Editor's note: This story was originally published by The Florida Trib.
Throughout Gov. Ron DeSantis’ tenure, Florida’s Republican leaders have spent years, and many millions of taxpayer dollars, injecting conservative politics into the state’s top-ranked university system.
There is almost no facet of campus life this sea change has left untouched, according to interviews with more than a dozen faculty, staff and education officials across the state, as well as a review of budgets, internal university communications and policy documents.
These changes have quieted private conversations among professors, altered allowable speech at public forums, invited conservative think tanks and policy analysts to influence and sit on key governing boards, and eliminated courses that were once non-controversial.
And it has turned the task of finding university and college presidents – once an academic exercise – into a secretive, thorny project that is inextricably linked to the ebbs and flows of Republican politics.
Although DeSantis is the chief architect and cheerleader of this transformation, even he can’t always control the conservative forces that now shape Florida’s colleges and universities.
To wit, the search for a University of Florida president is, for the second time in less than a year, overshadowed by culture wars as activists and politicians wield conservative distaste for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies as a sledgehammer in an effort to derail a DeSantis-backed finalist for the job. The tortured search is a remarkable turnabout for UF, one of the nation’s top public universities, which once had among the most coveted presidency positions in academia.
DeSantis’ press office did not respond to questions from The Florida Trib.
Still, the governor’s influence can be felt, and seen, on campuses across the state. “We’ve changed the underlying architecture” of higher education, DeSantis boasted to a crowd in Naples earlier this year.
In October, for example, a Florida SouthWestern State College professor was removed from a statewide curriculum workgroup for allegedly promoting “gender ideology” in his classroom.
“There’s a correction that’s going on,” said Alan Levine, the chairman of Florida’s board of governors, which oversees the state university system. “Ultimately the right place to be is where whoever you are on a college campus, you should feel free to give your opinion, and speak up.”
If it feels like a rightward shift, Levine said, “for probably 20 years, it’s been the other way, where you had a very liberal mindset on college campuses. You can’t ignore that.”
Levine stressed he was speaking individually, and not on behalf of the board.
DEI takes center stage
At UF, the sole finalist for the president job, former University of Alabama president Stuart Bell, has come under fire for policies that once earned him plaudits. Under his leadership, Alabama’s black enrollment increased by thousands of students, the university removed a Confederate monument from the campus quad, and Bell personally acknowledged the university’s racist past.
“Bell’s diversity efforts at Alabama rank as one of the most successful among the nation’s flagship institutions,” The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote last month.
In recent days, Bell’s track record prompted a firestorm of conservative opposition to his candidacy to lead UF. The university’s board of trustees is expected to vote on Bell’s hire later this month, and the board of governors must approve him as well.
Levine declined to comment on Bell’s candidacy.
The online outrage directed at Bell extends beyond right-wing political activists. The Trump administration’s secretary of education, Linda McMahon, blasted UF’s sole finalist, without naming him, in a thinly-veiled attack on social media.
“We need bold leaders to reorient higher education toward merit, truth-seeking, and academic rigor,” McMahon posted on X. “Florida has led the fight to get discriminatory DEI out of our schools and universities. UF deserves a president who will continue to drive those reforms.”
Bell remains in the running for the UF president job, and on Wednesday he has a series of open forums scheduled with students, staff and faculty. Bell is also supported by DeSantis, who has called him a “great selection.”
A state system, transformed
The political minefield of selecting a new college president reflects the larger restructuring of Florida’s higher education system, thanks to DeSantis and the GOP-controlled state Legislature.
DeSantis has packed university boards of trustees with hard-line conservatives, including some from out of state, despite state law that encourages “regional representation” for university trustees.
Last year, Florida’s board of governors rejected Santa Ono, who previously led the University of Michigan, for the UF presidency, in large part due to his prior support of DEI initiatives – a rare rejection of a candidate who had signoff from UF’s governing board.
But in Florida, the old rules of higher ed no longer apply.
At New College of Florida, in Sarasota, DeSantis engineered a conservative takeover so dramatic that it changed the entire institution’s identity.
New College was always unconventional – a no-judgements honors college, without formal grades, where future Fulbright scholars sat next to pink-haired art majors, both equally at home.
In 2015, its commencement speaker was Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian physician, author, and peace activist.
But when DeSantis became governor a few years later, he looked at New College — a quirky 900-student liberal arts college — and saw a big problem.
“It was like a Marxist commune, I mean, left of the left,” DeSantis said in an interview last fall with Condoleezza “Condi” Rice, the former U.S. secretary of state. The governor added: “So I put conservative reformers on the board.”
The new New College is modeled after Hillsdale College in Michigan, a private Christian college.
Campus programming amplifies conservative voices
On-campus events, too, are shifting in a more conservative direction.
Last year, the commencement speech at New College was delivered by Alan Dershowitz, a controversial lawyer and legal scholar who has defended both President Donald Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Dershowitz was featured at four separate New College events during his visit, and the college paid him $25,000.
At the University of West Florida in Pensacola, an anonymous “workgroup” of employees published an analysis of campus events under a state-created program that requires “public policy” debates at each of the 12 universities in the state system.
