Editorial: DeSantis goes to school on Florida: Here come the thought police

Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently described "culture wars" as, at bottom, an attempt by American oligarchs to distract the middle class from the oligarchs' efforts to reap what unguarded riches they could. That provides an explanation for many unfathomable actions political leaders have taken on their behalf, from decimation of environmental enforcement to tax cuts for the 1 percenters to IRS budget cuts that make it harder to collect even those reduced taxes. But, recent actions by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis show how much deeper this bottom lies, how much more damage these culture warriors intend to do to our society.

The imposition last week of a DeSantis-appointed board of trustees on one of the state's finest and most free-thinking liberal arts colleges, New College of Florida, demonstrates an effort to inculcate all the hateful and anti-Democratic policies he has conjured to date and institutionalize them nationwide and forevermore.

The new board is led by Christopher Rufo, an anti-'woke' warrior who fought nationwide against teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT) in American public schools despite the fact that it wasn't being taught in the first place. In the same vein, joined by "friends and colleagues from the conservative movement," he now says he plans to "recapture" the "notoriously left-wing campus" and topple any teachings or programs that advance "diversity, equity and inclusion." Equality in American society apparently is supposed to happen all by itself, so it's left-wing to even discuss the issue. Bootstraps, baby.

In a treatise published Thursday in City Journal, a publication of the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, where Rufo is a senior fellow, he spells out his goals: to undo the decades-long "grave threat to the American system" inflicted by (civil rights) activists and to replace any such focus by filling Florida institutions with "classical" thought and policies, starting at New College.

New College, for the record, is a state school that, despite its small size — 669 students enrolled in 2022 — has distinguished itself nationwide for its intellectual rigor combined with a largely student-generated curriculum and an environment known for tolerance of personal expression. In the past five years, more than 34 of its students have won Fulbright scholarships to study, research or teach around the world. Since 1968, 86 New College students have won Fulbrights for work in more than 36 countries.

But, DeSantis and appointee Rufo have something different in mind for New College of Florida. They envision a place not to open minds through pursuit of knowledge and exploration of ideas, but to groom Florida's future leaders with views the Governor's political base buys into and to scale up this effort throughout the nation. They're out not to educate but to institutionalize their misconceptions in the same way they imagine the left has done to them, as society has progressed in institutionalizing civil rights, women's rights, gender rights and more.

If they think it's wrong for their conjured left-wing, nationwide conspiracy to hijack political thought at universities, why would they think it's right for them to lean their own political thumbs on the scales of intellectual pursuit? If they looked honestly, they'd see they're not the martyrs they imagine themselves to be. Their recent electoral victories in Florida should show that no one has denied them the right to stoke their arguments in the public forum. They just want to tilt the political playing field, as when the Governor gerrymandered Florida electoral districts to deny Black Democratic voters representation; or when he created a special squad to go after self-generated election fraud, again targeting largely Black voters; or when his Republican legislative majority rewrote state law to protect schoolchildren from imagined homosexual grooming that wasn't taking place, in the process denigrating the entire LGBTQ+ community; and took on Disney for deigning to stand up on behalf of its LGBTQ+ employees.

So, to election police and anti-woke police, we now add thought police. It's easy to slough all this off as the work of nice guys who just have a different point of view. But in Ron DeSantis' world, there's only one point of view. Welcome to his "Free State of Florida."

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Editorial: Gov. DeSantis' New College remake smacks of thought police