The American Association of University Professors has just released a frightening report entitled “Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System.” It is a lengthy, meticulously researched and sober account of the destruction that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is inflicting upon his state’s colleges and universities. The study — which will dismay professors, students and parents alike — concludes with an ominous warning about mounting authoritarian threats to scholars across the globe.
Wherever Republicans have a legislative supermajority, they have built a “laboratory of autocracy.”
The AAUP’s investigation, however, is not without its moments of grim hilarity. “Political Interference” is packed with details of the farcical ploys and personages involved in the GOP’s onslaught on higher education. Its pages are populated with incidents and characters that seem spun from a campus novel, a genre of fiction that lampoons the extreme dysfunction of the frisbee-strewn quad. Unintentionally, the AAUP’s report illuminates DeSantis’ role as a comedy content creator.
Hey “Florida Man,” with your fondness for bath salts, pythons as pets and “Booty Patrol” trucks, meet your new sidekick: “Florida College President.” In his past life, Fred Hawkins was once a rodeo cowboy and arrested for impersonating a police officer. He is now impersonating the president of South Florida State College, having come directly from three years in the Florida House (his academic qualifications are a B.S. in political science from the University of Akron). In true Florida College President style, the DeSantis ally somehow tweeted about being hired three weeks before his official interview for the job!
An entire section of the report is devoted to New College, an institution that DeSantis and his henchmen have ransacked. They view their assault on this small, quirky school as a blueprint for how conservatives can upend similar “woke” institutions across the country. This goes to prove that wherever Republicans have a legislative supermajority, they have built a “laboratory of autocracy,” a legislative space in which anti-liberal munitions are tested, refined and readied for export to other red states.
The DeSantis’ cronies who run New College have landed on the expedient of using athletic scholarships to recruit students. Interestingly, New College now has twice as many baseball scholarships as the University of Florida (whose student body is 90 times larger!) In a phrase that suggests the AAUP is familiar with the campus novel genre, the report observes: “New College also does not yet have a baseball field, or for that matter any other intercollegiate athletic facility, although the parking lot, this committee was told, now has batting cages.”
Republicans are not only good at dismantling democratic institutions, but enriching themselves in the process. Again and again, “Political Interference” exposes how GOP patronage networks are filling in the gaps created by DeSantis’ purges. It should come as no surprise then that sitting on one New College presidential search committee was Bridget Ziegler, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty (whose husband has been accused of rape, allegations he has denied).
GOP patronage networks are filling in the gaps created by DeSantis’ purges.
As DeSantis’ New College staffs up (or grifts up), one administrator at the school sighs that “committees are irrelevant; faculty will is irrelevant. Trustees are trolling for candidates on Twitter and most of those candidates are wildly unqualified.”
“Political Interference” reminded me that the conservative takeover of higher education abides by a logic I would describe as “Convert or Kill!” Extremists in the Sunshine State are trying to cast Florida colleges and universities in their own ideological image. Even if that fails, they’ll completely destroy these institutions in the process.
And either outcome is fine by them! In response to a question from The New York Times about faculty departures at New College, trustee (and DeSantis appointee) Chris Rufo wrote: “To me, this is a net gain for Florida […] Professors who want to practice D.E.I.-style racial discrimination, facilitate the sexual amputation of minors, and replace scholarship with partisan activism are free to do so elsewhere. Good riddance.”
The consequences of this cynical strategy are now evident. More than 40% of the New College faculty have resigned. At other state schools, “professors are leaving the state in droves, either retiring or accepting offers in other states […] Many are leaving the state, often to take positions at less prestigious institutions with more onerous teaching loads.”
No Republican offensive against higher education would be complete without a campaign against ”woke ideology.” Permit the AAUP to introduce you to S.B. 7, sometimes known as the Stop W.O.K.E. (Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act. It sits alongside a docket of other bills aimed at “gender studies, critical race theory, and intersectionality.” The attempts to stifle the free speech of the faculty — which, I remind you, is expert speech, not just a bunch of folks voicing a “hey hey, ho ho” chant — was referred to by one judge cited in the report as “positively dystopian.” (It’s also no accident that these academic frameworks do the work of critiquing patriarchal power exercised by white men.)
Conscientious conservatives have taken note of how dangerous DeSantis’ crackdown on academic free speech is. The AAUP’s preliminary report features this observation from one dissenter: “I’m the faculty advisor for the Federalist Society, for the Law School Republicans, and for the Christian Legal Society. If they find me threatening, the rest of you are dead in the water. Be wary and be aware. If I don’t have academic freedom, neither do you. If you don’t, neither do I. We are in this together.” We, the professors and the students, are in this together. But apparently our upper administrators (some of whom were once professors themselves) are not into the whole guild solidarity thing. Indeed, the AAUP underscores the overweening cowardice of Florida’s complicit university leaders. Reading through “Political Interference” I was struck by the staggering number and variety of extremist conservative missions that are being launched against higher education. These range from donors practicing what I call “viewpoint philanthropy” (providing funding for partisan pet projects) to attempts by the Legislature to fund a “Freedom Institute” whose academic goal, of course, would be to end “cancel culture.” This air, land and sea invasion of Florida’s campuses entails lawsuits, legislative skulduggery and hostile takeovers of boards and committees. The endeavor must cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It must involve hundreds of operatives. As I have noted, the far left might dominate liberal arts faculties at elite universities, but nothing on their side compares to the funding, vision and grassroots organization of the far right. Many campus novels end with the brainy but flawed protagonist’s wizened reflections on all that their vainglory, narcissism and greed has wrought. I doubt the characters described in “Political Interference” are presently capable of such self-awareness. So better to conclude with the report’s own reflection: “We call on all professional organizations, unions, faculty, students, staff, administrators, and communities across the country to fight such ‘reforms’ tooth and nail and to offer support to colleagues and unions in Florida and beyond, however they can. The survival of the institution of higher education free from political interference and the ideological agenda of autocrats—a cornerstone of democratic societies—hangs in the balance. Being a bystander is no longer an option.”
Jacques Berlinerblau is a professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University. 
