In the weeks since Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed five new trustees to the University of West Florida, one faculty member has been fixating on a loaded question.
“Are we being New College-d?”
She’s referring to New College of Florida, the small public liberal-arts institution 500 miles south — where a 2023 administrative overhaul that started with six DeSantis-appointed trustees led to a faculty exodus and the axing of the gender-studies program. Now, “New College” is used as a verb by some West Florida professors to describe what’s happening on their campus, according to the faculty member. (Faculty quoted in this story asked to remain anonymous, fearing that criticizing the board could cost them their jobs. At least one outspoken New College professor did not have their contract renewed.)
The Republican governor has made his mark at most of Florida’s public universities, dismantling diversity offices, overhauling curricula and post-tenure review, and installing allies as board members and presidents. Such steps, the governor says, are necessary to eliminate progressive indoctrination. So far, West Florida — a regional institution that’s much bigger than New College and much smaller than the University of Florida flagship — has mostly stayed out of the line of fire.
That changed in January, when five DeSantis appointees joined West Florida’s board. Among them was Scott Yenor, a political-science professor at Boise State University who was quickly elected board chair. Yenor is also a fellow at the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank, and has advised DeSantis on education policy.
After becoming chair, Yenor posted on X that he would ensure that students are educated in “Western civilization, sound civic education, good work-force preparation, and professional education.” “We are committed to make sure @GovRonDesantis’s reforms are deeply embedded into the fabric in Pensacola,” Yenor said.
That was all I needed to see. He’s clearly a bigot and has no place in our Florida education system.
But Yenor, a staunch critic of feminism and diversity, has expressed views that some see as too extreme, even in a red state. Among the professor’s writings over the past decade are pieces discouraging women from attending college in favor of raising a family, despite the fact that women make up over half of college students. Yenor also made comments on social media that some Jewish legislators — including at least one Republican state senator, Randy Fine — found offensive.
Now that the Florida Legislature has returned to the state capitol, Yenor and other board members must face a confirmation vote from state lawmakers. It’s not clear that Yenor has the support, even within the Republican-supermajority Senate, Fine told The Chronicle.
And for faculty members, another question is on their minds: Why is the governor trying to fix a university they don’t think is broken?
‘No Place’
Of the eight new trustees — five appointed this January by DeSantis and three in December by the state’s Board of Governors — Yenor has drawn the most criticism and faces the steepest hill to confirmation.
In one speech, at a conservative conference in 2021, he said “independent women” are “more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be.” He also suggested that colleges not recruit women for engineering, medical, and law programs. (That remark prompted a Boise State student then to open a scholarship for women in those fields. In six months, she raised $200,000 for the scholarship’s endowment fund.)
Yenor’s critics also decried a series of his recent posts on X in which Yenor suggested that only white, non-Jewish men were qualified for political leadership. (He argued in the posts that the Democratic party needs “reformers” who are “rejecting the outer edges of identity politics.”) Yenor denied accusations of antisemitism and said he is an “ardent supporter of Israel and the Jewish people” in a subsequent post.
Yenor did not respond to email and phone requests for comment. A spokesperson for West Florida’s Board of Trustees said in a phone call that Yenor did not have a comment.
Fine, the sole Jewish Republican in the State Senate, said he first became aware of Yenor’s statements through a Pensacola news site. After reading Yenor’s social-media thread, he said he gasped.
“That was all I needed to see,” Fine said in an interview. “He’s clearly a bigot and has no place in our Florida education system.”
The Florida Legislative Jewish Caucus, led by Rep. Michael Gottlieb, a Democrat, also expressed “deep concern” over Yenor’s potential leadership role.
“His history of antisemitic and misogynistic rhetoric is not only deeply offensive but also incompatible with the principles of leadership and integrity that should define Florida’s higher-education system,” the caucus said in a statement.
Yenor has already been removed from a different Florida board. In February, a panel of senators cut Yenor from the Board of Directors at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), a research nonprofit group that’s affiliated with the State University System of Florida. The IHMC originated at West Florida, but since expanding to other universities, it has maintained a campus in downtown Pensacola with strong ties to its home institution.
