Florida colleges fire staff amid anti-"woke" crusade. Expert warns "this tactic will backfire"

Diversity, equity and inclusion staff at the University of Florida became the latest victims of the right-wing war on “woke” after being fired last week under a newly approved state rule stripping funding from equity initiatives at public universities. 

The culling is the latest in a sequence of Florida public university responses to a state law enacted by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis last May, banning those institutions from using state or federal funding to support their DEI policies and programs. 

“DEI is toxic and has no place in our public universities,” DeSantis wrote on X, formerly Twitter, celebrating the cuts. “I’m glad that Florida was the first state to eliminate DEI and I hope more states follow suit."

But, while experts on diversity, equity and inclusion told Salon that the firings and program elimination were expected given how DeSantis' and conservatives' crusade against DEI in the name of saving students from so-called "left-wing" indoctrination has ramped up in recent years, they fear the harm it will cause to students and the integrity of higher education. 

"This is worse than trying to just create puppets and mimics of previous generations," Anthony Abraham Jack, an associate professor of higher education leadership at Boston University and Floridian, told Salon, adding: "They're going after things that make the university a welcoming place for all students. They're not going after things just that are targeting one particular group. They're going after things that force people who are used to being in a privileged position to no longer have sole access to the campus, sole access to the life of the campus."

Last week's cuts at the University of Florida mark one of the latest steps in the ongoing escalation of anti-DEI efforts in Republican states across the nation. The campaign, spearheaded in part by ultra-conservative leaders and activists like DeSantis, has taken on new legs in the wake of last year's Supreme Court ruling banning race-based affirmative action in college admissions as they endeavor to wipe diversity initiatives from a number of areas of public life.

Lawsuits targeting businesses and firms aiming to address historical racial and gender inequities through company policies and grants are making their way through the courts. Students and faculty are also shouldering the brunt of the blow from rollbacks in DEI funding and programming, or complete bans as public universities scramble to comply with the high court ruling or newly enacted state measures. 

This fallout is unfolding against a backdrop where Republican lawmakers in 20 states are rallying behind around 50 anti-DEI bills this year alone — all of which are similar to DeSantis' spate of measures aiming to end what he has called "woke" policies, according to a recent Associated Press analysis. 

"This is a long game that is a political effort to diminish the advances that have been achieved through affirmative action and through equity and inclusion efforts on college and university campuses to promote and enhance more equitable educational outcomes," Roger L. Worthington, the executive director of the University of Maryland's Center for Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education, told Salon.

The split over political ideology playing out in higher education, one mirrored in the media and press, also comes with a swath of associated dangers, said Worthington, who is also a professor of counseling, higher education and special education at the University of Maryland. "Most critically, the demise of democracy is greater potential when academic institutions are not there to do the work that they are charged to do in the missions that they have established," he said.

An administrative memo released by University of Florida leadership on March 1 announced that the college would be immediately slashing all 13 DEI staff positions and 15 faculty appointments to the diversity office, closing the office of the chief diversity officer, ending work with DEI-focused contractors and reallocating the $5 million of the university's budget set aside for DEI initiatives, including salaries and expenditures, to a recruitment fund for the school's faculty, NBC News reports.

The UF cuts are the third university response this year to DeSantis' May 2023 funding ban and the Florida Board of Governors' subsequent adoption and approval of a regulation that loosely defined "DEI," according to the college's student newspaper, The Alligator. Two other Florida public universities — the University of North Florida and Florida International University — rolled back their programming last month.

Other schools, including Florida State University and the University of Central Florida, have not yet clarified how they will respond to the law. The New College of Florida voted last year to abolish its DEI office, the AP reported.

In the immediate aftermath of last week's DEI shuttering, University of Florida faculty are reeling as they navigate what it means for their institution, David Canton, the director of the University of Florida's African American Studies program, told Salon. An air of uncertainty has colored faculty's conversations on how and to what extent they can discuss diversity and equity on campus — if they even can. 

"Can you talk about diversity? Can you say, 'This program will talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, or this discipline will mention that in our classes?' Canton said, describing some of the questions he and his colleagues have been left with as they grappled with how to continue addressing inequities at the university. 

The "million dollar question" Canton describes himself and other UF faculty asking mirrors a similar reaction that Ericka Hines, the founder of DEI consultancy Every Level Leadership, saw in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's affirmative action decision last summer. 

