UF making national news as a model on how to stifle free speech on universities Trump Is Cracking Down on Universities. Florida Had a Head Start. Florida, under Gov. Ron DeSantis, has a three-year head start. A series of laws redefines general education requirements, bans some subjects from the classroom and emphasizes others across the state’s 40 public colleges and universities. In February, DeSantis announced an initiative to target state-level waste and fraud and to “make sure that these universities are really serving the classical mission of what a university should be, and that’s not to impose ideology. It’s really to teach students how to think and to prepare them to be citizens of our republic. The higher-ed legislation adopted in Florida is both sweeping and granular. It bans “political or social activism” while also mandating a shared understanding of Western civilization. The goal, proponents say, is to trigger a seismic cultural shift that pivots campus discourse away from critiques of America—with an emphasis on differences between groups—toward an appreciation of the heritage that binds Americans together. Across the University of Florida’s campus, lined with oak trees draped in Spanish moss, these new laws have transformed the way classes are taught, how students meet and work and the words people use. Among the first notable changes at UF, with an enrollment of more than 60,000 students, came last year when the school cut 28 full- and part-time positions on the DEI staff, and scrubbed university websites of DEI language. This past fall, students learned the Center for Inclusion and Multicultural Engagement had been renamed the Office of Community and Belonging. Inside the rebranded student meeting hub, the university had removed photographs of civil-rights leaders from the Black student engagement office and rainbow flags from the LGBTQ engagement center, and had taken down a painting in the Asian Pacific Islander Desi student office that included the depiction of a “Saigon” fraternity party in which white students dressed up as American soldiers and female students appeared to be costumed as Vietnamese prostitutes. “It was there to remind us what previous classmates had to deal with,” said Joaquin Marcelino, a leader in the Asian American Student Union. “The fact that they removed it tells me they don’t want us to remember our past.”
