Ron DeSantis lashes out against university activism

Unconquered_Statue_of_Florida_State_University
Thad Seymour is approved as UCF's interim president.

Florida’s universities need to beware of the kind of activism that gets in the way of competing views, Gov. Ron DeSantis told the State University System of Florida Board of Governors Thursday.

DeSantis did not touch on the controversy arising in the Florida Legislature this spring as lawmakers debate ordering a survey of political views on university and college campuses.

But he did touch on the Republican lawmakers’ rationale for the controversial survey proposal: a fear or suspicion that one train of political thought might squelch other, particularly conservative, viewpoints on campuses. He urged that universities be places where people are “not just fed an orthodoxy.”

HB 839 would require Florida public universities to survey faculty members and students about their political viewpoints. It is moving in the House, with Republican lawmakers expressing concern that universities’ liberal viewpoints may be indoctrinating students, while Democrats are raising concerns that the survey could be used as a tool to clamp down on liberal academics.

DeSantis held out the University of California-Berkeley, long a national symbol of liberal campus activism, as the kind of environment he did not want to see in Florida.

The Governor’s brief remarks Thursday to the state’s university governing board, meeting at Florida A&M University, mostly offered the themes that he thought they were doing a great job, that Florida has great universities, and that his priorities include promoting higher education for a variety of reasons.

And then he offered a concern.

“I would just caution you, you see some of these other universities around the country, some things that happen, like the culture in places like a Berkeley. That’s a bad way to go here,” DeSantis said. “I want to make sure that we’re focused on achievement, academics.

“I don’t care about activism. People can do that, but that should not be the university’s mission. The universities’ mission should really be academic-focused and really promoting high-achievement in an environment where people are exposed to competing views and are not just fed an orthodoxy,” DeSantis continued.

“I think the people here agree with that, and I don’t think our universities have had the problems that you have seen. But I would just caution, the more you do that, go in that direction, I think the less we’ll be preparing students to actually succeed in society,” he concluded.

Shortly before DeSantis spoke, the Board of Governors approved Thad Seymour Jr. as the University of Central Florida’s interim president. The UCF Board of Trustees offered him that role last week, following the February resignation of former President Dale Whittaker in the wake of that school’s misspending scandal.

Scott Powers

Scott Powers is an Orlando-based political journalist with 30+ years’ experience, mostly at newspapers such as the Orlando Sentinel and the Columbus Dispatch. He covers local, state and federal politics and space news across much of Central Florida. His career earned numerous journalism awards for stories ranging from the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster to presidential elections to misplaced nuclear waste. He and his wife Connie have three grown children. Besides them, he’s into mystery and suspense books and movies, rock, blues, basketball, baseball, writing unpublished novels, and being amused. Email him at [email protected].


5 comments

  • Reid Friedson, PhD

    March 28, 2019 at 3:25 pm

    Try actually surveying ALL students and educators in Florida every year so we can determine which educational institutions in Florida have incompetent and arrogant admin. That would be much more revealing. Pay educators a living wage and health care instead of starvation wages so all our best teachers and professors do not keep leaving the educational profession.

    • JohnDome

      March 29, 2019 at 3:40 am

      huh? “surveying ALL students”, I don’t think so. You want to survey first graders?

      • James Bobo

        March 29, 2019 at 3:27 pm

        I think they mean collage students. He was addressing the state University board of governor’s.

    • James Bobo

      March 29, 2019 at 3:48 pm

      As an ex educator, I’m sure that all Florida universities have some incompetent and arrogant administration members. And some competent ones. You will probably find even more arrogance and incompetence in the Florida State government. Teachers know that the legislature passes laws that are not always in the best interest of teaching and learning. Since Lawton Childs died in office, teachers (all teachers) have been villified and their jobs overwhelmed with paperwork and responsibilities that use to fall on the administrators. And the raises for those responsibilities never happened. I’m not a big fan of raising taxes, but the money would have to come from somewhere. But I speak of K-12, and now it’s time to punish any University level personnel with “incorrect” opinions. Of course, personal opinions don’t belong in the classroom, but they don’t belong on the news either. I would like to read the questionnaire the governor plans to use for this quest. to root out the biases it is bound to include.

  • James Bobo

    March 29, 2019 at 3:56 pm

    I wonder just what kind of “activism” the governor is speaking of. Political rallies, people distributing handouts, teachers or administrators revealing their actual opinions in class or speaches? What is it that the governor wants to see be different that a board of governor’s can affect?

Comments are closed.


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