A "chilling effect" came over a variety of organizations, leaving them unsure of what to do and how best to approach diversity, equity and inclusion, Hines told Salon, noting that these entities didn't want to stop addressing inequity but felt they needed to "quiet down." 

Their concerns were wrapped up in a fear of facing legal troubles — and a "reputational calculus" around whether a lawsuit over policy was better for business than litigation over inequitable treatment — as a result of the conservative reimagining of what DEI means, Hines said. 

"What has happened is the convolution of this framework where [opponents say], 'Ugh, it makes people feel bad. It's based on an oppressor-oppressee, being oppressed, framework," Hines said, describing common conservative talking points against equity programs. "The fact is that we actually have historical facts that people have experienced inequity and have been oppressed based upon traits. But there has been an allowed oversimplification, on the part of people who have criticized it, to not actually take the time to unpack what it means.

"Even when they do unpack what it means then they sort of go, 'But don't we all have the same access to opportunities?'" she continued, adding: "Folks like me are looking at data going, 'That's not true. Your opinion, your word soup, isn't true." 

The right-wing argument against DEI has also obscured the extent to which equity efforts show up tangibly at universities, making humanities programs like African American studies that offer counters to Western thought appear more active in student participation than they are and funding for DEI initiatives appear more expensive than it is, noted Canton, who previously served as the dean of social equity and inclusion at Connecticut College.

The $5 million the University of Florida spent on DEI amounted to less than 1 percent of the university's total budget for the 2022-23 academic year, the Alligator reported. 

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It's too early to tell what impacts the elimination of the diversity program will have on the university, but Canton suspects that they will see the concrete effects of it in two to three years. The early indicators of that will start to appear in the percentages of minorities in undergraduate and graduate student enrollment in the fall, full-time tenure track positions in the upcoming academic year and tenure-track faculty retention after it, he said. 

Race-based affirmative action bans in other states suggest that diversity at Florida's public institutions could tank as a result of DeSantis' legislation taking full hold. When California's 1996 elimination of race-based affirmative action in its public universities took effect in 1998, UCLA and UC Berkeley saw a 40 percent decrease in enrollment among Black and Latino students, a 2020 study found. 

What Florida's DEI ban makes certain, however, is that the "institutional inequities," like lower minority student enrollment as well as post-grad wage gaps, will remain, Canton said, echoing a finding of the study.

Florida's anti-DEI legislation and other efforts like it are also transforming DEI's focus on structural and systemic barriers limiting minority students' access and outcomes to an individualist perspective, he said.

"The arguments go back down to individuals. It's not the universities, it's individuals who decide not to go to UF or UT," Canton said, referring to the University of Texas system, which has similarly been navigating a state ban on DEI offices, programs and training at public universities. "It's individuals who didn't work hard enough in high school to get into UF or UT because we believe in meritocracy. Now we're shifting discourse back to individuals, values and, that for some Americans, racial oppression doesn't exist. Sexism doesn't exist."

These institutions have also erred in allowing the conservative pushback to influence their policy before waiting to see how court challenges to this legislation wind up, Jack added. He pointed to Tuesday's decision by a federal court against the "Stop Woke Act," another DeSantis law banning DEI training in public schools and workplaces that could spur feelings of shame around historical actions undertaken by a race or sex that the court described as a "First Amendment sin" in its efforts. 

Worthington expects similar rebuffs to come from the courts declaring these widespread anti-DEI efforts not only infringements "on free speech, but as an infringement on academic freedom" in the coming years. He also predicts the greater hurdle to the conservative anti-DEI campaign in higher education will come from within those universities. Faculty and staff will start to "react strongly" about their workplaces and "seek employment elsewhere," while students will show their discontent by choosing other colleges to attend and alumni will decide whether to provide donations. 

"Those institutions will start to find that this tactic is going to backfire," Worthington said. 

In the meantime, Jack sees a larger detriment to the U.S. taking root in how anti-DEI policies and efforts are holding back these institutions and their values, and by proxy the future their students will create.  

"America is only as good as its citizenry, and the more educated the citizenry, the better. But for us to be at our best we need all of us to be more educated and more importantly, more knowledgeable," Jack said. "They're preventing us from doing that.

"These legislations are preventing us from not only being more educated, but more knowledgeable and more ready and better prepared for what the future is to bring," he continued. "Because if we can't even handle questions about our past, and our present, we can never be ready for tomorrow."