Weaponizing higher education is DeSantis' newest trick

The war on public education continues, and Ron DeSantis is making certain that everyone knows Florida is ground zero for overhauling the way our students learn. First, he installed former Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska) as president at the University of Florida. Starting Feb. 6, Sasse will be paid $1 million in base salary for five years, plus a raise of up to 4 percent. A bonus after five years could add another $1 million to the former senator's paycheck.

DeSantis then announced his targeted, surgical attack on the 62-year-old New College of Florida in Sarasota, a small public college that continuously ranks in the top ten in Public National Liberal Arts Colleges (currently #5) by U.S. News & World Report. It is a "Best Value College" by the Princeton Review and a "Best Buy College" by Fiske Guide. It is considered one of America's best colleges for student voting by Washington Monthly. Fortune Magazine ranks New College of Florida a Best Master's in Data Science. Yet the governor wants to bring in a wrecking ball to New College and make it a "Hillsdale of the South" to give conservative families an option for higher education in Florida.

Hillsdale is a private, religious school in Michigan. Hillsdale's president, Larry Arnn, was recorded (with Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee saying "Teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country. The heart of modern education is enslavement." Arnn is chairperson of the 1776 Commission, the advisory board that seeks to overhaul the nation's schools with a whitewashed "patriotic education." It's important to note that the 1776 Commission's vague language insists that George Washington freed his slaves at the end of his life. Not true: Of the 317 enslaved people at Mount Vernon at the time of Washington's death in 1799, 123 were owned by Washington and eligible to be freed after the death of his wife, Martha (this was per the terms of his will). The Washingtons had no legal authority to emancipate the slaves owned by the Custis estate portion of Mount Vernon, and those enslaved people were inherited by Martha Washington's grandchildren after her death. The 1776 Commission also claims that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. opposed affirmative action. Again, not true: as chair of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr. King initiated Operation Breadbasket, the first successful national affirmative action campaign. Apparently, lying to our children is the GOP's plan for public education, only now, it extends from K-12 to the collegiate level.Conservative families have always had plenty of options. The governor himself is a conservative who chose to attend an Ivy League school that appeals to conservative, liberal, and progressive students. His own education did not sway him to become liberal nor progressive. If his Ivy League education didn't "indoctrinate" him in liberal or progressive ideology, why is he scared that higher education in Florida will "indoctrinate" conservative students to become progressive or liberal? I am reminded of former President Trump's quote: "I love the poorly educated." DeSantis has twisted the mission of New College, claiming it needs to be "fixed" because it doesn't provide a quality education — an attack on the diversity, equity, and inclusion mission that all Florida public colleges and universities held until this past week when DeSantis continued his assault on higher education for daring to include people from all walks of life — not just heterosexual white Christians. The person DeSantis has tapped to lead the change at New College of Florida is Christopher Rufo. Rufo was plucked from virtual obscurity when he started the culture war on critical race theory (CRT), while also admitting that he did not know nor did he care to learn what it is. How's that for education? Ironically, Rufo could likely learn from the daughter of our state senator, Kathleen Passidomo. Dr. Catarina Passidomo's master's thesis in Environmental Anthropology at the University of Georgia (Athens) investigated social capital within a network of local food producers. Her dissertation from UGA in Human Geography was the "Right to (feed) the city: Race, Food sovereignty and food justice activism in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans." Among the classes that Dr. Catarina Passidomo teaches at Ole Miss: Southern Studies, which examines race/racism. Dr. Passidomo teaches this in Mississippi. This is the exact type of class that Rufo and DeSantis would eliminate from public education across the state, and yet the president of the state Senate has a daughter who teaches this exact topic, knowing it poses no threat to the existence of white students. Surely Kathleen Passidomo sees the irony in this and the value of what her own daughter teaches Ole Miss students. Passidomo must recognize that if the governor's plan moves forward, then it will be the first domino that will fall in a long line on top of her own child? In May, my son graduated Gulf Coast High School in Naples with a GPA well north of 4.0. By the end of ninth grade, he had amassed 80 hours of volunteer service work to go toward his Bright Futures Scholarship (students need 100 hours by the time they graduate high school). In addition to being in the engineering academy, he also took coding classes all four years of high school. He has a neck full of awards from winning various Science Olympiad competitions. Additionally, he took so many AP classes and scored high enough on the college board exams that he earned more than a year's worth of college credit. He is intellectually curious and genuinely enjoys learning about a variety of topics. He could never pick a favorite subject during K-12. At New College of Florida, he has found a small, tight-knit community of self-motivated, like-minded thinkers. He wants to use computer coding and artificial intelligence to help improve the lives of those with neurological deficits. New College can help him bring those areas of focus together in a single major so he can continue on with studies at the graduate level (which, if this attack on education continues, will happen outside of Florida). While in their first semester of college, my son's friends at UF were taking computer classes repeating tasks they had done as ninth graders. My son was learning new object-based languages and how to apply real-world frameworks and systems to collate and organize data in a commercially usable format. How? Because he was able to demonstrate competency in those basic skills: He didn't need to repeat them and grow bored like his counterparts at UF who were skating through skills they already knew inside out; cookie-cutter computing, if you will. New College of Florida's courses challenge the student who wants to chase knowledge — not a GPA. My son receives no grades at New College. That doesn't mean it's easy. Rather, he receives detailed feedback in the form of written evaluations throughout his courses; undergraduates are treated as if they are already in graduate school. If he doesn't demonstrate proficiency, he doesn't get credit for the class. Professors are invested in their students' success, and students are accountable for their work. If anything, New College's format is more rigorous than other colleges in the state. It's clear DeSantis hasn't spent any quality time inside the classrooms at New College of Florida to see for himself what these students are learning: he's picking his fight with New College because it is small; he didn't expect people to be outraged by what's been labeled his "hostile takeover" of a jewel in the state university system.My son's peers at New College are similar in that they are self-motivated to learn, ask questions, and come up with solutions. My son is friends with people from all over the country as well as international students. Many are gay/trans, heterosexual, and others are still figuring it out. We're talking about young people in their late teens and early twenties. Those of us without outside interference had the opportunity to figure out who we were and carve out a place for ourselves in life at that age. These young people deserve the opportunity without the governor interfering.I remember when the GOP was the party of small government. Yet here they are, with DeSantis trying to force feed his deeply personal, bigoted agenda down our throats. After all, DeSantis himself has said that Florida is freer than it has ever been. I was born here, and this is the scariest time to be a Floridian. The attack on New College of Florida and the university system in general should be a shrieking wakeup call to everyone: this is not about educational philosophy. It's about making headlines as DeSantis paves his way toward the 2024 presidential run, and those who are in college right now happen to be in front of the paver. Let's just pretend for a moment that this is about educational philosophy. DeSantis wants a Hillsdale of the South? Fine. Build one from scratch, from the foundation up, the way Florida Poly was established in 2012 in Lakeland. I'm sure there's another community that would welcome the economic benefits that a Hillsdale type public school would bring to it. Don't let the governor destroy New College of Florida. If they are successful in overhauling New College and DeSantis becomes president, then what they do at New will become the blueprint for higher education throughout this country. Your child or your grandchild's education is on the line.

A native of Miami Beach, Danielle DeLaney graduated from the University of Tennessee with bachelor's degrees in English and journalism. She worked in both government and private sectors as a researcher and technical editor. DeLaney lives in Naples with her husband of 30 years, David. Their son attends New College of Florida.   

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Weaponizing higher education is DeSantis' newest trick