Opinion | ‘The Death Knell for Higher Education in Florida’ – The New York Times
March 8, 2023 Leave a comment
Over the past decade, a liberal faction within America’s colleges and universities, corporate America and the media has promoted goals of diversity, equity and inclusion, endorsed regulations restricting “harmful speech,” encouraged the ostracization of dissenters and sought to grant enhanced status to the previously marginalized.
Now, in reaction, come the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, his allies in the state legislature and Republican politicians across America with a blunt-force counteragenda that uses the coercive power of government to impose its own speech code and ideology on education, including higher education, as well as on private businesses.
In this, DeSantis and his emulators are demonstrating that the hard right is willing not only to jettison the conservative principle of restrained government but also to endanger the accreditation of a state system of higher education — a crucial pillar of economic growth — in order to promulgate their own repressive version of permissible language in America’s universities and colleges, which have traditionally been bastions of academic freedom.
Opinion | ‘The Death Knell for Higher Education in Florida’ – The New York Times
About Stephen E. McGaughey
Coral Gables Watch 