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Trustees Appointed to Florida’s New College by DeSantis Shutter School’s DEI Office

Trustees Appointed to Florida’s New College by DeSantis Shutter School’s DEI Office

“If DeSantis gets his way—and he likely will—diversity, equity and inclusion efforts will be eliminated from every public college and university in Florida.”

Other governors should notice what’s happening here and do the same thing.

Vice News is very unpleased about this:

DeSantis Cronies Force College to Close Diversity Office

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ handpicked board of trustees voted to shutter New College’s diversity, equity, and inclusion office on Tuesday, the latest step in its hostile takeover of the school and a harbinger of what Florida’s entire university system could look like in a few months.

The board, which has a majority of DeSantis appointees, voted 9 to 3 to abolish the school’s Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence.

Christopher Rufo, a rightwing education activist and one of DeSantis’ appointees to the board, argued during the meeting that diversity efforts undermine fairness. “DEI goes against those principles because it restricts academic freedom, it degrades the rigor of scholarship, it treats people differently on the basis of skin color or other inborn identities,” he said during the board meeting.

DeSantis has sought to make an example of New College, a tiny liberal arts school with a mostly progressive student body that has a large LBGTQ community. Earlier this year he replaced most of the college’s board of trustees with right-wing loyalists who quickly moved to fire the college’s president, replace her with an ally, and push the liberal-leaning school hard to the right.

If DeSantis gets his way—and he likely will—diversity, equity and inclusion efforts will be eliminated from every public college and university in Florida. DeSantis is backing a bill that would cut funding from all of Florida’s DEI programs, as well as ban the teaching of critical race theory at the state’s public colleges and universities.

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Comments

Dear Vice News

Please cry more.

novaculus

BierceAmbrose | March 3, 2023 at 4:57 pm

There’s really only three ways to get paid by people who don’t want what you have to offer:

Fraud — Lie about what they’ll get, so they hand it over for something they want, but won’t get.

Propaganda — Convince them that they want something else, so they’ll hand it over for something they will get, but don’t really want.

Coercion — Force them to hand it over, neither getting nor promised anything.

One wonders which approach dominates in public higher ed. I can’t tell.

BierceAmbrose | March 3, 2023 at 5:03 pm

“Higher Ed” has believed for a while that they determine what the people who pay have to pay for, vs. the people who pay paying for what they want.

Curious, that.

I, myself want a rotating stable of Leo-style hot and cold running supermodels on a crewed yachtL “Shenanigans.” Think of what I’d learn.

Y’all should want to fund that for me, if you were informed, enlightened and righteous enough. As it is, you should be grateful for me cluing you in. So get on that.

The Squalling from the entitled Progressives is honey on the tongue. Sweet but never enough.

Suburban Farm Guy | March 5, 2023 at 9:58 am

Let’s see if enrollment goes up or down.

They got a lot of nerve, accusing us of ‘making war on education’ and ‘book-burning’ when their entire goal in life is overturning every aspect of life