The Throttling of American Universities, the Bogus "Woke" Thing, and a Disastrous Breakthrough in Florida

The Trumpian attack on American universities has been relentless.  Conservatives' ferocious hatred for critical thinking in all its forms has now been yoked to an array of oppressive governmental powers -- lawsuits, funding cuts, the opportunistic use of immigration laws, and on and on.  This will end very badly.  Harvard, which at least held out a bit longer than everyone else, is apparently in negotiations to join its peer institutions in abjectly prostrating itself before the country's anti-intellectual powers that be.

As I have been arguing relentlessly for months (OK, years), there is no nuance when it comes to Trump's threat to democracy.  I have also tried to make the case that the attack on universities is anything but a sideshow.  That is, the right-wing attacks on universities are important not only to those of use who are directly affected.  More broadly, those attacks are part of their full-on assault on Americans' freedom of thought.  A column by Professor Moustafa Bayoumi of Brooklyn College in yesterday's Guardian, titled "Trump’s Washington DC takeover is straight out of a fascist playbook," included this:

Enter Donald Trump. Whether it’s an existential threat of “wokeness” run amok in American universities, or the extraordinary danger of unauthorized immigrants picking our vegetables, Trump is prepared to battle everyone and everything, including his own windmills, to restore the country to some illusory past glory that we are all supposed to believe in, and be willing to sacrifice ourselves for.

I introduced a "Dorf on Law Classic" column last week by describing "the empty — but somehow inextinguishable — topic of wokeness/cancel culture/political correctness."  No one hitched his wagon to anti-wokeness more than the still-governor of Florida, who managed to spend tens of millions of dollars of other people's money for the honor of failing miserably in the 2024 Republican presidential race.  But even though he will barely merit a footnote in the history books (at least, those books that will be written outside of the United States in future years), he did manage to be present at the beginning of the end of the modern American university.  To be clear, the anti-intellectual movement in the US would have gotten around to a frontal assault on universities sooner rather than later, but it had to start in earnest somewhere.  And that somewhere was the Sunshine State.

Earlier this summer, in a column noting my move to the western shores of the Irish Sea, I wrote: "When I left UF and the US, I did so because Florida had become a Petri dish (or maybe the better comparison would be to a meat grinder) of reactionary political attacks on academia."  I have now come to think of it as a "demo demo" -- a demonstration of how to demolish a valuable public asset.  Trump and the rest of the Republican Party are now simply taking it to scale.

Long before anyone imagined how easily the Trump people could lay low even private universities from the outside, Florida's governor had led an effort to show how to destroy a state's universities through legislation and internal attacks.  This included making it illegal for any teacher in the state to say anything that would make students feel "guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress" by talking honestly about the nation's history of racial atrocities, but that was only an amuse bouche.

Three years ago, a Republican US Senator resigned his seat to become the president of the University of Florida's flagship canvas in Gainesville, which understandably made the university's stakeholders worry that the reactionary thought police would soon be at their doors.  Although he dutifully created a new "civics" program that effectively required every faculty member to pledge an "Oath of Fealty," the new president turned out to be both incompetent and pettily venal, so he had to go.

The story of finding his replacement has been, as the kids would say, A LOT.  I briefly touched on this topic in the June column that I mentioned above:

I will most likely write a separate column soon about the recent embarrassing mess around the failed effort to name now-former President of the University of Michigan Santa Ono as UF's President, but I do want to point here to the galling hypocrisy of those who sank Ono's nomination because he was supposedly too friendly to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at U of M.  A New York Times article summarizing the hatchet job on Ono quoted a member of the university system's board (who is also a former Speaker of the state's House of Representatives) as follows: "Higher education can’t operate where there’s this heavy-handed, ideological orthodoxy lording over people." He is right. Right?

A man who had just engaged in an ideological purge thus had the utter gall to accuse the people he had just steamrolled of "heavy-handed, ideological orthodoxy lording over people."  But the Ono story is much more important than example number 83,244,358 of Republicans' hypocrisy.  That embarrassing episode was in fact the moment when the battle to maintain academic independence in Florida was finally and truly lost.  How so?

