"Dystopian": DeSantis appointee brags about college professors fleeing state over "open hostility"

Liberal-leaning professors at Florida's public universities are giving up their positions — many of them coveted tenure roles — and blaming their departures on Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' efforts to reconfigure the state's higher education system to align with his conservative principles.

According to The New York Times — which interviewed a dozen academics in an array of fields who have left the state's public colleges or given their notice and, in some cases, plan to move to liberal areas — those professors, while acknowledging the hundreds of top academics who remain in the state, have raised concerns that the governor's policies have become indefensible to scholars and students.

Just four years after he started at the University of Florida, Dr. Neil H. Buchanan, a prominent economist and tax law scholar, has given up his tenured position and moved north to teach in Toronto. Buchanan left George Washington University to work for the Florida college in 2019 shortly after DeSantis took office that year.

In a recent column on a legal commentary website, Buchanan accused Florida and its Republican leaders of “open hostility to professors and to higher education more generally.”

"They have shown in every way possible that they want to get rid of people like me," he wrote. "In this case: Mission accomplished."

The University of Florida told the Times that its turnover rate is not unusual and remains below the 10.57 percent national average. The hiring rate, it said, is also higher than the departure rate. Florida State University and the University of South Florida released similar numbers.

DeSantis' office did not respond to the Times' requests for comment. But Dr. Sarah D. Lynne, the chair-elect of the University of Florida's faculty senate, said that not much has changed except that her campus has garnered national, political attention. Most people who leave the university, she told the Times, do so for reasons completely outside the realm of politics.

“Florida isn’t really a unique scenario when it comes to the politicization of higher education,” said Lynne, who teaches in the Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences. “It’s a beautiful state to live in and we have amazing students, so we’re staying.”

Data from several schools, however, show that departure rates have risen. At the University of Florida, overall turnover went from 7 percent in 2021 to 9.3 percent in 2023, figures released by the university show. A report by the university's faculty senate found some departments were hit especially hard. The school of arts, which includes art, music and dance, “struggles to hire or retain good faculty and graduate students in the current political climate,” the June report said.

In the liberal arts, the report said, “Faculty of color have left.”

Danaya C. Wright, a law professor and the chair of the University of Florida's faculty senate, told the Times she sees job candidates avoiding the state.

“We have seen more people pull their applications, or just say, ‘no, I’m not interested — it’s Florida,’” she said.

At Florida State, Vice President for Faculty Development Janet Kistner commented during a September faculty senate meeting that the “political climate in Florida” had contributed to an upturn in faculty turnover with 37 professors departing for reasons other than retirement in the last year compared to an average of 23 during the past five years.

Dr. Paul Ortiz, a history at the University of Florida and a former president of the college's faculty union, told the Times he is leaving after more than 15 years to join Cornell next summer.

“If the academic job market was more robust, then a lot more people would be leaving,” Ortiz said.

Dr. Walter Boot, a tenured psychology professor who has secured millions in grant money for Florida State, is joining Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, where he will continue developing technology for the elderly. Boot said he started at Florida State in 2008 and immediately felt at home on its Tallahassee campus.

“This was the place I could see myself spending the rest of my career — great department, great university," he told the Times.

Things changed, however, when the DeSantis administration began to push its education policies, he added. Boot, who is gay, cited a 2022 that limits when educators can discuss gender and sexuality in elementary schools. Though the legislation was not targeting universities, it did fuel a fearsome environment, Boot said.

“The run-up and aftermath of its passage involved hostile rhetoric painting queer and trans individuals as pedophiles and groomers, rhetoric that came not just from citizens but from state officials,” Boot wrote recently in the Tallahassee Democrat.

He noted that shortly after the bill passed, a man threatened to kill gay people on Florida State's campus.

“It’s been very difficult, from a day-to-day perspective, not feeling comfortable or even safe where I live,” Boot told the Times.

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Other gay professors pointed to recent state sanctions aimed at transgender employees and students who do not comply with a May law restricting access to bathrooms as well as state restrictions on transgender medical procedures.

Dr. Hope Wilson, a former professor of education at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, had served as an advisor to the college's Pride club and worked with the L.G.B.T.Q. center.

She told the Times that she particularly opposed what she regarded as intrusive requests from the state for information — to which her school responded — on everything from how many students had received transgender care to expenditures for D.E.I. initiatives.

“It just felt very dystopian all the way around,” she said.

Her professional discomfort came alongside personal fears because her child is transgender.

“Florida isn’t a state where I can raise my family or do my job," said Wilson, who now works at Northern Illinois University.

For Christopher Rufo, a conservative writer and activist whom DeSantis appointed a trustee of New College of Florida this year, the faculty departures are a positive outcome.

“To me, this is a net gain for Florida,” he said in a statement to the outlet, railing against transgender medical care and diversity programs. “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 University of Florida's law school has also seen a significant drop this year, with a 30 percent faculty turnover rate. Some of those professors told the Times that political interference played a role in their departures, while other faculty said the state's reputation had dissuaded professors from other places from joining.

Maryam Jamshidi said that after a 2021 law allowed students to record professors in the classroom, liberal-leaning professors feared they would find videos of their lectures on Fox News.

“As a Muslim woman who works on issues of racism and American power, I didn’t feel like U.F. was a place I could safely be myself and do my work,” said Jamshidi, who now teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Questions about gender and race are at the core of an array of legal arguments from constitutional law to criminal justice and workplace discrimination. But in May DeSantis signed a bill that regulates what can be said in classrooms and prohibits university spending on diversity programs.

Kenneth B. Nunn, one of several Black law professors who have recently departed, had already decided to leave by that time.

In 2021, Nunn had been blocked from signing a brief challenging state restrictions on voting by felons. Nunn told the Times that signing such a document is “something that is considered a matter of course for faculty to do anywhere else.”

The university later doubled back on the question of whether Nunn could sign but he took the incident as a sign of the university's direction. He chose to retire from the law school and is currently a visiting professor at Howard University.

For Buchanan, the final straw was the implementation of a review process for tenured faculty, which he saw as the end to academic freedom.

“It’s not just that the laws are so vague and obviously designed to chill speech that DeSantis doesn’t like. It’s that they simultaneously took away the benefit of tenured faculty to stand up for what’s right,” he said. “It’s tenure in name only at this point.”

Since Buchanan writes on tax policy through a progressive lens, he said he felt that he could become a target at any time.

“The Republicans who are running Florida,” he told the outlet, “are squandering one of the state’s most important assets by driving out professors who otherwise wouldn’t have wanted to leave.”