Attempts to Destroy Higher Education in the US (and in one state in particular) Started Long Ago

Yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education included an essay by John W. White, who is an education professor at the University of North Florida.  Titled "Secret Rules Now Govern What Can Be Taught in Florida," White's piece describes an extreme chilling effect on higher education in the nation's third-largest state, with professors being forced by their university units to remove the words "diversity," "equity," "inclusion," and "culture" from their syllabi.  That is perhaps unsurprising, given that the Sunshine State's governor is still the man who thinks that his "war on woke" was pure genius.  But White explains that the situation is even worse than it looks.

As an aside, the emptiness of the word "woke" still astounds.  A few months ago, when the right's outrage du jour was about Cracker Barrel's logo, David French wrote in his New York Times column: "Again, this is referring to a logo that simply has the name of a restaurant on it. If that logo is woke, then the word has no meaning. It’s now a stand-in for anything MAGA dislikes."  Sure, French believes that "cancel culture was real," even though that epithet is simply another term for wokeness.  But to give credit where it is due, at least French has recently been aggressive in calling out intolerance on the right.

Professor White's essay was surprising only in the details.  After all, he works within a state university system that took away tenure in all but name and replaced it with an insane, slapdash post-tenure "review" system that no one understands.  Even so, the now-former Provost at the flagship campus in Gainesville called that mess "a success," saying that "[c]ritics have claimed post-tenure review effectively eliminates tenure at UF. Nothing could be further from the truth." Why? Here is his odd defense: "By ensuring that tenure provides the critical tangible benefits the system intends, we help arm it against attacks that it is an unfair and unneeded ‘job for life’ and should be eliminated."

So it was necessary to end tenure in all but name because otherwise tenure would have been ended in name as well?  Got it.  Good one.  And we had to destroy the village to save it.

Meanwhile, the scandal-plagued governor keeps on keeping on, most recently announcing that his state's universities should stop hiring H-1B visa holders: "We will not tolerate H-1B abuse in Florida institutions. That’s why I have directed the Florida Board of Governors to end this practice."  Even so, as the article in The Guardian from which that quote was drawn points out, "it’s unclear how such a move could be carried out. States do not have authority to revoke federal visas, and US Citizenship and Immigration Services regulations prohibit firing employees based on immigration status."

Notably, DeSantis's rant included this: "Universities across the country are importing foreign workers on H-1B visas instead of hiring Americans who are qualified and available to do the job."  Normally, the response to such an ignorant statement would be that US universities have long had the ability to draw top talent from around the world, and it is that kind of competition for the best of the best that conservatives have long claimed to want in their universities.  But now that Florida and other states are making it impossible for professors to do their jobs, turning even stars like Professor White into unthinking mouthpieces for conservative political correctness, it might in fact be true that pretty much anyone is "qualified" to do what Republicans want professors to do from now on.

In short, Florida's attacks on its own universities continue to validate three columns that I wrote this past summer, where I characterized what happened at UF starting in about 2021 as a "Petri dish" or a "meat grinder," (here), a "demo demo (a demolition demonstration)" (here), and finally "proof of concept" for what Republicans are now trying to do nationwide.  I added "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."

Even so, the Board of Trustees that controls the main campus at the University of Florida (UF) is chaired by a rankings-obsessed political donor, and he recently touted a bogus new ranking system that put UF at the top -- that is, Numero Uno -- in the country.  That ranking, it should surprise no one to learn, "rewards institutions that encourage viewpoint diversity and maintain robust, well-rounded curricula," which is simply euphemistic code for a ranking system that is designed to put "the Harvard of the un-woke" at the top of the heap because it is now being run by hard-right demagogues.

But there is a larger story regarding UF that goes beyond the politics of the moment, and it illustrates how badly an institution's culture can go awry when the message from the top is toxic and disrespectful. 

Frequent readers of Dorf on Law might recall that I took emeritus status at UF in 2024 after having joined the law faculty there in 2019.  That relatively brief stint is getting more and more difficult to see in my rearview mirror.  Even so, I was there when all hell started to break loose after DeSantis decided to squander one of the state's key assets, and during my time there I spoke with many faculty about what had gone wrong.  What I learned was that Florida's politicians have long held Florida's universities in contempt, engaging for decades in once-unusual efforts to make a mockery of even the most basic concepts of faculty governance.

For example, while every law school with which I am familiar has a slightly different relationship to its central university administration when it comes to hiring deans, UF's system was the most extreme that I have ever seen.  At one of the other law schools on my resume, the law faculty engaged in an extensive vetting process that involved campus visits by candidates and ultimately a faculty vote that sent a slate of acceptable candidates to the university president's desk.  It was a source of tension that we were not allowed to rank our choices, but on the other hand, the president by rule was required to choose only from that list (or to go with the nuclear option and declare the search a failure, starting over again after generating terrible headlines that would drive away future applicants).

At UF, however, the university gives no weight at all to faculty input on hiring deans (or to faculty input on much else), and this faculty powerlessness has had the effect of making many faculty members act out.  For example, during my first year there the dean was in the fourth year of a five-year term, and (as is common) she asked the university to renew her appointment for a second term.  At a normal university, the faculty would then have engaged in a careful review of the incumbent, providing procedural safeguards to the dean and to everyone involved.  At Florida, the faculty was told that it could not even run the purely advisory review that is allowed when hiring new deans.

The result was sadly predictable.  As I have made clear at various time (see, for example, here), I was impressed by the job that that dean was able to pull off, given the state's hostile political environment.  But because the faculty already viewed themselves (quite understandably) as being in an us-versus-them situation, many of my former colleagues reflexively attacked everything that the dean did.  When these faculty critics were explicitly told by the main campus administrators that there would be no official faculty review of the dean, they decided to carry out an unofficial review of their own.

