Florida’s 40 public colleges must now comply with an unusual mandate to ease the transfer process for students facing “religious persecution” — described by Gov. Ron DeSantis as a means to help Jewish students who are “fleeing antisemitic activities” in other states.
A directive from DeSantis on Tuesday prompted an emergency order from the chancellor of the State University System of Florida. The order instructed each of the state’s 12 public universities to waive transfer-application deadlines and credit-hour requirements for students who demonstrate a “well-founded fear of antisemitic or other religious discrimination” at any out-of-state institutions. Individual colleges will have to determine whether students meet that standard.
The Florida College System, which includes the state’s 28 two-year institutions, is also carrying out the new policy.
“With leaders of so-called elite universities enabling antisemitic activities rather than protecting their students from threats and harassment, it is understandable that many Jewish students are looking for alternatives and looking to Florida,” DeSantis, a Republican and 2024 presidential hopeful, said in a statement.
DeSantis’s statement aims to paint Florida as a safe haven for Jewish students, whose apprehension about antisemitism on campus has increased in recent months. The governor asserted that the state’s public colleges were “experiencing an elevated number of inquiries from out-of-state students to transfer.” A request from The Chronicle to the State University System of Florida for transfer-application data went unanswered Wednesday.
Coming six months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled race-conscious admissions unconstitutional, a declaration that Florida would make the admissions process easier for Jewish students raised eyebrows. Would DeSantis’s directive withstand laws prohibiting differential treatment on the basis of race or religion?
Evidently yes, according to Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in constitutional studies. That’s because the university system’s emergency order, the document resulting from the governor’s request, is not limited to Jewish students.
“As written, the order applies to antisemitism or other religious discrimination,” Feldman wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “That’s permissible on its face,” he wrote, but DeSantis misrepresented the universities’ new policy by focusing on how it would benefit only Jewish students, with no mention of other identities or religions.
The order “is specific to those who are fleeing religious persecution, which not only includes our Jewish students but any student that’s fearful of religious persecution as a result of October 7,” Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, wrote in an email statement to The Chronicle on Wednesday, referring to the date the Hamas militant group attacked Israel.
But the transfer policy’s goal was made clear in a Wednesday statement from Richard Corcoran, president of New College of Florida, which is part of the university system. Corcoran said that “all students should feel comfortable being open and vocal about their identities,” and then he praised the system for “taking the lead in protecting Jewish students.”
DeSantis also encouraged colleges to use waivers on a case-by-case basis to grant in-state tuition to out-of-state transfer students experiencing financial hardship.
For the university system’s order to be challenged in court, a lawsuit must be brought by someone who has been injured or affected tangibly as a result of the policy, according to Howard M. Wasserman, a professor of law at Florida International University, whose university is affected by the change.
“It really does depend on how the universities put this into effect,” Wasserman said, because the document itself is light on specifics. Until then, he said, “I don’t think we will fully know what it means and therefore we won’t fully know whether or not it’s valid.”
