DeSantis’s Know-Nothing Assault on Florida’s Public Universities

By Diane Roberts

Jeanette Nuñez has been installed as “acting president” of Florida International University.

The smart money says she’ll soon be permanent.

Her qualifications? Let’s see: She graduated from FIU 30 years ago, served in the Legislature, and was Ron DeSantis’ lieutenant governor.

That’s pretty much it.




Oh, and her about-face on in-state tuition for DACA recipients, whose only crime was being brought to the U.S. as children.

In 2014, she helped push the bill granting Dreamers the same tuition rate as other Florida resident students.

Now this daughter of Cuban exiles has turned on these Floridian kids.

As Sen. Jason Pizzo, D-Sunny Isles, put it, Nuñez chose to “do a 180 for political expediency, drop a $120-thousand position and exchange it for a million-dollar position, at the university with the most number of in-state tuition waivers for undocumented kids.”

FIU once prided itself on educating Dreamers, declaring, “DACA and undocumented students have a home at FIU.”

The faculty don’t want her; the students are protesting; Panther Now, the FIU newspaper, calls her a “political nepo baby.”

But DeSantis wants her, so the FIU Board of Trustees snaps to attention and barks, “Yes, sir!”

DeSantis, the lame duck and failed presidential candidate, may have lost much of his hold on the Legislature but, given that he appoints state university trustees, our institutions must still suffer his anti-intellectualism, his spite, and his obsession with “woke.”




Like FIU, Florida Atlantic has also been landed with a new president, an unimpressive ex-legislator who once proudly declared himself “the most partisan Republican in Tallahassee.”

Adam Hasner beat out FSU’s dean of the College of Business and the University of Maine’s provost: two genuinely qualified candidates.

The governor prefers political hacks.

Outraged students, faculty

Hasner’s executive experience consists of being vice president for public policy at Geo Group, a Boca Raton-based private prison corporation.

Geo Group has been accused of forcing inmates to into virtual slavery, witholding food if they didn’t work for the prison.

FAU’s faculty have decried his appointment, and outraged FAU students have pointed out a university is not the same as a prison.

Not yet, anyway.

The University of West Florida is in the middle of a hostile takeover by ultra-conservative trustees, several of whom are affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, authors of the misogynistic, homophobic, white supremacist Project 2025.

These nominees are not an impressive bunch: The only one who actually lives in the area is an NRA instructor and graduate of Pensacola Christian College, an entity unaccredited by any reputable academic assessment organization.

Another teaches at Boise State in whiter-than-Wonder-Bread Idaho, where he is given to bizarre pronouncements on the evils of college-educated women who, turned uppity by all that book-learning, fail to fulfill their God-mandated role as stay-at-home mamas.

Scott Yenor says women who defy decency by insisting on a career should always make much less money than men.

His plans for UWF include abolishing its anthropology department and its distinguished archeology program.

He thinks no one need to study human cultures except to learn that Western Civilization is the only real civilization and “patriarchy” is the natural order of things.




Yenor may not actually be a shoo-in: He needs Senate confirmation, and his X-posts suggesting only “non-Jewish white men” should hold power have riled the combustible Sen. Randy Fine, enraged by what he sees as Yenor’s blatant antisemitism.

Incompetent, arrogant, fiscally irresponsible

The bipartisan legislative Jewish Caucus isn’t real happy, either.

We’ll see who wins this contest: DeSantis (who says he didn’t know Yenor said that stuff!) or horrified Floridians from the Perdido River to the House and Senate chambers.

Seriously, y’all: Anybody who’s too extreme for the Randy Fine, proud member of the Attila the Hun Fan Club, shouldn’t be within 50 miles of any Florida institution of higher education.

Maybe if somebody tells Yenor that, despite DeSantis’s best efforts, Florida is full of non-Aryans, he’ll stay out west.

Prolifigacy

Again, the professors and the students — the people who teach at UWF and learn at UWF, the people for whom the university exists — want Yenor deep-sixed.

Of course, nominating an ignorant yahoo is on-brand for DeSantis.

Installing incompetent, arrogant, and fiscally irresponsible presidents at colleges and universities is, too.

Ben Sasse, the disgraced former president of UF, stands out as one of DeSantis’ stupidest moves.