We’re being framed as something we’re not. We’re meeting all the expectations that the state has set for us, and yet still it seems like there’s this very ideological push to fix something where they provided no evidence that we’re broken.
The West Florida board chair typically holds a seat on the IHMC board. Fine proposed nixing that seat due to Yenor’s comments. Most of his colleagues agreed. The exact vote breakdown is unclear, but among those on the panel was Sen. Don Gaetz, a Republican and chair of the ethics committee that will ultimately oversee whether Yenor is confirmed to the West Florida board.
Gaetz said he’s aware of the interest in West Florida’s trustees and plans on using “their responses to vigorous, penetrating questioning” to inform his vote, according to the News Service of Florida.
The State Senate hasn’t set dates for the trustees’ confirmation hearings, but it publishes a regularly updated list of more than 160 appointees who require confirmation for boards across the state. As of this article’s publication, Yenor is the only West Florida appointee left off the list. His omission might mean he hasn’t passed the Senate’s vetting process yet, a Senate spokesperson wrote in an email, and he could be added to the list at any point during Florida’s legislative session, which runs through May 2.
Fine said he doubts Yenor will be confirmed as a trustee. The seven other new trustees, who voted in a bloc to make Yenor chair in January, may face tough questioning, too. (The five West Florida trustees who predated DeSantis did not vote for Yenor.)
“The board thought this guy was an appropriate chair,” Fine said. “So then it brings their judgment into question as well.”
Despite the criticism, DeSantis said in mid-February that he backs Yenor “100 percent,” which Fine found “very troubling.”
Yenor recently wrote a Chronicle opinion essay defending a DeSantis-backed overhaul of public colleges’ general-education curriculum, which resulted in many courses that discussed diversity, race, and gender being eliminated from the gen-ed list.
The Republican-supermajority Senate has voted down past DeSantis nominees, though rarely. In 2023, senators refused to confirm Eddie Speir, one of six DeSantis nominees at New College, after he said he would debate students into changing their religious views.
‘Something We’re Not’
New and contentious trustees was the first sign that major changes were coming to New College’s curriculum, work force, and campus culture — and some West Florida faculty members can’t help but see parallels to their own institution.
But West Florida is different from New College, which was an overtly progressive liberal-arts institution. West Florida is a regional university primarily serving Republican-voting counties.
That’s why some faculty members are frustrated with characterizations of West Florida as a liberal bastion in need of reform. One cited a recent article in the National Review, a conservative publication, that called West Florida a “college led astray by progressive ideologues.”
“We’re being framed as something we’re not,” the faculty member said. “We’re meeting all the expectations that the state has set for us, and yet still it seems like there’s this very ideological push to fix something where they provided no evidence that we’re broken.”
DeSantis said recently that West Florida was promoting “gender ideology.” At a February board meeting, the trustees voted to end the university’s women’s-studies program — because of low enrollment.
The statewide faculty union has called on its members to urge state senators to vote against confirming Yenor, as well as another new West Florida trustee, Adam Kissel. Kissel is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and has served in the U.S. Department of Education during President Trump’s first administration. He has advocated for privatizing all public colleges by revoking state funding, among other controversial ideas.
DeSantis is “known for appointing trustees who have no experience or qualifications,” said Teresa M. Hodge, president of United Faculty of Florida, referencing New College. During a recent visit to West Florida, Hodge reassured faculty that the union wholeheartedly backs them against what she considers unusual governmental interference.
“We’re in an abnormal state of affairs,” Hodge told The Chronicle, “and we don’t want people to think this is normal.”
Last week, commissioners in Escambia County, where West Florida is located, voted unanimously to support a community group opposing DeSantis’s trustees and promised to send a letter to the State Legislature. Four of the five commissioners are Republican.
Another concern for some faculty and community members is that Yenor and Kissel — who live in Idaho and West Virginia, respectively — don’t appear to have any connections to the region and, as far as they know, haven’t visited the campus.
That should change this week as West Florida’s board holds its first in-person meeting of the year.
Susan Densmore-James, a trustee and president of West Florida’s Faculty Senate, brought up the lack of local ties during a virtual meeting in February.
“I’m looking forward to you visiting Pensacola,” Densmore-James told Kissel, “because you’ll see that we have a very diverse community here.”
