, the interim provost, in a letter obtained by The Chronicle.
The applicable standard is not whether communications are “loosely, tangentially, or even closely related to university business,” Acceus wrote. It’s if those communications actually “transact” FAU business. She cited Florida statute and the state attorney general’s “Government-in-the-Sunshine” manual.
Education is too important to our students, to the people of Florida, and to the future of our nation to be put at risk by political whim.
“Understandably, FAU has an interest in protecting itself from legislative attacks and may even fear retribution if it does not respond zealously to the House,” Acceus said. “For these reasons, the university has cast its net wide to err on the side of overproducing records to the House of Representatives. Yet, it is not fair or just to faculty when FAU intrudes into their private lives, going beyond the scope of the record request at issue.”
FAU must do a number of things to dispel the “hysteria” it has caused, Acceus wrote, including telling professors that the university is not seeking their personal communications “beyond the parameters articulated above.”
The union is prepared to take legal action to prevent FAU from accessing faculty members’ personal information and documents in a way that’s prohibited by the Fourth Amendment, Acceus wrote.
Hawkins did not reply to a request for comment from The Chronicle.
Florida Atlantic’s faculty senate also adopted a full-throated defense of DEI efforts. These programs “are not the product of a ‘woke’ ideology,” reads the statement. Rather, “DEI is a student-success strategy. Moreover, it is a strategy that responds to student demand and expectation.” The document urges Florida’s elected leaders to “realize the damage these mischaracterizations and scare tactics” have wrought, both to the reputation of state institutions and to the morale of its educators. It calls on donors, business leaders, alumni, and citizens for their support.
“Our message is clear: Education is too important to our students, to the people of Florida, and to the future of our nation to be put at risk by political whim.”
The broad effort to expose diversity spending at the state’s universities is a marked shift. In October 2020, the state university system’s chancellor at the time co-authored a memo laying out the governing board’s commitments to DEI and its expectations that its universities would support that work. For one thing, the importance of having a senior-level university administrator who leads DEI-efforts “cannot be overstated,” says the memo. For another, universities should consider integrating DEI best practices into their curriculum, when appropriate.
“Work on diversity, equity, and inclusion as strategic priorities must not be a ‘check the box and move on’ activity,” reads the memo. “To produce meaningful and sustainable outcomes, this challenging work will need to continue long after our urgent responses to the crises of 2020 are completed.”
In an email on Tuesday, Michael V. Martin, president of Florida Gulf Coast University, told The Chronicle, “We intend to continue to follow that directive.”
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