Under Ron DeSantis’s leadership, Florida has attained the enviable status of the state that liberals most like to hate, and to denigrate irrationally. Thus it is no surprise to see this headline: Pro-woke professors leave Florida universities in protest.
The Tampa Bay Times reported on a July meeting of the Florida Board of Governors. During the meeting, a number of professors expressed concern about the political climate in Florida. Professors and administrators said they were having difficulty hiring and retaining new teachers, in part because of Florida lawmakers dismantling CRT, DEI, and other planks of the leftist agenda from higher education.
Job prospects in academia are, in general, brutal. There are many teachers hungry for tenure-track positions, and the Florida universities will have no trouble filling their ranks. And, of course, the professors who are attracted to Florida precisely because DEI has been dismantled will be vastly better than the ones who think they can’t survive without it.
One employee at University of Florida reportedly said that a half dozen candidates who toured the campus “expressed mixed feelings about moving to Florida in the current political climate.” A candidate who applied to the philosophy department at the University of South Florida reportedly took a job at a lower-ranked school in another state over political concerns.
I call that a narrow escape! This is wonderful, too:
[UCF History professor and AAUP chapter president Robert Cassanello] said that faculty members are especially concerned that they would be called out by conservative journalist and New College of Florida board member Christopher Rufo.
“They’re changing their classes or they’re not assigning books they would normally assign out of fear that if that stuff gets published that Chris Rufo is going to come and target them and tweet about them and they’ll be in the crosshairs,” he said.
Isn’t that great? Professors were assigning books that were so bad they are afraid the taxpayers might find out about them, and now they have stopped. What a win for Ron DeSantis and Chris Rufo!
Of course, “safety” rears its head:
Carolyne Ali-Khan, a social justice in education professor…
Why is there such a thing as a “social justice in education professor”?
…at the University of North Florida, also had to change her course because of the “Stop WOKE Act.” She claimed she was also included in a state-mandated audit of university DEI expenditures, unbeknownst to her.
Which I think means that she is out of a job because she was on the university’s “DEI” staff, but didn’t realize it. Which seems consistent with being an extremely low-priority employee.
She is moving to Molloy University, a small liberal arts college in New York. “It’s not safe here anymore on so many levels,” Ali-Khan said. “It’s not physically safe. It’s not economically safe. It’s not professionally safe. It’s not intellectually safe. That was not true when I got here.”
Florida is “unsafe”! Governor DeSantis, take a bow.
There is much more at the link, but let’s close with New College, which until recently was a failing left-wing institution with hardly any enrollment. DeSantis is now totally revamping it by, among other things, appointing Chris Rufo and other conservatives to its Board of Trustees. One new trustee said that he wants to make New College the Hillsdale of the South. What a great way to transform an institution that looked to be on the verge of going out of business. But you can imagine the whining that has ensued:
Meanwhile, a July 18 report from the Tampa Bay Times found that the newly-reorganized New College of Florida is experiencing an exodus of professors. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo was among six new Board of Trustees members appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
New College provost Bradley Thiessen told the Tampa Bay Times that 36 of the less than 100 faculty at the school have resigned or retired. Some of them are long-planned retirements or sabbaticals, but many were attributed to the change in leadership.
Thiessen said many low-attendance classes would be cut, but required classes would be completed in some form. New College has already hired ten visiting faculty members, and is negotiating with six more. Temporary positions would also be used while the school seeks new full-time hires.
The funniest thing about this is that these left-wing professors think they are making some kind of statement, and presumably damaging Florida in some way, by leaving. No: if a third of New College’s professors are resigning, Hallelujah! They are self-selecting as dead wood, which creates opportunity for Rufo et al. to staff the college the way they want to.
At the moment, there are lots of bad things happening in the world and a smaller number of good things. The way in which the DeSantis administration is remaking education in Florida is high on the list of good things.
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