The Florida auditor general found that Sasse, a former U.S. senator from Nebraska, spent money like a drunken sailor.

He hired D.C. cronies at way above market rates and didn’t require them to live in Gainesville; he blew $300,000 chartering UF’s Athletic Association’s private jets to do God knows what; he threw absurdly expensive parties — one with a $38,000 sushi bar at a cost of about $900 per guest.

Whose bright idea was it to hire Sasse?
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That would be Ron DeSantis and UF board chair, developer Mori Hosseini — at the time, one of the governor’s university enforcers.

These two also imposed our anti-vaxxer surgeon general upon UF’s medical school, where he does next to nothing yet draws a fat salary in addition to his job at the Department of Health.

‘Transformational leader’

When Sasse was announced as UF’s new leader, state politicos hailed him as a “transformational leader,” though a more accurate description would be “useless and not very smart.”

Sasse is given to spouting dim-witted, ill-phrased educational theories he clearly imagines are cutting-edge when they’re simply nonsense. Stuff like: “Our monolithic system lacks incentives to empower social entrepreneurs to spark intellectual curiosity” and “a thriving system will cultivate a student’s self-awareness about different learning styles and help them develop a style that works for them.”

Those of us in the academy would first take a red pencil to this pitiful excuse for English and explain that “cultivating” different “learning styles” and “sparking intellectual curiosity” is what we call “teaching.”

Appointing university presidents used to take place out in the open, where taxpayers could see the process. But now the process is so secret, only the names of finalists become public.

After a mere 17 months on the job, Sasse “resigned” (translation: was pushed out by the irascible Hosseini, who decided he didn’t like the way Sasse and DeSantis seemed to be in cahoots), but shed no tears for him: He’ll continue to receive $1 million a year plus full benefits until 2028.

This kind of profligate, time and energy-wasting, embarrassing nonsense is what you get when politicians who don’t understand education choose politicians who don’t know what they’re doing in an opaque process hidden from the citizens who foot the bills.

Nevertheless, the big money showered on Sasse and his gold-plated lieutenants looks like a bargain compared to what’s been going on at New College, once Florida’s highly regarded honors college, now a taxpayer-funded Heritage Foundation training camp.

Jock college

DeSantis’ hand-picked trustees installed Richard Corcoran, a man singularly lacking in intellect, training, and relevant experience, as president, paying him more than twice the salary of his eminently qualified predecessor.




The big bucks don’t stop there: Though the value of a New College degree has tanked, it spends way, way more money per capita than any public university in the state.

A member of the state Board of Governors figures it costs the place around 90 grand per student.

The state average is $10,000 per student.

Richard Corcoran insists it’s really only $68,000 each.

They’ve now agreed it’s somewhere between $88,000 and $91,000.

So that’s all right.

Nevertheless, Board of Governor’s member Eric Silagy has questions: New College is “spending a lot more money to educate a very small number of students that already cost exponentially more of state taxpayer dollars to educate. And I personally have real concerns with that.”

He’s also concerned about the $1.5 million spent on athletics, especially since “that’s a violation of the Board of Governors rule.”

Corcoran, another DeSantis-sponsored grifter, doesn’t care. He’s fired faculty, ditched programs, and admitted kids with low test scores to play baseball.

He wants to run a jock college.

By the way, if Silagy’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he used to be CEO of Florida Power & Light Co., one of the state’s most despised corporations.

He resigned in 2023 when he and FPL were accused of campaign finance violations, trying to disguise advertisements as legitimate news stories, spying on reporters, and all sorts of other sleazy stuff.

In Florida, guys like him never slink off in disgrace: They land on an important board of trustees.

But the really bizarre thing is that Silagy talks more sense than New College’s president.

Florida’s public colleges and universities are struggling.

MAGA’s rage when professors teach our sometimes-shameful history, their discomfort with scientific realities from the climate crisis to vaccine efficacy, and their attempts to block students from encountering ideas that challenge American exceptionalism, means some institutions fear telling the truth.

An uneducated populace is a compliant populace: Ron DeSantis is trying to destroy higher education in this state, reducing universities to Christian Nationalist support systems for sports teams.

College is no longer about intellectual excellence: It’s about the governor’s war against the 21st Century.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.