Last week, the University of Florida peremptorily announced that it had ended its ill-fated experiment with DEI. “The University of Florida,” the college’s missive confirmed, has “closed the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, eliminated DEI positions and administrative appointments, and halted DEI-focused contracts with outside vendors.” Going forward, the university explained, the more than $5 million per year that was being spent on the initiative will be redirected into “a faculty recruitment fund.” And they say that nothing ever changes!
UF’s move brought it into full compliance with a recently passed Florida statute that prohibits the state’s public colleges and universities from spending any money — including privately donated money — on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Still, while he was obliged to oversee the change, we doubt that following these rules was much of a hardship for the university’s new president, Ben Sasse. Last year, in his inaugural address, Sasse made it clear that universities ought not to be “in the business of advancing either a theology of the right, or a theology of the left.” “We are not,” Sasse proposed pithily, “a seminary.”
Conceptually, this is precisely the correct way of thinking about America’s DEI programs, which like to present themselves as the purveyors of commonplace liberal norms, but which, in reality, serve as little more than Trojan horses within which all manner of fanatical ideologies are smuggled into environments in which they manifestly do not belong. Like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” departments sound entirely innocuous until one looks more closely under the hood. And then? Well, just as roses by any other name would smell as sweet, so rank identitarianism rechristened as “inclusion” remains revolting to the well-adjusted man. Upon signing the law that excised it from his state’s establishments of higher learning, Governor Ron DeSantis told the press that “DEI is better viewed as standing for discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination,” and that it thus has “no place in our public institutions.” DeSantis was correct. The University of Florida is, indeed, not “a seminary,” but if it is to play any catechizing role, it must be to disseminate the values that were promised by the Declaration and realized by the 14th Amendment. To do anything less is to embrace cultural suicide.
Since it was announced by the legislature in 2023, Florida’s approach has been characterized by some as “overreach.” We find this critique baffling. Reasonable people can disagree over the extent to which civil-rights laws ought to be applied to private institutions, but, whatever they conclude, those debates simply do not obtain in this context. Like the other schools to which Florida’s statute applies, the University of Florida is a state-created, state-run, and state-funded organization, whose fate, by definition, falls strictly within the purview of the state’s government. To complain that the government of Florida is interfering with the University of Florida is akin to griping that the government is interfering with the government. As a practical matter, one would not wish the men and women of Tallahassee to micromanage every last feature of academic life in Gainesville, but, evidently, that is not what is happening in this case. Instead, the state’s authorities are establishing minimum guidelines for how taxpayers’ money can be spent, and they are doing so in a manner that upholds the most precious of America’s ideals. This country would be in better civic shape if others followed suit — and, once they see the results from the Sunshine State, we have little doubt that they will.