Ono's attempt to become UF's new president -- which would have been a huge step down from his then-current job at one of the country's most respected "public Ivies" (but with a big step up in pay) -- was killed when the culture warriors in Florida decided to oppose him on the basis of his prior advocacy of diversity programs at Michigan.  Ono shamelessly attempted to put all of that in the memory hole, abasing himself over and over again while trying to say "that was then, this is now."  His opponents screamed "Woke," to which he essentially replied, "No, I'd be more than happy to become comatose like the rest of you."

I cannot recall who said it, but a musician in the Sixties or Seventies once offered a quip along the lines of "If you're gonna be a sellout, you'd better make sure someone's interested in buying."  Ono apparently never heard that advice.  The hard-right cadre on the relevant hiring board managed to get him to reveal that he had no principles, but they wanted someone who was a true believer.  In the end, Ono's moral emptiness has made him unacceptable to everyone, no matter their ideological views.  An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education put it this way: "He Wanted a Presidency. He Became a Pariah."

The entire situation was both crass and tragic in various ways, but Ono's humiliation is in fact a distraction.  I happen to have been interviewed (though not quoted) by the author of that piece in The Chronicle, and we agreed that there were two narratives coming out of the big, sad mess: (1) Ono's self-destruction, and (2) What the outcome means for UF and higher education going forward.  Talking about the first narrative is a bit like a rubbernecking at a car wreck, perhaps irresistible but ultimately icky.  The second narrative, however, is the big enchilada.

Why?  This was not merely an intramural battle between two subgroups of Florida's Republican power elite.  It represented a definitive change in how Florida would play the higher ed game.  Until 2025, the chair of the board that control's UF (an ultrarich Republican power broker named Mori Hosseini) had decided that the single most important thing in the world was for UF to climb in the USNews rankings of universities.  That singular focus meant that Hosseini was willing to abide things that Republicans hate (like hiring legal scholars who write about Republicans' sociopathy), so long as doing so raised UF's global profile and thus its ranking.

And it worked.  UF's campus was soon covered in signs declaring it a "top 5 public university."  Hosseini apparently saw no reason to mess with success, which meant that going after Ono seemed to him an obvious next step in his brilliant strategy.  He surely thought of the hiring of Ono as a potential public-relations coup.  As The Times reported before everything blew up: "[T]he university’s board chair, Mori Hosseini, who has been on a quest to move the college up in national rankings, strongly endorsed Dr. Ono.  'He is the right person to accelerate U.F.’s upward trajectory and help make it the undisputed leader among America’s public universities.'"

But there was a new wind blowing through Gainesville, and Hosseini had no idea what hit him.  After he (and Ono) were publicly humiliated by the vote against his attempted big "get," he posted a public statement to the campus community that was an exercise in the five stages of grief, focusing on the injustice of it all, calling Ono's defeat "unprecedented in the Board of Governors’ 22-year history," adding that "Dr. Ono is one of the most accomplished academic leaders in the world," and complaining that "We had a national search led by a committee composed of faculty, the student body president, administrators, alumni, other stakeholders and a representative of the board of governors. The committee unanimously selected Dr. Ono as the recommended finalist in early May."

All true, but Hosseini lost the battle.  At the end of his statement, he added this ominous comment: "Let me be clear: this moment, while disappointing to our Board of Trustees and many of you, will not diminish the University of Florida’s momentum, with or without Mori Hosseini."  Well now.  Was he hinting that he would soon resign over principle?  Was he trying to get ahead of his own imminent ouster?  Neither, it turns out.  Not even two months later, he had drunk the Kool-Aid and published another public statement that was picked up as an op-ed in several Florida newspapers.  His happy talk ended with this: "At UF, our Board of Trustees demands excellence, and we pursue it because it’s what our students — and our state — expect from Florida’s flagship university.  UF is leading with vision, and its best days are ahead."

Hosseini therefore not only lost the battle, he lost the war.  It does not matter whether or not he sticks around (so why not stick around?), because the people who are now fully in charge of the state's university system have swept away his rankings-or-bust strategy and have decided to destroy anything that can be smeared with the woke label -- even an effort to hire a big name university president who was willing to repeatedly repent for having been a bad, bad, woke boy.

The process of destroying a complex system can take time, and there can be several multiple milestones along the way.  Florida's anti-intellectual crowd has now reached the point where they no longer bother to pretend to care about how much they have damaged their state's educational system.  And even the people who thought they were in charge have learned that everything has changed for the worse.

- Neil H. Buchanan