DeSantis’s Terrifying Plot Against Higher Ed

At the end of January, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida announced a package of higher-education reforms. Those proposals have now been introduced into the Florida legislature as HB 999. The proposals were worrisome. The bill is worse.

The stakes are high — for Florida, and for the country. Florida has charged into the lead in experimenting with new political interventions into state universities. It has become a laboratory for higher-education reforms; other Republican-leaning states are likely to follow its lead. Florida may also become the proving ground for policy proposals that Republicans in Congress, or a future presidential administration, might take national.

The proposed reforms are not modest. Governor DeSantis has pushed for unprecedented political interventions in how state universities operate, and the resulting changes would be sweeping.

Last year, the Florida legislature adopted the Stop WOKE Act, which among other things tried to restrict what viewpoints state-university professors could promote in their classrooms. That law is now under a preliminary injunction issued by Judge Mark E. Walker of the U.S. district court for Northern Florida, who called it “positively dystopian.” More recently, the governor’s office has demanded information about diversity, equity, and inclusion activities, potentially including scholarly research and teaching, on state college campuses. DeSantis installed a slate of trustees at the state’s liberal-arts college with a mandate to remake the traditionally left-leaning institution.

HB 999 is perhaps the most dramatic move yet. It would ban politically disfavored, though vaguely defined, degree programs at state universities. Majoring in gender studies or critical race theory would be out. It would ban the teaching of “identity politics” in general-education core courses, which will most likely run into the same constitutional challenges as the Stop WOKE Act. It would also ban “unproven” or “theoretical” content from general-education courses, which might banish Plato and Albert Einstein to elective courses. Such specific legislative restrictions on what courses and materials can be taught and what academic degrees can be offered invite an extraordinary degree of legislative meddling in the core academic functioning of state universities.

The bill would also mandate that every student take a general-education course promoting “the values necessary to preserve the constitutional republic.” It is not unusual for states to require students to take courses with a certain subject matter. The State of Texas, for example, has long required college students to learn American or Texas history. But legislative direction of the “values” to be taught in required courses is remarkable at the university level. States have traditionally exercised a great deal of control over the curriculum in public elementary and secondary schools, but they have not sought to do the same in state universities. Florida is breaking new ground in insisting that state universities convey the government’s favored message in its classes.

HB 999 would ban “any programs or campus activities” that “espouse diversity, equity, and inclusion or critical-race-theory rhetoric.” The rapidly growing DEI bureaucracy on many state-university campuses is already in the crosshairs of Republican politicians, but this legislative blunderbuss would very likely threaten the scholarly activities of the faculty, as well as the workings of student-affairs offices.

Along with DEI bureaucracies, “diversity statement” requirements have similarly proliferated throughout academe. Student admissions, faculty hiring, and even faculty-promotion decisions are now frequently predicated on the demonstration of sufficient commitment to the diversity, equity, and inclusion program. Some academics have started to resist, arguing that such requirements are little better than the McCarthy-era loyalty oaths that professors were once required to sign. Florida’s postsecondary-institutions bill would ban such requirements, but it would do so in a particularly vague and sloppy fashion.

HB 999 also centralizes the power to hire and fire faculty members in politically appointed boards of trustees and in the university presidents that the trustees oversee. A central feature of modern American universities is faculty control over faculty-personnel decisions. The independence of the faculty is meant to insure that professional merit and not political favoritism drives such decisions and that scholarly activity will be insulated from political pressures. The accelerating leftward tilt of the professoriate has fed conservative discontent with this system of faculty self-selection. The new bill would significantly weaken tenure protections for the faculty and increase outside political control over university staffing.

State universities have never been perfectly independent from political pressure. They are ultimately creatures of the state and dependent on the good graces of political leaders. But American universities have long enjoyed a significant degree of freedom from political meddling in academic affairs, and that insulation from politics has allowed public universities to become intellectual powerhouses.

That long-lived arrangement may be nearing an end in many red states. It is hard to know where this newfound willingness to micromanage state universities will lead, but it would be a radical departure from the past. If conservatives are concerned that the intellectual environment at universities has become too stifling, this program of reform may provide a cure that is at least as bad as the disease.