Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has just signed bills that will cut the legs out from under woke education programs at state colleges and universities.
In a signing ceremony on May 15 at Sarasota’s New College—whose recent reform has been a hallmark of DeSantis’s anti-woke campaign—the governor signed one bill, Senate Bill 266, that eliminates funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the state system.
Another bill he signed, House Bill 931, prohibits political loyalty tests at universities.
A third bill, Senate Bill 240, strengthens workplace education, with the goal of increasing access to career-related and technical education.
“If you look at the way [DEI] has actually been implemented across the country, DEI is better viewed as standing for discrimination, exclusion, and indoctrination. And that has no place in our public institutions,” DeSantis said.
Demonstrators chanted noisily outside the building where he spoke. A legislator who also spoke riffed on DeSantis’s frequent statement, “Florida is where woke goes to die.”
“You hear what’s going on outside. That’s what woke sounds like when it dies. The last gasp of dying,” the legislator said.
DEI has not been used to promote intellectual diversity on campus, to debate different viewpoints, or to have robust discussions, DeSantis said.
“In reality, what this concept of DEI has been is the attempt to impose orthodoxy,” not just in the classroom but through university administrations, the governor said. It “has been used as a veneer to impose an ideological agenda, and that is wrong.”
House Bill 931 prohibits loyalty oaths and so-called diversity statements, DeSantis said, that “are really requiring you to sign up to support an ideological agenda that you may not be supportive of.”
“The whole experiment with DEI is coming to an end in the state of Florida. We are eliminating the DEI programs. We are going to treat people as individuals. We’re not going to treat people as members of groups.”
The Legislature’s budget—not yet signed by DeSantis who has a line-item veto—includes $100 million for faculty recruitment at the state’s colleges and universities, he said. The bill increases the decision-making power of university presidents, including the right to hire faculty directly without going through the academic departments. University presidents, along with their boards of trustees, are more accountable to taxpayers than faculty members, he said.
New College received $15 million in a special session earlier this year in which DeSantis replaced its president and trustees. It is getting another $35 million in this budget, he said. The money will go to faculty hiring and other improvements.
New College President Richard Corcoran said the liberal arts college’s enrollment had been dropping but is now on track for its largest-ever incoming class this fall. He called the state’s grants “an amazing amount of money” and more than New College has received in more than 20 years—combined.
“I would love for this to be, and I think it will be, the top classical liberal arts college in America. Certainly to be the top state liberal arts college in America,” DeSantis said.
Returning education in the classics to the state’s universities is another part of the legislation signed today.
New College is having its curriculum reoriented toward a classical education, one definition of which is “a tradition of education that seeks truth, goodness, and beauty through the study of the liberal arts and the great books.”
DeSantis has also prioritized a return to civics education so that high school and college students have a better idea of how the American classical liberal democratic system works.
In the service of both of these priorities, the budget has allocated $30 million for the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center for Classical Civic Education.
It has another $8 million for Florida State’s Florida Institute of Politics, which will be renamed the Florida Institute of Governance and Civics.
And another $5 million has been marked for Florida International University’s Adam Smith Center for the Study of Economic Freedom. University presidents will be able to recruit faculty directly to those programs, he said.
“Inherently, there’s nothing wrong with the concept of diversity or equity or inclusion,” said Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the university system. “However, the programs that have been created and their applications have no connection with a common definition of those words.”
One study of hiring and tenure practices nationally, he said, found that 20 percent of them required a DEI statement with the application. “These statements serve as a litmus test to weed out those who have diverse thought.”
“Our universities are supposed to be a marketplace of ideas. When you only have one, you have a monoculture. Creating a monoculture is not diversity.”
Many university DEI departments have instituted bias-related incident reporting. The complaints can be made anonymously, and they can target behavior that not only isn’t a crime or violation of university policy but even a violation of the student code of conduct, he said.
Students can be accused, found guilty, and counseled on restorative steps they should take.
“A quasi-judicial proceeding that tramples on rights of due process is not equity,” Rodrigues said. He criticized as divisive the proliferation of separate graduation ceremonies for black, Hispanic, Asian, and other minority students.
“It’s important we recognize that segregating students by race isn’t afinity. It’s called segregation,” he said. Martin Luther King and others fought for, and in some cases died for, the struggle for civil rights to end segregation.
“No individual paid for by the taxpayer on a higher-education campus should be reconstructing segregation, no matter what they call it.”
Christopher Rufo, one of New College’s new trustees and a nationally known voice criticizing the influence of DEI and critical race theory (CRT) on campuses, said he’s done a review of the academic priorities of five Florida universities.
The University of Florida had launched more than a thousand separate DEI initiatives, including some denouncing the United States as a system of white supremacy, he said.
“They even encouraged white faculty to participate in something called ‘Racists Anonymous’, which I didn’t even know existed,” Rufo said.
The University of Central Florida released what they called, “an inclusive faculty hiring guide,” he said. “They said that merit in faculty hiring was ”a myth,“ and advocated for explicit racial discrimination and racial quotas all in the interest of promoting left-wing political concepts.”
Florida International University “turned its DEI programs explicitly into a ground for left-wing activist recruiting, even training students for participating in violent BLM protests, and teaching them how to handle tear gas and getting arrested by police,” he said, “all funded by many of the people in this room with taxpayer dollars.”
“This legislation that will be signed momentarily will immediately abolish all of these programs. Done.”
Rufo said that the reformed New College will “put the pursuit of knowledge and truth—not political activism—back at the center of higher education in Florida.
“And what you‘ll hear from the media, what you’ll hear from maybe the protesters is that somehow this is destroying democracy,” Rufo said. “Anyone heard that line of attack? But in fact, they have it exactly backward. This is about restoring democracy.
“The basic premise of this legislation is that our public institutions should reflect the values of the public. That Florida’s farmers and waitresses and truck drivers should not be subsidizing a pure permanent bureaucracy of left-wing activists who hate them and hate their values, but of course, are happy to take their money.”
