Republican presidential candidate and Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis delivers remarks at the Faith and Freedom Road to Majority conference – Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP Drew Angerer
Ron DeSantis’s slew of laws attacking the teaching of race and gender issues sees state colleges struggle to fill faculty posts.
With just a little more than a month left before the start 0of the academic year, senior officials at New College of Florida (NCF) made a startling announcement in mid-July.
The small honors college has approximately 100 full-time teaching positions, and according to the Tampa Bay Times, 36 of those teaching positions are vacant.
That’s according to Provost Bradley Thiessen, who called the 36 departures in a single year a “ridiculously high” number for a school with fewer than 100 full-time teachers.
However, The Guardian is reporting that Governor Ron DeSantis opened 2023 with the appointment of six political allies to the college’s 13-member board of trustees who vowed to drastically alter the supposedly “woke”-friendly learning environment on its Sarasota campus.
The six GOP appointees didn’t waste any time remaking the college’s board of trustees into an image DeSantis would be proud of. The cleansing began in late January this year.
The new board voted to fire the college president, Patricia Okker, without cause and appoint a former Republican state legislator and education commissioner in her place.
Several weeks passed, and the board members managed to dismiss the college’s head librarian and director of diversity programs, along with denying tenure to five professors who had been recommended for approval.
In a statement given to 10 Tampa Bay about faculty vacancies that were issued earlier this month, NCF officials said that six of the openings were caused by staff resignations and one-quarter of the faculty member departures “followed the changes in the New College board of trustees.”
The governor’s new laws have introduced a ban on the funding of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at Florida’s public colleges and universities, as well as withdrawing the right to arbitration formerly guaranteed to faculty members who have been denied tenure or face dismissal.
Colleges and universities are also prohibited from teaching critical race theory, which contends that inherent racial bias pervades many laws and institutions in Western society, among other changes.
Hard figures for turnover rates will not be available until later this year, and none of the other 11 state-run universities are expected to match New College’s exceptionally high percentage of faculty vacancies. BGut5 teacher vacancies seem to cover the K-12 range, too.
In January 2019, when DeSantis first took office, Florida had 2,217 teacher vacancies. That number has since more than doubled to 5,294 vacancies as of January 2023, according to the Florida Education Association.
You could say that the state of Florida has become, rather toxic, and quite frankly, I find it ludicrous that people actually love the garbage De3Santis lets roll out of his mouth.
DeSantis came under renewed criticism this month when the state department of education issued guidelines recommending that middle school students be taught about the skills slaves acquired “for their personal benefit” during their lifetimes in bondage.
The prevailing political climate in Florida has complicated efforts to recruit qualified scholars from outside the state to fill some vacancies. And teachers of color find it very difficult to work in a state that prohibited a new advanced placement course in African American studies from being taught in high schools.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
