Most universities in the Florida system have built significant Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) empires. DEI in academia means infusing pervasive anti-American racialist propaganda into curricula, hiring, training, and recruiting, and the destruction of standards to accommodate protected groups.
DEI has infected most of America. Red states, which have sleeping through this institutional capture, are starting to wake up. They are beginning to eliminate cancerous DEI programs from their universities (see Iowa, Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee). But Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis is leading the way in uprooting this pernicious ideology from public centers of higher learning.
As I detail in a recent report for the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, all 12 four-year Florida universities had a central administrator dedicated to promoting DEI. All but one university included DEI in their strategic plans, and all but one had a university-level committee dedicated to DEI.
DEI plans were most developed at the University of Florida, the system’s flagship. Twelve of the 16 colleges at UF have DEI deans, often with significant budgets, authority, and staff. Minority recruitment at the Levin College of Law and in the College of Medicine was bending, if not breaking, Florida’s ban on racial preferences in admissions. New racially-infused curricula were being added in college after college, including the College of Medicine and the College of Education.