GAINESVILLE, Fla.— Students on a handful of university campuses across Florida walked out of their classes in a coordinated effort on Feb. 23 to show their disapproval for Gov. Ron DeSantis’s policies to fight “wokeness” in the state university system.
Organizers of the protest said about 1,000 students joined in at a handful of the 12 public universities in the state. The system has more than 341,000 students enrolled.
DeSantis, a Republican, has promised to remove all funding from school programs that teach Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). The two schools of thought are quasi-Marxist and foment division by treating people differently based on their race, gender, and sexual preferences.
The governor added he wanted to remove ideological loyalty oaths as hiring qualifications and shift hiring authorities to university presidents.
“Our institutions will be graduating students with degrees that will actually be useful,” DeSantis said. “We will be eliminating all DEI and CRT bureaucracies in Florida. It will wither on the vine.”
At the University of Florida, the protest was small but passionate. Florida College Democrats and Dream Defenders led the walkouts.
Roughly 100 students walked out of the Gainesville campus to protest DeSantis’s actions against left-wing ideological education. The Gainesville campus enrolled more than 60,000 this academic year.
Skipping Class for DEI
By 10 minutes after the planned start time at noon, organizers at the University of Florida event decided the crowd had grown as much as it would.About 100 students stood in clusters in the breezeway outside the Marston Science Library and a campus Starbucks coffee shop.
A few held signs: “Trans Healthcare is a Right, Not a Political Pawn,” and “Don’t Sleuth on Trans Youth.”
Nearby, pairs of university police officers leaned against squad cars and chatted, or strolled together around the building. And workers from the institution’s Student Life office were posted along the group’s outer edges “just to be sure everyone stays safe,” one told an Epoch Times reporter.
Sabrina Briceno told The Epoch Times, “So we’re here, really walking out and demonstrating real anger towards the DeSantis administration here in Florida trying to control and put a heavy hand on our higher education, threatening to ban DEI, threatening to ban LGBT studies or anything like that.”
“Any sort of freedom of thought, he is trying to stomp on, and that’s really why we’re all here.”
When asked about students who say conservative viewpoints aren’t tolerated on campus and that they, too, seek the freedom to share their ideas without retribution, Briceno spun on her heels and addressed the crowd.
The Future of Florida
In 2022, Florida had 97 public colleges and 331 private schools, according to the university statistics website UnivStats.Together, these schools serve more than 1 million students, making Florida the state with the fourth-largest number of college students, according to college ranking site Best Colleges.
The Epoch Times reached out to DeSantis’s office, but a spokesman provided no new comment. Instead, he pointed to the governor’s legislative priorities.
A current bill in the Florida legislature, Senate Bill 958, requires Florida College System schools to perform annual viewpoint diversity assessments, host debates on current topics, ban political loyalty tests and ban ideologies that support biased treatment based on race.
Henry Mack, Chancellor of the Florida Department of Education overseeing the Division of Career, Technical, and Adult Education, had no comment about the walkout when asked about it by The Epoch Times.
The Epoch Times reached out to Florida College Democrats and Dream Defenders, but neither group responded by press time.
The Epoch Times also reached out to the Florida Department of Education and the Florida State University System, but neither replied.
