The American Association of University Professors has just released a frightening report entitled “Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System.” It is a lengthy, meticulously researched and sober account of the destruction that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is inflicting upon his state’s colleges and universities. The study — which will dismay professors, students and parents alike — concludes with an ominous warning about mounting authoritarian threats to scholars across the globe.
Wherever Republicans have a legislative supermajority, they have built a “laboratory of autocracy.”
The AAUP’s investigation, however, is not without its moments of grim hilarity. “Political Interference” is packed with details of the farcical ploys and personages involved in the GOP’s onslaught on higher education. Its pages are populated with incidents and characters that seem spun from a campus novel, a genre of fiction that lampoons the extreme dysfunction of the frisbee-strewn quad. Unintentionally, the AAUP’s report illuminates DeSantis’ role as a comedy content creator.
Hey “Florida Man,” with your fondness for bath salts, pythons as pets and “Booty Patrol” trucks, meet your new sidekick: “Florida College President.” In his past life, Fred Hawkins was once a rodeo cowboy and arrested for impersonating a police officer. He is now impersonating the president of South Florida State College, having come directly from three years in the Florida House (his academic qualifications are a B.S. in political science from the University of Akron). In true Florida College President style, the DeSantis ally somehow tweeted about being hired three weeks before his official interview for the job!
An entire section of the report is devoted to New College, an institution that DeSantis and his henchmen have ransacked. They view their assault on this small, quirky school as a blueprint for how conservatives can upend…
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