Alex Obraud, a 21-year-old anthropology student in his third year at New College in Florida, did not expect to be on the frontlines of America’s culture wars simply by attending university in the state.
But Florida’s rightwing Republican governor, Ron DeSantis – and likely would-be presidential candidate for 2024 – has launched a relentless campaign of attack on higher education in the state, seeking to appeal to his party’s Trumpist base by positing that the state’s colleges and universities are a bastion of liberal extremism that needs to be reformed.
Last week DeSantis unveiled plans for a sweeping overhaul of Florida’s state university system that has left thousands of in-state students and faculty members feeling by turns indignant and dumbfounded as the man seen by many as Donald Trump’s only serious Republican rival set them up as a punchbag for his self-declared “war on woke”.
But far from demoralizing Obraud, DeSantis’s moves actually energized him.
“It’s a wake-up call to stand up for educational freedom and for what’s right, and I’m absolutely re-energized,” said Obraud. “It’s solidified my resolve to stand up and push back against this because these politicians and [new] trustees don’t have the interests of students, their parents or faculty members at heart.”
It will not be easy.
In one fell swoop that was breathtaking in its scope, dog-whistle racism and naked ambition, DeSantis began with the abolition of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, which had been mandated by a mostly Republican-appointed board of governors in the second half of 2020 when he was midway through his second year as governor.
Addressing a news conference in the Gulf coast city of Bradenton, the governor declared that all students graduating from public universities in his state would henceforth be required to take general education courses that will include “actual history and actual philosophy that have shaped western civilization”.
But that was not all. DeSantis proposed a full-scale assault on the longstanding faculty tenure system by empowering university boards of trustees and presidents to review tenured faculty members “at any time”, in addition to the periodic reviews already taking place. “They can be let go if they’re not performing to expectations,” observed DeSantis, adding that “the most significant dead-weight cost to a university is unproductive tenured faculty”.
The governor also wants to require schools to give priority to “graduating students with degrees that lead to high-wage jobs, not degrees designed to further a political agenda”. And DeSantis made a point of keeping in reserve a hefty share of his gunpowder for the governor’s newfound bete noire in the statewide network of 12 publicly funded institutions of higher education: the tiny New College of Florida (NCF).
Widely expected to seek the presidential nomination of the Republican party in 2024, the governor announced plans to allocate $100m for the “recruitment and retention of highly qualified faculty” across the state – and in the same breath, DeSantis said $15m would be specifically set aside for faculty and student recruitment at New College. The college is a haven for progressive-minded undergraduates in Florida that is especially known for its no-questions-asked tolerance of gay, lesbian, trans and queer communities. Its total student enrollment hovers between 650 and 700.
The announcement fueled fears that DeSantis wants to transform New College into a southern version of Michigan’s conservative, Christian Hillsdale College that would be diametrically at odds with the established traditions and prevailing atmosphere of NCF.
DeSantis’s opening salvo against NCF was fired on 6 January when his office announced the appointment of six rightwing allies of the governor to the college’s 13-member board of trustees. The bonfire of the universities that the governor ignited during the morning press conference yesterday then engulfed the NCF seaside campus within a matter of hours.
During its first in-person meeting of 2023 on Tuesday afternoon, the freshly reconstituted board voted to fire the president of NCF, Patricia Okker, without cause and replace its general counsel, who had vetoed a request by one of the DeSantis-appointed trustees to open a pair of open meetings on campus last week with prayer.
The board then named as Okker’s successor Richard Corcoran, a former Republican legislator and Florida education commissioner whose earlier candidacy for the presidency of Florida State University was withdrawn after questions were raised over his academic qualifications for the post – or lack thereof – and possible conflict of interest issues.
The ensuing shock waves that reverberated across the 110-acre NCF campus demoralized some students and faculty members but infuriated others.
“The call to overhaul New College is part of an orchestrated set of moves to undercut the principles of public education, of freedom of speech across the US,” said Amy Reid, a professor of French and director of the college’s gender studies programme. “What’s happening in New College is not just another anecdote from Florida. The suggestion that we adopt a curriculum based on Hillsdale’s Eurocentric and explicitly religious, so-called classical model challenges not only the principle of free speech, but also the goal of fostering an engaged and informed citizenry.”
Prominent members of the country’s higher education sector see in DeSantis’s so-called blueprint for academic reform a thinly veiled and continuing bid to lure voters away from Trump’s base as the governor contemplates a direct challenge to the former president’s already launched candidature.
“This is about building a national political brand by engaging in the culture wars, and as far as he is concerned, the more outrage and media coverage, the better,” said Brian Rosenberg, a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and president emeritus of Minnesota’s Macalester College. “The colleges and students in Florida are simply collateral damage, about which he is unconcerned.”
Whether he has the state’s kindergarten through 12th grade public education systems in his crosshairs or its dozen institutions of higher education, DeSantis often justifies his policy initiatives on the grounds that educators have embraced an agenda of indoctrination seeking to “impose ideological conformity [and] provoke political activism”, as he stated anew at last Tuesday’s press conference.
The leader of Florida’s statewide faculty union emphatically rejects the brainwashing thesis and DeSantis oft-repeated remarks that Florida students take outlandish courses, like “zombie studies”.
“Indoctrination is not occurring in college and university classrooms,” said Andrew Gothard, the president of United Faculty of Florida and a member of Florida Atlantic University’s faculty. “Governor DeSantis’s lack of examples and his emphasis on ‘zombie studies’, which also does not exist, show that truth is not on his lips when he speaks of Florida’s colleges and universities.”