Trump Is Cracking Down on Universities. Florida Had a Head Start.

Desantis has also outlayed the exhibition of the new Snow White Movie.

Trump Is Cracking Down on Universities. Florida Had a Head Start.

The state’s laws have dismantled campus DEI initiatives, banned political or social activism and redefined core curricula

By Douglas Belkin

March 12, 2025 9:00 pm ET

GAINESVILLE, Fla.—Three years ago, as a University of Florida freshman, Bia Castanho kept her head down and her mouth shut when classroom conversations veered toward politics. Virtually every time students with her conservative orientation entered a debate it ended badly for them, she said.

Her time on campus has paralleled a concerted effort by Republican lawmakers to dismantle what they consider entrenched liberal orthodoxy within Florida’s institutions of higher learning. In a class this past fall about the economics of farming, she felt emboldened enough to take a stand: Donald Trump was right, illegal immigration was wrong and farmworkers without proper documentation should not be allowed to work, she said.

“Things are changing,” said Castanho, now a senior. “When I got here, if you were a conservative, people thought you were a hater, a racist or homophobic. Now at least some people will at least listen to your ideas.”

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed “to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left.” Recent edicts from him and his new administration ordering colleges to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs or anything they deem as discriminatory—or risk losing federal funding—aim to begin the process.

Colleges are rolling back programs that they fear could run afoul of the new administration’s guidance and are making other changes. The University of Virginia voted last week to dissolve its DEI and community partnerships office. “DEI is done at the University of Virginia,” said Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

The University of North Carolina will no longer mandate students take DEI-related classes to fulfill general education or major requirements, Andrew Tripp, the system’s senior vice president for legal affairs and general counsel, wrote chancellors in February. The risk of jeopardizing federal research funding was “simply too great to defer action,” he wrote.

After the Trump administration canceled roughly $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University last week, the school pledged to work with the government to restore funding. On Monday, Harvard University announced a freeze on staff and faculty hiring, citing “substantial financial uncertainties driven by rapidly shifting federal policies.”

Florida, under Gov. Ron DeSantis, has a three-year head start. A series of laws redefines general education requirements, bans some subjects from the classroom and emphasizes others across the state’s 40 public colleges and universities. In February, DeSantis announced an initiative to target state-level waste and fraud and to “make sure that these universities are really serving the classical mission of what a university should be, and that’s not to impose ideology. It’s really to teach students how to think and to prepare them to be citizens of our republic.”

The state’s flagship campus offers a look at where the rest of the country might be heading. The changes have begun to shift centers of campus power, alter sources of anxiety and reshuffle the academic hierarchy and social norms.

Conservatives like Castanho report their wariness is lifting. Now it’s mostly left-leaning students who say they are afraid to speak their mind. One question hangs in the air: Is the illiberalism of the left being replaced by an illiberalism of the right?

Rewinding DEI

The higher-ed legislation adopted in Florida is both sweeping and granular. It bans “political or social activism” while also mandating a shared understanding of Western civilization. The goal, proponents say, is to trigger a seismic cultural shift that pivots campus discourse away from critiques of America—with an emphasis on differences between groups—toward an appreciation of the heritage that binds Americans together.

Across the University of Florida’s campus, lined with oak trees draped in Spanish moss, these new laws have transformed the way classes are taught, how students meet and work and the words people use.

Among the first notable changes at UF, with an enrollment of more than 60,000 students, came last year when the school cut 28 full- and part-time positions on the DEI staff, and scrubbed university websites of DEI language. This past fall, students learned the Center for Inclusion and Multicultural Engagement had been renamed the Office of Community and Belonging.

Inside the rebranded student meeting hub, the university had removed photographs of civil-rights leaders from the Black student engagement office and rainbow flags from the LGBTQ engagement center, and had taken down a painting in the Asian Pacific Islander Desi student office that included the depiction of a “Saigon” fraternity party in which white students dressed up as American soldiers and female students appeared to be costumed as Vietnamese prostitutes.

“It was there to remind us what previous classmates had to deal with,” said Joaquin Marcelino, a leader in the Asian American Student Union. “The fact that they removed it tells me they don’t want us to remember our past.”

Because the law prohibits faculty and staff from advocating for DEI, university employees didn’t organize the usual welcome-back events for affinity groups. Student leaders said that their lack of email lists, time and money reduced initial turnout, depressing attendance at affinity group events for the rest of the year.

In the dorms, “living-learning” spaces for Black and LGBTQ students are being phased out, as are school-supported affinity graduation events such as the LGBTQ community’s lavender ceremony, in which each graduate is draped in a lavender boa.

“I don’t know if we’ll have it this year or not,” said Lucas Nadeau, a sophomore and member of the lavender caucus in the UF student senate. “If we lose it, I think it says something really sad about our school.”

Chill on speech

Professors say they are steering away from topics they think could violate state law, but have been frustrated by the new rules’ imprecision. What constitutes DEI? What is advocacy? What defines the Western canon? And although words like “microaggression” and “equity” aren’t explicitly banned, faculty say, they are common DEI lingo and have become embedded into the undergraduate lexicon.

In a political science class last semester, a professor quickly cut off a student who asked whether something was “intersectional,” said Arshan Falasiri, a sophomore who was in the class.

