Ron DeSantis defends UWF Board nominee who criticizes women prioritizing their careers

Gov. Ron DeSantis defended his appointment to the University of West Florida (UWF) Board of Trustees of a political scientist who claims that encouraging women to prioritize their careers has led to the decline of family life.

In speeches, essays, articles, and interviews Scott Yenor details his views against same-sex relationships, including that LGBTQ+ practices bring “dreaded diseases,” and labeling career-oriented women as “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome.”

But DeSantis claimed during a press conference Friday that he wasn’t familiar with Yenor’s views that women should put motherhood first, which he first garnered criticism for after his remarks at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021 and has since repeated in other writings and interviews.

“I’m not familiar with that. I mean, obviously, I think if you look at the state of Florida, we probably have a higher percentage of women enrolled in our state universities than we do men, and that’s probably grown under my tenure,” DeSantis said during the Jacksonville press conference in which he talked about the results of his education policy. “But what I don’t do, what I don’t like is cherry-picking somebody saying this, and then trying to smear them.”

Democratic Sen. Lori Berman of Palm Beach County called Yenor’s opinions troubling and said nominating someone like Yenor to the Board was counterproductive.

“I find the whole thing shocking,” she said. “I think it’s a throwback to an age that is in the past and belongs in the past. We have seen that women have been part of the workforce now for many many years, and it’s been very successful. We’ve had women advance in business, in politics, in nonprofits, and education, and all of these careers because they went to college.”

Most notably, Yenor is a political science professor at Boise State University and was a fellow at conservative think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and The Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life.

In a 2023 interview with the First Things podcast, published by a journal of religion and public life of the same name, Yenor described how honor and shame were the most effective tools to deal with declining birth and marriage rates.

“But what the effect of that large number of single, never-married females, and childless females are going to have on our politics, on our regime, on our political culture is something that — because it’s historically unprecedented — it’s something that we don’t really have a great grasp on,” Yenor said in the interview.

The Governor’s Office announced DeSantis tapped Yenor and four others to the UWF board on Monday. The university in Pensacola has 14,300 students and 2,400 faculty and staff, according to its website. The Board has 13 members and the Florida Senate must confirm all appointments.

“You can have people get appointed who have flagrant left-wing backgrounds, and that’s just swept under the rug,” DeSantis said. “You never hear legacy media trying to highlight any of that. So I don’t play those games. The proof is going to be in the pudding about what they’re willing to do.”

DeSantis also said during the press conference that there would be changes coming to UWF, referring to the institution as highly politicized. The shakeup of the board mirrors the Governor’s overhaul two years ago of the board of New College of Florida in Sarasota.

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Jackie Llanos reporting. Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: [email protected]. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.