Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has taken the first steps in what seems set to be a decades-long political fight over the nature of America’s public universities. Among the host of major reforms that DeSantis proposed last week are a ban on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs, which he correctly characterizes as “an ideological filter” through which all students are pushed; a transfer of key hiring-and-firing powers away from faculty and toward university presidents and boards of trustees; more frequent reviews of tenured staff; the prioritization of STEM and business programs; and the mandatory teaching of Western civilization. “Academia, writ large, across the country,” DeSantis said at an event in Bradenton, Fla., “has really lost its way.”
As is their wont, critics of the move immediately charged that DeSantis was engaged in a “culture war,” alleged that Florida is at risk of “politicizing” its institutions of higher education, and even submitted that Republicans in the state are guilty of “government interference.” These charges are facially ridiculous. The universities to which DeSantis’s reforms would be applied are public. By charter, they are owned and run by the state, forcibly funded by taxpayers, and, by various means, subject to the democratic process. To complain that the governor and the state legislature are interfering with them is, in effect, to complain that the governor and the state legislature are interfering with the government that they run. If progressives so wish, they can offer up a case against the existence of public universities per se, but, absent such a case, they cannot have it both ways. As things stand, Florida’s public universities are accountable to the public and to the public’s elected representatives — and they will remain so even when that public chooses politicians of whom progressives happen to disapprove. What is good for the goose is good for the gander, and, in Florida, the gander won the last gubernatorial election by 19 percentage points.
Indeed, the progressive argument for public education and public universities has long stressed the social value of imparting common liberal democratic values to students. John Dewey, the patron of progressive educators, wrote that “democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” If the content of those values is not ultimately up to the voters, why should they trust that public education is advancing rather than undermining democratic self-government?
Besides, thanks to decades of deliberate effort — an effort that goes all the way back to the Port Huron Statement of 1962, which called for progressives to obtain a “permanent position of social influence” by taking over the universities — higher education is already highly “politicized,” including in Florida. Were they to come to fruition, DeSantis’s moves would, at best, reduce some of that politicization and, at worst, ensure that other political views are included in the curriculum. Either outcome — even if modest in scope — would represent a marked improvement over the status quo.
On their merits, DeSantis’s constructive suggestions all seem sensible. Whatever the case may be for tenure, frequent performance reviews seem like the bare minimum an employer can do to ensure that a promise of job security does not become a license for complacency. Given the state of the job market, the call to increase the number of students in STEM courses and in practical business courses seems like an entirely reasonable request. As for the inclusion of Western civilization in the mandatory curriculum? Quite obviously, there is a role for the government to play in guaranteeing that the educational institutions it runs are teaching the fundamentals, and ensuring that all students emerge from college with a basic understanding of Western civilization is about as fundamental as it gets.
Of particular import is DeSantis’s focus on DEI. At root, DEI is a marketing term designed to help progressives smuggle a set of pernicious identitarian ideologies into the nation’s institutions while pretending that they are doing nothing more controversial than protecting foundational American pluralism. In his announcement, DeSantis proposed that DEI was not, in fact, about diversity, equity, or inclusion, but about “imposing an agenda on people.” He is absolutely right. In much the same way as political activists have attempted to short-circuit a whole host of live debates by preempting and confining the English language, so the architects of DEI have tried to use HR departments, student-support bureaucracies, and legal compliance rules to silence dissent and circumvent open inquiry. If, as he has promised, he intends to ensure that this endeavor is left to “wither on the vine,” Governor DeSantis will have struck a great blow for intellectual liberty — and, if the pushback spreads to other states and other contexts, he will have struck a great blow for America, too.