The problem with that plan was that it was inevitably an ad hoc affair, especially because it was contrived by a faculty sub-group with a clearly hostile preconceived outcome in mind.  That being obvious, people who were supportive of the dean were unwilling to engage, meaning that the process could not possibly result in a fair assessment.  In addition, people who might have offered dissenting opinions saw no reason to do so, because everyone knew that the university had no interest in whatever the informal review might find.  In what I found to be the darkly amusing low point of the story, the document that the anti-dean sub-group created included among its complaints (gleaned from a survey of faculty) the absurd statement that the dean was not doing a good job because the Starbucks in the student lounge area (which that dean had helped to bring to campus in the first place) closed too early in the afternoon.  I wish I were kidding.

That is not to say that faculty members at other places are immune to silliness.  A friend at a middle-ranked law school once told me about a faculty debate over whether to make an offer to an excellent scholar who had been denied tenure at Yale.  One of his colleagues voted no, arguing that "if we hire someone that Yale fired, that would tell everyone that we're not as good as Yale."  Every professor I know has at least ten war stories like that one.

The serious point, however, is that UF's culture was already uniquely ugly, because the faculty had been beaten up and ignored for so long that they ended up inadvertently validating the contempt with which the university's political appointees had always held the faculty.  The provost did not take the unofficial review of the dean seriously, because it was unserious.  That is not a defense of the provost more generally or the system that created him, but it is not difficult to see how the cycle of dysfunction grew worse and worse over time.

I will offer one last incident to emphasize the point.  There was enormous blowback in 2021 when UF's president and provost announced that they were changing the longstanding practice of allowing faculty to testify in court as expert witnesses.  As I explained in a Dorf on Law column shortly after that story broke, the new rule issued from on high was that faculty could not appear in court on behalf of any party suing the state of Florida, because (in the words of the university's administrators), "[a]s UF is a state actor, litigation against the state is adverse to UF’s interests."

That was insane and generated negative headlines worldwide, and the administration walked it all back (very clumsily) soon thereafter.  In what turned out to be mostly a public relations move, the administration then created a university-wide faculty committee to review administrators' denials of faculty requests to engage in outside activities.  That committee was purely advisory, but it did formally exist and was empowered to hold meetings, hear evidence, and send recommendations to the provost.

I was not on that committee, but I did agree to serve in a role that amounted to being an expert witness of sorts, not representing any party but allowed to weigh in on questions of process.  What I witnessed over the space of several meetings was a group of six or seven faculty who were so angry about the university's longstanding disdain for faculty governance that they egged each other on until the committee had become a "we can review everything" board.  Whereas the original idea was to ask whether, say, a department chair's denial of a faculty member's request to teach an additional course at a different university was politically motivated (rather than a decision based on "conflict of commitment" rules), the committee members started acting as if they could review everything (including the provenance of the rules themselves) based on their own opinions.

In one case under review, a staff member in one of the university's career services offices wanted to make money on the side by advising non-UF clients on how to get jobs in the same field in which the staff member was providing advice to UF students.  The unit's top administrator denied the request, saying that it was a clear conflict of interest to have a UF staff member help people compete against UF students.  Even so, the administrator who denied the request did allow the career advisor to work with people who had been in the field for ten years or more, explaining to the committee that this would sufficiently eliminate the conflict of interest, given that UF students would necessarily be looking for entry-level jobs.

This was a clear example of something that had no political valence and that had a completely sensible explanation, based on the interests of the university and its students.  Even so, one committee member said, "Oh come on, I don't believe that all that many UF students would've been harmed."  At one point, I noted that the request was in fact moot (for procedural reason too annoying to recount here), but another committee member shot back: "I don't care if it's moot.  I hate this, so we should send a message that we won't stand for it."  Ultimately, the committee voted against the administrator in every case that I saw.

Again, I have no reason to defend the top brass at UF, but I was hardly surprised when the provost rejected all of that committee's recommendations.  If I could have said something to him, I might have tried this: "These people feel powerless, because they are at UF.  What do you expect?"  And in turn, I can hear his reply: "Be that as it may, they are giving me obviously bad advice.  At most, you've explained why they have gone rogue without denying that they have indeed gone rogue."

Have I seen colleagues at other schools make bad decisions?  Of course.  In my pre-UF days, I once had a colleague (who teaches constitutional law) tell me that his committee was bound by faculty bylaws to review a decision on the clear error standard, but he had decided that they would engage in de novo review instead.  Cool.  So yes, isolated -- even frequent -- bad decisions are unfortunately a fact of life in any large institution.

But among the reasons that UF was a particularly likely place for the Republicans' anti-intellectual program to take root is that the ground had been relentlessly seeded for decades to produce its bitter harvest.  It is unfortunately possible to point to truly indefensible things that faculty (or anyone else) might do in an environment where they have no voice.  That is, after all, the basis of the complaints from those in power against protests generally.  "These people are so rude!  Why don't they work within the system that works so well for us?"  The question answers itself.

Unfortunately, what has been happening for so long at UF and in Florida more generally is now a nationwide trend.  Faculty are told to remove potentially offensive words from their syllabi as a preemptive measure.  Faculty are being fired across the country for what have always been non-firing offenses.  In a future column, I will discuss some of the more egregious of such incidents that we have seen in 2025.  But the message for today is that disrespectful and arbitrary treatment from the top generates and reinforces unhelpful and even self-destructive reactions from below.  Pulling out of that kind of spiral is never easy.

- Neil H. Buchanan