The Grim March Toward Enforced Right-Wing Groupthink in US Universities
"The Harvard of the Unwoke" was the unimaginative title of a puff piece about now-former University of Florida (UF) president Ben Sasse. That op-ed appeared early last year on the notoriously hard-right editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. (The column is behind a paywall that I hope no readers will pay to breach). The idea was that UF was hoping to become to the right what Harvard supposedly was to the left. The author informed his readers that the stakes were high: "Illiberalism, anti-intellectualism and identity politics were spreading on campus for decades... 'The culture of ideological conformity and monoculture at those schools is unhealthy not just for them, but for the nation at large,' Mr. Sasse says."
How quaint. Sasse is long gone, and the Trumpian right is no longer trying to set up alternatives to the elite institutions that they have habitually smeared. Instead, they are now busily remaking everything to fit their idea of what a university is supposed to be. Which is? A true "monoculture" in which even to be in favor of, say, diversity is a fireable offense, and where teaching about systemic racism (or really about bigotry of any kind) is potentially criminal. For all of their complaints about non-conservatives' supposed intolerance of opposing views, these people are the most intolerant snowflakes imaginable.
And to be clear, the supposed illiberalism on American campuses was a made-up problem, invented and relentlessly hyped by the people who could not win arguments on the merits. They claim that universities indoctrinate students, but their evidence is anecdotal at best and relies on repetition of a tiny number of distorted examples rather than proof.
Luckily, there is evidence out there, and it exonerates universities from the charge of being liberal assembly lines. The co-author of one honest-to-god systematic study of how universities affect their students' views (if at all) put it this way to a reporter: "We did find that people who go to college are a bit less likely to be moderate. They’re more likely to have a political position, but it doesn’t look like there’s any liberalizing tendency." The reporter then paraphrased the author this way: "It could appear that modern-day college graduates are disproportionately liberal because left-leaning students are more likely to enroll in the first place." So young people who go to college and study issues become more likely to form opinions about issues, but the average graduate leaves no more liberal than they were on the first day of Freshmen Week.
Monoculture my eye. The likes of Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, and the rest were admitted to elite institutions and received degrees without having to renounce Ayn Rand. That level of openness is not what the Trump regime will allow at the universities that it is trying to remake into mindless cheerleaders of reactionary dogma. To repeat, it is the right that is busily turning universities into indoctrination camps.
Even so, the Florida story still matters. In two recent columns (one in late June, the other yesterday) I characterized what happened at UF starting in about 2021 as a "Petri dish," a "meat grinder," and a "demo demo" (a demolition demonstration). Another way to describe what the right did at UF is "proof of concept," showing that it is not at all difficult for the right -- armed with stacks of billionaires' money as well as bottomless anti-intellectual zeal -- to attack and remake a university's culture into their preferred image.
And even though the fight has now gone nationwide, what Florida's Republicans have done is still worth studying. Not only have other states' Republican-dominated legislatures been copying Florida's tactics, but the culture warriors in Florida have not stopped.
As I pointed out yesterday, it was only this summer that the most far-right dreams in the Sunshine State came true. The chair of the main campus's Board of Trustees (Mori Hosseini) lost a power struggle with the university system's Board of Governors, which the state's governor effectively controls. The latter board killed an attempt to hire the University of Michigan's then-president to replace Sasse as UF's president. The unpardonable sin? At Michigan, he had been in favor of diversity initiatives. And even though he absolutely debased himself, promising that he is now anti-woke, that was not enough.
So the situation at UF went from bad to horrible, and it is about to become even worse. Before I get there, however, it is important to be clear that Hosseini is no hero. As I explained in yesterday's column, he has been obsessed with USNews rankings and has for years done everything possible to push UF up the ladder. That had the somewhat positive effect of making him willing to play the game by the existing non-MAGA rules -- which meant that he was not willing to do things that would make UF look bad to the people who vote in "reputation" surveys -- but it also had the very negative effect of twisting nearly every aspect of campus life into gaming the rankings.
As I explained late last year, it is possible for an especially able administrator (I focused in particular on UF's former dean of the law school, Laura Rosenbury) to minimize the harm caused by the edict from on high to push up rankings, but that it still damage control rather than an affirmative mission of improvement. The edict itself was the problem, and Hosseini was tireless in pushing his nothing-but-rankings-matters agenda.
A nicely illustrative moment grew out of an early controversy in the UF saga. As I explained in a Dorf on Law column in November 2021, UF had made global news of the worst sort by changing its rules (and later trying to walk back those changes) regarding faculty members serving as expert witnesses in cases that the Republican governor cared about. One result of that scandal was that the accrediting body with jurisdiction over that region of the United States (the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges) launched an investigation into whether UF's administration had done something serious enough to cause it to lose its accreditation.