Under the law, the forums are supposed to present a variety of ideological perspectives.
But at UWF, the workgroup found:
- 71% of the invited speakers had conservative or right-leaning political views.
- Two-thirds of events featured only speakers with conservative institutional affiliations.
- 100% of the scheduled and previously featured speakers this academic year have been men.
The report has been widely circulated among UWF employees, and echoes concerns from faculty, staff and alumni about the school’s direction under Manny Diaz Jr., a former Republican state lawmaker.
Diaz, a DeSantis ally and former state education commissioner, was the sole finalist named by the UWF board for the presidency.
In response to the workgroup’s report, UWF told The Florida Trib the school “continues to comply with all applicable state laws and regulations, including those governing the Office of Public Policy Events.”
“UWF remains committed to providing programming that supports civil discourse and the exchange of ideas from a variety of perspectives consistent with state requirements and University policy,” the university said.
UWF didn’t dispute the accuracy of the workgroup’s findings.
DeSantis and other Florida politicians have justified their actions by saying colleges were previously controlled by a left-leaning, “woke” ideological agenda. But in the state’s own survey of university students last year, a majority of respondents said their college is “equally tolerant of both liberal and conservative ideas and beliefs.”
Students were more likely to describe their professors as liberal than conservative, but a majority said they simply “don’t know,” and roughly two-thirds of students said their institution “is doing a good job” at promoting and encouraging different political views.
‘Faculty are intimidated’
Some of the changes DeSantis has championed have not just imbued Florida’s schools with conservative politics, they’ve also expanded his control over their governance, staff and curriculum, while sidelining the influence of academics.
Tallahassee lawmakers, for example, have funded new conservative-leaning academic centers affiliated with Florida’s colleges across the state, which serve as an express lane for hiring more conservative faculty.
“They don’t go through the faculty, the faculty can’t block ‘em,” DeSantis said during his Naples appearance. “They go to the board of trustees, and they get appointed.”
Most recently, during Memorial Day weekend budget negotiations, lawmakers quietly inserted language giving the state board of education and board of governors, which together oversee colleges and universities, the power to amend general education course lists.
The significant policy shift further weakens the input of Florida’s college professors.
“Since the beginning of universities, faculty have had control of the curriculum,” said Robin Goodman, an English professor at Florida State University. “That is why people go to college, to learn from experts.”
Searches for university presidents also became effectively secret after DeSantis signed legislation in 2022 that shields most of the process from public-records laws.
Although state law calls for a group of finalists to be publicly considered, DeSantis and his allies have frequently handpicked a sole finalist instead — a practice that has drawn critics, including, most recently, former governor and U.S. Sen. Rick Scott.
“I am frankly tired of hearing ‘there is only one sole finalist because no one else was willing to do a public interview,’” Scott wrote to the chancellor of Florida’s university system last month. “That is BS.”
‘You don’t want to poke the bear’
Faculty across the state complained in interviews to The Florida Trib about state interference in the classroom, feeling intimidated into staying silent during staff meetings, or having proposed campus events rejected because their college feared the potential wrath of Republican lawmakers in Tallahassee.
“Most faculty are intimidated,” Goodman said. “They’re terrified. Because they don’t know where this is going to go.”
Robert Cassanello, a history professor at the University of Central Florida who also serves as president of the statewide faculty union, has a word for state lawmakers who accuse college professors of “indoctrinating” students:
“Hypocrites,” Cassanello said.
“They’re not at all consistent, they don’t believe in civil discourse, like they all talk about,” Cassanello told The Florida Trib. “That’s very clear in their actions.”
Said Cassanello: “They have no problem promoting the ideas they favor, and they have no problem prohibiting the ideas they dislike.”
Two years ago, Cassanello and about 20 other UCF faculty listened as their dean, Jeff Moore, read aloud the new prohibitions on teaching certain subjects, in certain ways, under Florida law.
UCF, in a statement, said Moore merely “shared state-provided guidance on courses.”
What was missing from the discussion, according to Cassanello and others who were in the room, were specifics on what exactly was banned. Lawmakers wrote the rules in vague terms, and the resulting discussion was both ominous and conspicuously lacking in details.
“We were told in that meeting that we should obey these regulations,” said history professor Duncan Hardy. “But how one should actually obey these regulations, for general education curriculum, in practice, was not really made clear in this meeting.”
Moore reassured faculty that the university would work with professors who unintentionally violated the new rules. But for those who willfully transgressed, there would be discipline, up to and including termination.
Amid the tension, Cassanello announced to the dean, and everyone else in the room, that he fully intended to violate Florida’s restrictive new law.
In response, the dean warned: “Robert, you don’t want to poke the bear.”
UCF denied the dean used this phrase, although multiple faculty members told The Florida Trib they remembered it being said.
“Dean Moore would not have used that phrase, so it is inaccurate to quote him directly,” UCF spokeswoman Margot Winick said. “The Dean recalls delivering the message that faculty should avoid intentionally stepping outside new parameters.”
Another history professor in that UCF meeting, Vladimir Solonari, is a graduate of Moscow State University.
