Documenting the damage to higher education in Florida | Steve Bousquet

A scathing new report documents the “horrifying” deterioration of higher education in Florida.

It should be required reading for every college student — and come to think of it, every taxpayer, too.

For the first time, the report lays out in disturbing detail the extent of the damage done to a once-great system by Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Legislature and their allies in the higher education bureaucracy, which has been politicized to unprecedented levels, with disastrous results. As much as anything, this will be the destructive legacy DeSantis leaves behind when he eventually leaves office.

“What has happened in Florida’s colleges and universities over the past couple of years is a tragedy for Florida students and their families,” said Irene Mulvey, a mathematics professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut and president of AAUP, the American Association of University Professors, which compiled the report.

Using news accounts, public records and interviews with dozens of educators, AAUP paints an exceedingly dark picture.

It’s all there: the brutal takeover of New College in Sarasota; secrecy over university presidential searches; attacks on teacher tenure, labor unions and accrediting agencies; rampant cronyism in presidential choices and on university trustee boards, including appointing out-of-state ideologues with no ties to Florida; restrictions on teaching race and sexual orientation; and blocking professors from testifying about their subject matter expertise in court.

It shouldn’t be overlooked that DeSantis wanted to go further and give university trustees — political appointees, hacks in some cases, chosen for connections, money and school loyalties, not for their education expertise — control over hiring and firing faculty members.

Even the presidential search at Florida Atlantic University, tainted by Tallahassee partisan politics, made it into the report.

The authors say that the sense of fear and thought control is so intense on Florida campuses that many faculty members did not want their names to appear in the report for fear of retribution. That alone tells you plenty about the condition of academic freedom in Florida.

“They want to create an atmosphere of fear that results in self-censorship and will chill free speech, and their tactics are working,” said Matthew Lata, a Florida State University music professor.

Lata said faculty members are fleeing Florida in record numbers, and it’s becoming harder to fill vacant teaching jobs.

Historical context matters, too. AAUP’s report compares today’s conditions to those of the Legislature’s notorious anti-communist and homophobic Johns Committee of the 1950s and ’60s, which terrorized professors, civil rights activists, journalists, teachers and students. (The committee was named for state Sen. Charley Johns of Starke, its chairman).

For five years, the AAUP report recalled, Johns Committee agents “monitored lavatory stalls and private bedrooms.” The University of Florida was the first academic target.

A DeSantis spokesman dismissed the AAUP report as a “hoax,” the Tampa Bay Times reported. Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, who supported DeSantis’ changes to higher education, also disagreed with the report.

“Our institutions should be institutions of learning. They should not be institutions of indoctrination,” Passidomo said. (Was she indoctrinated in college? No, she said).

As the professors noted, higher education should be a wonderful journey of the intellect. But DeSantis and his allies want to erect barriers and decide how young people can think.

“Learning new stuff is one of the joys of being human,” Mulvey said. “College students should have the right to learn the subjects they want to study, taught by professors who are experienced in those subjects, and those professors get to determine the methods of instruction … But your governor’s agenda is to limit opportunities, and his policies are driving high-quality faculty to flee Florida.”

One faculty member who was not shy about being quoted by name in the AAUP report was LeRoy Pernell, a law professor at Florida A&M University.

“We can’t run away from what is happening in Florida,” Pernell said. “Bullies depend on their victims running away and hiding. On their silence. We can’t run away and hide. We can’t be silent.”

He’s right. DeSantis & Co. have done catastrophic damage to Florida’s higher education system.

Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the South Florida Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or (850) 567-2240 and follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @stevebousquet.