For those who do not follow such things (and few people do), losing accreditation status almost never happens, and it would have been impossible to imagine it happening to the main campus of a large state's university system. It would be like, say, one of the major anti-abortion groups losing tax-exempt status for crossing the line into impermissible politicking. That is, it is possible under the law, but it simply would not happen as a matter of bare-knuckle political reality.
Even so, it was important to undertake the investigation of UF, because something very dangerous had happened, and an investigation with a forgone conclusion is much better than no investigation at all. As expected, the agency did not bring the hammer down on UF. This outcome was possible, however, because the university administration had scrambled to walk back its huge mistake in part by setting up a new system that was supposed to prevent such things from happening in the future.
Eight months after the scandal broke, one of the UF student newspapers reported that the university had been cleared, but it also quoted this from the accreditor's report: "While there are still unresolved concerns among individuals at the institution regarding complex aspects of how conflict of interest, conflict of commitment, and consideration of viewpoint may erode academic freedom, the institution has endeavored in good faith to put safeguards and corrections in place."
In other words, the accreditor found that what UF had done was plenty bad (certainly bad enough to launch the investigation in the first place), but it credited UF's attempt to remediate the damage and was willing to treat the new plan as being undertaken in good faith.
The excellent student journalist then, however, had the good judgment to add that the report "noted concern about state legislation 'regarding censorship in the classroom.' The 'Stop Woke Act, signed in April, limits how race-related issues are taught in public universities, colleges and workplace training." It is that tiresomely named law (more neutrally known as HB7) that I have been highlighting in all of the columns that I have written explaining my decision to leave UF. The accreditor, in other words, was not saying that all was well at UF.
What did Hosseini say?
The report prompted Mori Hosseini, a chairperson of UF’s Board of Trustees, to complain about the media's coverage of the investigation. He said in its meeting Thursday the university has become collateral damage for the media’s agenda throughout the investigation.
Hosseini said the university will push through those “attacks” with integrity, though he was frustrated with what news publications left him with.
“Where do I get my reputation back? Where do I get his [President Fuchs’] reputation back?” he said. “Where do I get the reputation of this university back?”
What the ... ? To summarize, UF's administration did something unprecedented that severely and deservedly harmed the university's reputation. It's accreditor immediately looked into it, and the administration frantically tried to contain the fallout. Only after they did so was the accreditor willing to say, "You did something that you shouldn't have done, but you seem to be trying to make things right. Good on ya." Hosseini, however, wants to know where to go to get UF's reputation back.
Sorry, but UF's reputation had to be damaged by what happened, and the best they could have hoped for was to restore their reputation in full or in part by doing better from then on. It would be absurd to say that a person who is caught stealing but then gives the money back and promises to go to therapy for kleptomania is unfairly tainted by coverage of his crime and the investigation.
And to repeat, things have gotten much worse since then. That student newspaper article went on to note that, in addition to HB7, "[a]nother new law will require state universities and colleges to have a new accreditor every cycle." Why do that? The state's Republicans wanted to punish the accreditor for doing its job, essentially using forum-shopping and intimidation to find more compliant regulators.
Was that an idle threat? Of course not. In its June 26, 2025 edition, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a column under this headline: "6 State University Systems Are Partnering to Create a New Accreditor. Most Details Are TBD." Under that headline was a photo of Florida's permanently angry governor, who announced at a news conference a plan to go one better than the law that the Republican-gerrymandered legislature had passed three years ago. Rather than forum-shop in an effort to play accreditors off against one another (which is what corporations do with forced arbitration clauses, by the way), why not throw off all pretense and create one's own accreditor?
So where do things stand now, at UF and in the rest of higher education in the United States? Private universities are being extorted by the Trump Administration to bend to its will, in the process losing their academic freedom. Red states learned from Florida's Republicans how to undermine one of society's most important sources of independent expertise and knowledge, so the UF model has crossed state borders. And the feds are already initiating their inevitable attacks on public universities in blue states.
Again, all of this has been a solution in response to a nonexistent problem. Right wingers worked themselves into a froth for years, imagining radicalized campuses full of capitalism-hating satanists. Meanwhile, the universities that existed in the real world were in fact a magnet for students of all political views, with the additional benefit to the US of drawing talent from around the world. But now, the American right is celebrating its big win in making sure that higher education will become as White, male, Christian nationalist, and anti-science as possible. As I frequently find myself asking: What could possibly go wrong?
- Neil H. Buchanan