Feb. 26 (UPI) — A national organization of college professors has voted to sanction New College of Florida, accusing the state and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of an “unprecedented politically motivated takeover.”
The American Association of University Professors announced Monday that it had voted unanimously to add New College of Florida, as well as Spartanburg Community College, to its list of public institutions that have failed to comply to “widely accepted standards of academic government.”
“What we are witnessing in Florida is an intellectual reign of terror,” LeRoy Pernell, professor of law at Florida A&M, told the AAUP special committee. “We are being named an enemy of the state.”
“This is a test case for a conservative overhaul of higher education — and it isn’t going to stay isolated to New College or Florida,” said Nicholas Clarkson, assistant professor of gender studies at New College, who resigned last August.
According to the AAUP’s sanction list, a sanction informs professors and others of poor working conditions at certain higher education institutions. There are currently 14 colleges and universities throughout the United States on the list.
The AAUP’s vote to sanction New College of Florida follows a December special committee report called “Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System,” where the AAUP singled out the governor’s January 2023 restructuring of New College of Florida and the appointment of six new members to the college board of trustees.
The trustees “dedicated themselves to ignoring their fiduciary responsibilities to the institution in favor of pushing the governor’s political goals,” the AAUP claimed.
“Following the ouster of then-president Patricia Okker, the board of trustees and administration eliminated the college’s Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence and its gender studies program. They also attacked tenure and imposed new admission standards and athletic programs absent meaningful faculty involvement,” the AAUP said, adding that the actions violate AAUP principles of shared governance.
Last May, DeSantis signed three education bills into law, including Senate Bill 266 that bans higher learning institutions from giving state or federal funding to programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
The law takes “several steps to prevent woke ideologies from continuing to co-opt our state universities and state colleges,” DeSantis said. “By signing this legislation, we are ensuring that Florida’s institutions encourage diversity of thought, civil discourse and the pursuit of truth for generations to come.”
The AAUP investigating committee said the administration abolished the faculty senate at Spartanburg Community College on April 10, 2023, in an effort “to prevent the senate from voting that day to oppose the administration’s policy requiring faculty members to be present on campus for almost forty hours each week.”
The AAUP claims the state replaced Spartanburg’s senate with an academic council “of its own devising” and “whose bylaws restricted its deliberations to academic policy.”
