By Diane Roberts
Why are right-wingers so scared of ideas?
Are their minds so weak that mere exposure to certain books will infect them with what Elon Musk calls “the woke mind virus”?
They don’t want you inoculated against measles, but they’re doing their damnedest to inoculate Americans against knowledge.
Novels upset them; poetry upsets them; science upsets them; history upsets them; art upsets them; questioning of authority upsets them.
Universities really, really upset them — all that interrogating norms; all that challenging orthodoxy; all that critical inquiry.
To that end, Donald Trump’s going to war with Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, even Penn, his alma mater.
Ron DeSantis beat him to it: The governor’s been trying for years to regulate speech, impose restrictions on what teachers can teach, and decree which books the state of Florida finds “acceptable.”
While he’s had some success in K-12, enabling Moms for Liberty and their ilk in their book-banning crusade and threatening educators with dire consequences if they mention the existence of gay and trans people, some judges, unsurprisingly partial to the First Amendment, have slapped him down.
DeSantis, nothing if not energetic in his rage, is now determined to shield our precious college students from Dangerous Thoughts.
Choose the administrators. Choose the presidents. Control the universities.
The University of Florida needs a new dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences — with 40 majors and more than 10,000 students, it’s the largest college at UF.
They got as far as interviewing four highly qualified candidates: two mathematicians — UF’s own Kevin P. Knudson and Maggy Tomova, dean of UCF’s College of Science; Ryan Schroeder, dean of Georgia Southern’s College of Behavioral and Social Sciences; and Robert Brinkmann, a professor of Geology and dean of Liberal Arts and Science at Northern Illinois University.
‘Radical DEI progressives’
But two weeks ago, the governor blew up the search. Demanded UF stop it.
Seems the finalists, admired scholars and seasoned leaders, are crypto-Marxist, Trump-hating eggheads bent on destroying America.
An anonymous social media account calling itself “Commies on Campus” ran shrieking to Bryan Griffin, DeSantis’ communications director, calling all four “radical DEI progressives.”
The Commies posted slick, selectively edited videos of candidate interviews, slamming Brinkmann for stating the obvious: “We have people in charge of things in our country that don’t have any business being in charge of those things,” and Knudson for being proud that as head of UF’s Honors Program “we were able to increase the number of African American and Hispanic students in the program.”
As if that’s somehow shameful.
Kent Fuchs, UF’s invertebrate of an interim president, sent out a memo pretending “terminating the search” was the only thing to do, what with the university also in the middle of hiring a permanent president.
Fuchs has never said no to DeSantis.
He does as he’s told, facilitating the hiring of our data-challenged surgeon general at UF’s medical school and trying to stop professors from testifying on voting rights.
Academic freedom doesn’t matter; the professors’ expertise might pose a “conflict of interest to the executive branch of the state of Florida.”
As if serving the interests of the executive branch should somehow be the mission of a university.
UF remains a distinguished institution, though slipping in national rankings of public universities. It was No. 5 a couple of years ago but is now No. 7.
Still pretty good, especially given DeSantis’ obsessive attacks on higher education in the state.
But allowing some trifling X account to dictate policy at Florida’s flagship university won’t exactly burnish UF’s reputation.
All-purpose insult
Whoever the “Commies on Campus” may be, they weren’t paying attention in political science class.
They call anything they don’t like “communist:” LGBTQ, feminism, secularism, programs for the poor, addressing the climate crisis, taxing the rich, giving anyone without one of those useful White Man Cards a fair shot in life.
“Communist” is MAGA’s all-purpose insult.
Read a book, kids: While real live commies like the ones in North Korea, Cuba, or China may think religion is the opiate of the masses and rich folks (except the leaders of these countries) shouldn’t exist, they’re not keen on stuff like feminism, they persecute gay people, and they sure as hell don’t favor DEI.
Ask the Uighurs.
Yet DeSantis, a man educated beyond his intelligence, takes what these nameless chuckleheads say at face value.
There are in fact a number of well-regarded Marxist scholars at American universities. Yale, the governor’s alma mater, has a reading group studying Marxism and Cultural Theory.
Nevertheless, DeSantis emerged from the Red Menace of New Haven untainted.
He’s also unimpeded by understanding what universities are supposed to do.
An academic’s job is to research everything from the Roman Republic to astrophysics to Norse sagas to gene structure to the ideology of slavery to economic and political systems, which requires reading across the spectrum from “Das Kapital” to “The Road to Serfdom“ and presenting their data and knowledge to students.
