(The following article is the second of a three part series. Part I may be found here.)
Florida's reopening was among the most ambitious in 2020, garnering a heap of criticism from the national press — criticism that accelerated when Florida was one of the first states to order schools to open, refusing to give in to school districts that didn't want to resume five-day, in-person instruction by late August of that year.
Education is a very important subject to DeSantis, who earned through intellect and resolve — and baseball — his admission to Yale University, graduating magna cum laude.
The growing influence of ideology over education is something DeSantis witnessed firsthand when attending Yale and Harvard Law School.
Although there was plenty of left-of-center orthodoxy in those institutions back then, DeSantis said, "Now I think it's gotten more militant, but it's also gotten more oppressive in terms of trying to exclude dissenting voices and actively trying to suppress dissenting voices, and that's where we're taking a lot of strong moves in Florida on reforming higher education."
Late last month, DeSantis rolled out significant reforms to the state's higher education system that included a new focus on civics, tighter scrutiny on faculty tenure, and prohibitions on so-called diversity, equity and inclusivity programs.
DeSantis said there are a number of educators at the state schools who have reached out to his office to be a part of this.
"Some of these professors, they're not all Republicans, probably most aren't, but they realize that something's gone terribly wrong with academia," he said.
"The thing about it is, as a state university system, they are funded by Floridians, by taxpayers," he said.
"They don't have the right to do whatever the heck they want to do on our dime, so we have the right and, actually, the responsibility to say, 'What's the purpose of higher education, what are we trying to get out of this, and what's in the best interest of the state of Florida?' and then put that vision into reality."
DeSantis said too many people in academia think their purpose is to indoctrinate students with a particular worldview that would prepare them for political activism.
"We don't believe that that's the case. We believe it's about rigor, we believe it's about the pursuit of truth, and we believe it's about giving students a foundation so they can think for themselves," he said.
DeSantis said he expects other states to push back against the overt politicization of public academic institutions.
"I think it's going to end up really catching fire in a lot of red states because it's one thing that a private university can do what they want, but when you're surviving on the state dole, we have every right to say it's going to go in the direction that we want to go," he said.
The expectation of personal attacks gives some would-be reformers pause, he said.
But "I don't care because people attack me no matter what, so I might as well do what's right and just let the chips fall where they may."
He sees the ideological creep across all of the cultural curators in our country, not just in academia but also in corporations and other large institutions.
But ideological capture isn't limited to academia and the federal bureaucracy.
DeSantis said conservatives must also adjust from a world in which "business and institutions weren't terribly political" to the current moment, "a situation where these institutions have been captured by leftist ideology," he said.
"You have companies doing the ESG, where they're trying to impose a leftist worldview on society through their economic power.
"You have K-12 schools where you have school unions, who are very partisan, trying to impose certain ideology," DeSantis said.
"So my job as governor, we are the free state of Florida, but that means I need to defend threats to freedom across the board. I can't just say, 'If it's not government doing it, then why do you care?'
"I think that's why people have been drawn to the model that we have in Florida because I think we're much more sensitive to the threats to freedom that actually exist today in 2023 as opposed to how we would've perceived that in 1980 or even 1990," he added.
(A related article may be found here.)
Salena Zito has held a long, successful career as a national political reporter. She worked for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for 11 years, and has interviewed every U.S. president and vice president since 1992, as well as other top D.C. leaders. She joined the New York Post in September 2016, and acts as a CNN political analyst, and also as a reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. Read Salena Zito's Reports — More Here.