Solonari, who was once a member of parliament in the former Soviet republic of Moldova, told The Florida Trib that he relocated to the United States to escape authoritarianism. But the UCF meeting gave Solonari unwelcome flashbacks, he said.
“This kind of thinking, I distinctly remember from the Soviet Union,” he said.
Roughly six months before that eye-opening staff meeting, Solonari attempted to organize an art exhibit in UCF’s library that would feature photos, and short biographies, of pro-democracy dissidents in Russia who have been jailed by Vladimir Putin’s oppressive regime.
The short bios described the democratic ideals the activists fought for, the questionable criminal charges they were ultimately convicted of, and the name of the prison they were sent to as punishment.
Solonari said UCF was initially receptive to the exhibit, but later expressed concerns, and demanded that the Putin government’s position also be included, for fairness.
Solonari said he recoiled at the idea of incorporating Russian propaganda into an exhibit honoring freedom fighters, and instead he moved the exhibit to a location off-campus, which ultimately meant fewer people saw the powerful photos.
“They don’t want anything political,” Solonari said he was told. “I said, ‘How is that even political? … It’s about supporting people who are imprisoned, who are persecuted, it’s not about their views. It’s about their right to express them.”
Winick, the UCF spokeswoman, said “the gallery wall in the UCF Library is generally curated specifically for librarian and student projects. Faculty exhibits are not typically included in this program.”
The GOP war against sociology
When college governing boards do settle on new leaders, they are taking over universities that are being closely scrutinized by DeSantis appointees who share the governor’s suspicions about higher education.
In March, Florida’s board of governors deleted Introduction to Sociology from the “core curriculum” required of college students.
While it can still be taken as an elective course, the change means sociology classes will likely attract fewer students, which could lead to reductions in sociology courses, and the faculty who teach them.
Sociology is taught as a standard course in colleges across the country, but Florida’s Republican politicians have for years criticized the subject for alleged liberal-leaning bias.
Ray Rodrigues, the chancellor of the state university system, advocated for removing sociology in March. Rodrigues, too, is a former GOP lawmaker.
In making his case, Rodrigues blasted the American Sociological Association, saying its “mission goes beyond understanding society, and now extends to its transformation. Sociology as a discipline is now social and political advocacy dressed in the regalia of the academy.”
Adia Wingfield, the immediate past president of the American Sociological Association, told The Florida Trib that Rogrigues’ statement is a “fundamental mischaracterization” of sociology and its methods, which are used to study groups and institutions.
“Our conclusions that we reach may sometimes be discomfiting to some audiences,” Wingfield said. “But it is driven by empirical research, data, and fact.”
Wingfield credited sociology with producing research that shows how businesses can improve their bottom line, and employee retention, through family-friendly policies. Sociology also revealed that immigrants are not more likely to commit crimes, Wingfield said.
‘Intense, negative scrutiny’
Across the state, Florida’s faculty speak in hushed tones. The new rules regarding what can be said, and what cannot, are unpredictable.
Pensacola State College’s faculty colloquium series, which is open to the public, was intended to be a place where faculty could “talk informally,” about their areas of expertise, according to Tom Barber, a history lecturer who specializes in local history and the Gulf South.
In the past, professors have presented about country music, philosophy, or the writing process.
Barber himself presented once before, without incident — delivering a talk about policing prior to the Civil War.
But Barber’s latest talk, scheduled for last October, was flagged by university officials after they reviewed a promotional flier for the event, entitled “Convicts, Capital, and Care in the Gulf South: The Political Economy of the Escambia County Poor Farm.”
In a meeting with college officials, Barber was informed that his event would not go forward.
“I asked, what part of it did you find controversial? Would you like to read the whole paper?” Barber recalled, but he said the administration was not interested in reading his paper, or accepting revisions to the event.
“I was just told, ‘Hey, you can’t present this,” Barber said.
Pensacola State did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Barber told The Florida Trib that his research actually reflects favorably upon Escambia County officials. He remains perplexed that his talk was deemed a violation of state law.
“When reviewed under section 4(b) of the statute, the abstract raised concerns,” the college wrote in an email to Barber. “While the statute allows for the exploration of the listed concepts (in 4(a)) when they are presented objectively and without endorsement, the sentence, ‘As managers of both the poor farm and county jail, commissioners blurred the lines between welfare and punishment,’ reads as interpretive rather than objective.”
The email added: “Although this particular presentation cannot proceed, the broader purpose of the colloquium remains: to foster scholarship, encourage exchange, and support faculty voices in ways that both respect intellectual rigor and align with applicable requirements.”
Barber has since delivered his presentation outside of Florida twice, including at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma.
“When I told my colleagues in Oklahoma that I wasn’t allowed to give this at my college, they were very surprised,” Barber said.
Barber said he loves teaching at Pensacola State, and he sympathizes with college administrators who are tasked with satisfying the demands of state lawmakers — at the risk of “intense, negative scrutiny” from Tallahassee if any perceived violations occur.
Michael Vasquez is an investigative reporter at The Florida Trib. He can be reached at michael.vasquez@floridatrib.org.