We call this “education.”
It’s embarrassing how MAGAs deem Hungarian (or Putinist) authoritarianism OK, even admirable, while “communist” is the gravest of insults and socialism is a mortal sin.
Perhaps they’re unaware socialism is viewed favorably by around 36% of Americans.
That’s almost the same number who say they strongly support Donald Trump.
Ideas are not viruses
The point is, ideas are not viruses: Mere exposure to communist thought doesn’t turn you into a communist, any more than reading James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” makes you gay, any more than reading “The Wealth of Nations” ensures you’ll become a rabid capitalist.
But MAGAs don’t do high-level thinking: It makes their heads hurt. They simply react.
Loudly. Ignorantly. Irrationally.
Commies on Campus now has a new project: trying to influence who will become the new president of the University of Florida.
UF has announced a finalist.
One finalist. Chosen in secret.
He is Dr. Santa Ono, a Canadian American immunologist.
The Commies say he’s some kind of woke monster who, as president of the University of Michigan, created “THE LARGEST #DEI EMPIRE in the country.”
Their evidence? Christopher Rufo, the febrile New College trustee last heard claiming immigrants were eating cats and dogs, calls Ono “left-wing” and points to a 2023 commencement address in which he made the unimpeachable statement, “The climate crisis is the existential challenge of our time.”
Florida gubernatorial candidate and Trump acolyte U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, never losing a chance to ingratiate himself with MAGA voters, demands UF “go back to the drawing board.”
Donalds’ hair is on fire because Ono once said, “Racism is one of America’s original sins.”
Deep breath, people: 1. Both of Ono’s statements are perfectly true; and 2. Rufo, Donalds, and the Commies need to update their intel.
Ono has changed his tune. No longer a champion of diversity, he’s now singing from the DeSantis Hymnal, declaring himself in “total alignment” with the governor’s anti-woke crusade.
“I have the same views as this governor,” Ono said.
Bend the knee
During his three years at Michigan (the shortest tenure of any president in the university’s history), Ono initially won praise for prioritizing sustainability and anti-racist projects. Students say he was personable and accessible.
Then Trump happened, and, like too many university administrators, he bent the knee, shutting UM’s DEI office, cracking down on student protest, and creating, as one faculty member said, “a surveillance state.”
Seems he deployed plainclothes officers police to trail and photograph people on UM’s campus.
No wonder DeSantis likes this guy.
Santa is a real scholar, a proper scientist, with academic and administrative qualifications that could have been a great fit at UF. He’s streets ahead of DeSantis’ last hand-picked president, the empty, in-over-his-head Ben Sasse, whose one discernable talent was spending other people’s money.
In a Trump-free world, Ono might have become the leader who could protect the institution. He might have pushed back against the governor’s determination to reduce Florida’s universities to football factories with libraries curated by the likes of Christopher Rufo and courses insisting on the divine greatness of America.
Alas, Ono has made clear that’s not him, not anymore.
This is what you get when one incurious, anti-intellectual, and perpetually angry man chooses university presidents in secret.
This is what you get when there’s only one finalist.
Yes, the trustees officially make the job offer, but there’s no chance they’d hire someone DeSantis didn’t like.
This is the reality of higher ed in Florida today.
FIU has one finalist for president. No shock that it’s DeSantis’ former lieutenant governor and Interim President Jeannette Nuñez.
In its presidential search, FAU announced three finalists. Maybe this would be a real contest?
Two had Ph.Ds. and solid higher ed experience. One was a Republican political hack.
You can guess who got the gig.
A ‘plant’ at FAMU?
Florida A&M, still in the process of choosing a president, has four finalists.
Promising, right?
There were initially three on the shortlist, all with extensive university experience. Then a fourth candidate, a woman with ties to top Republicans, appeared.
She’s Marva Johnson, a communications company executive, appointed by then-Gov. Rick Scott to the Florida Board of Education and chosen by Ron DeSantis for the Florida Scholars Academy Board of Trustees.
Commies on Campus have not yet weighed in on this one.
FAMU alumni say she’d be a terrible choice, calling her “a plant” and likening her to a Trojan Horse hostile to the university’s mission.
But what the alumni want, and what the university wants, probably won’t matter.
What DeSantis wants matters.
As everyone in the unfree state of Florida knows, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
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.
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