Florida’s new Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has pledged to cut funds for diversity, equity, and inclusion at public colleges and to crack down on low-performing faculty members.
This month, DeSantis was sworn in for a second term as governor of Florida following a resounding electoral victory. He has recently requested that public university administrators provide a detailed accounting of expenditures related to DEI initiatives as the Florida legislature considers budget proposals. On Tuesday, he said that his administration will be working to “remove all DEI and CRT bureaucracy in the state of Florida,” to let those programs “wither on the vine.”
Under the aegis of diversity initiatives, coerced speech and political pressure arise, and as a result, “it truly works as an ideological filter,” DeSantis said. Those bureaucracies are not reflective of what the people and taxpayers of this state desire, but we are perhaps the first state that is genuinely leading by example.
In response to DeSantis’s request for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, university officials provided a summary of each program, the total cash utilized to support the program, and the percentage of financing that came from taxpayer dollars. As a further point, he stated that “DEI bureaucracy” is “inimical to academic freedom” and “constitutes a drain on resources.”
Financial rewards for consultants and university administrators who push the DEI agenda in higher education are substantial. The Heritage Foundation conducted research and discovered that universities typically employ three diverse staff members for every one hundred tenured-professors.
DeSantis has already approved legislation requiring performance assessments of tenured faculty every five years. Further “accountability for tenured academics” was announced, giving university presidents and trustees “the right to call a post-tenure review at any moment.”
He remarked that unproductive tenured teachers represent the “most substantial deadweight cost” at colleges. You, the taxpayers, shouldn’t have to shoulder that expense unless it’s really necessary.
DeSantis made many conservative appointments to the Board of Trustees at New College of Florida with the expectation that the public liberal arts institution will follow suit and remove contentious views from the curriculum. A fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an activist who has rejected critical race theory, Christopher Rufo was appointed, as was Matthew Spalding, a professor of constitutional government at Hillsdale College.
DeSantis spoke of the need for training courses for nurses, truck drivers, and other occupations with shortages in Florida and the nation’s economies, and he advocated for the promotion of a curriculum that promotes the values and philosophy of Western civilization.
Higher education institutions increasingly spend more on administrators than on faculty members, a trend that has been documented across the country. He remarked that there was “not much improvement” in students’ grades. They are increasing the number of bureaucrats and administrative workers to impose their will. That’s a bad example, and we don’t want it to be replicated in the Sunshine State.
DeSantis has also raised concerns about the new Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies curriculum being developed by the College Board. In one iteration of the course, students were introduced to black queer theory and encouraged to think critically about the case for jail abolition. The Florida Department of Education, which requires traditional black history in public schools, criticized the materials as “contrary to Florida law and notably lacking instructional value” and urged the College Board to revise the materials to be “historically correct.”