“She said, ‘Let’s stay away from that word,’” recalled Falasiri, adding, “It’s not some word to be afraid of, it’s just a word for political analysis. It felt unscholarly.”

Adding to the anxiety: The new laws allow students to record classes without professors’ consent.

“I don’t know when I walk in the classroom whether there’s a student recording what I’m saying, and whether that student might use this to accuse me of teaching identity politics,” said Terje Østebø, who teaches religion and African studies. “Sometimes you see a student pick up their phone and you wonder about the angle they’re holding it.”

Students know it, too, and say they are fearful they will be recorded sounding uninformed or “woke.” They worry recordings will be weaponized and shared publicly by someone with a political agenda, inviting ridicule.

“You should be able to have a kind of half-baked opinion that you work through with other students and professors in that group setting,” said Peyton Harris, a junior English major. “But there’s a wariness that it will get blasted on social media and there are real-world consequences to that with your mental health or even job prospects.”

Conservative watchdogs have eagerly published tales of professors allegedly crossing ideological lines.

Increased scrutiny of tenured faculty is intensifying the apprehension. Under one new law, professors’ productivity in teaching and research are now assessed every fifth year in post-tenure reviews that carry “consequences for underperformance.” This year, 17% of faculty reviewed were found “unsatisfactory,” or “did not meet expectations,” according to a university audit of the process. Five professors were fired and 34 put on performance-improvement plans.

Beyond classrooms, a campus student news organization declined to cover another student organization event because it discussed the impacts of laws prohibiting DEI. The journalists feared coverage would compromise their funding, according to a lawsuit filed in January by six Florida professors who are being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. Student tour guides and resident housing assistants have been instructed by university staff not to use words like DEI, according to students in those positions.

Nadine Strossen, a former ACLU president, said the chill on speech generated by government action—now coming from both Democrats and Republicans—has greater consequences than limitations imposed by campus social pressure.

“Our colleagues can impose enormously painful consequences upon us, shaming, shunning, ostracizing, but it still realistically pales in comparison to the power of the government to use the full force of its investigative powers and its discretionary powers to punish through fines, and ultimately, even imprisonment,” Strossen said.

Core curriculum

The Florida legislation’s boldest push is reshaping the stable of courses eligible to fill the state’s general-education requirement. A core curriculum is traditionally meant to comprise a series of courses reflecting what an educated American should know.

Academia has fiercely debated what constitutes a proper general-education core since the mid-20th century, amid pushes for civil rights and gender equality. (UF admitted its first Black student in 1958 and established its African American Studies program in 1969). Over the decades, universities faced a fork in the road and went left, moving away from the traditional Western canon toward courses that focus on identity and social justice.

Now Florida prohibits classes from “distorting significant historical events” or including “identity politics”—and mandates that some courses emphasize the philosophical foundation of Western civilization. University of Florida administrators and the Florida board of governors reviewed more than a thousand general-education classes to determine which met the new criteria. Faculty filled out 11-question surveys defending their courses’ relevance. This process slashed classes eligible to be counted toward general-ed requirements from 1,200 to about 300.

Sociology, which examines how social structures influence people’s actions and understanding of the world, became the first casualty. Manny Diaz Jr., Florida’s commissioner of education, described it on X as an area of study ”hijacked by left-wing activists.”

Introduction to Sociology was removed from the core and replaced with a general-education history course. Eight women’s-studies classes were also removed.

The legislature’s move to control the core curriculum prompted the American Association of University Professors to call the Florida legislation “an intellectual reign of terror.” PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free expression, called it “the country’s most intensive rollback of Americans’ right to freely express themselves.”

Humanities faculty view the revamp as threatening their department’s survival. With these classes stripped from the core, students lose a key incentive to enroll in them. Less exposure to the discipline will translate to fewer humanities and social science majors, making departments vulnerable to cuts and layoffs, said Anna Peterson, a full professor in the religion department and a leader in the faculty union. She fears entire departments may vanish over time, and sees governmental meddling in the curriculum as a threat to academic freedom.

“We are heading in the wrong direction,” she said. “In a dangerous direction.”

Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, said complaints by faculty are self-serving. Inclusion in the core gives classes an advantage, he said. Now those professors will have to compete on equal footing to enroll students.

“There are some faculty out there that know the only way that they can get these concepts in front of students is if they’re forced to be there,” Rodrigues said. “In the Free State of Florida, we’re just not doing that anymore.”

A new center

At the new Alexander Hamilton Center, which touts itself as “free from agenda,” the growing faculty of historians, philosophers, political theorists and classicists have the wind at their back. Lawmakers created the center to teach Western civilization and the principles of a free society. Politically, it was designed to counterbalance the traditional humanities department, which some lawmakers view as too progressive to reform.

Political support for the Hamilton Center translates into a $10 million annual state appropriation, the hiring of 50 accomplished faculty in two years and the preparation of a building on prime campus real estate.

Its director, William Inboden, said places like the Hamilton Center shouldn’t be necessary but American universities have failed to hold up their end of a century-old social contract. Faculty enjoy billions in research funding, tenure protections and the right to determine what and how they teach, he said, and in exchange, they should produce meaningful scholarship and graduate students who are prepared for both citizenship and careers.

One of the center’s goals is to encourage American patriots, Inboden said. “We strongly encourage love of country,” he said.