A New Order from Ron DeSantis May Leave University Professors Brushing Up Resumes
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took decisive action to promote diversity of thought on college campuses amid a mounting consensus that academia has been invaded by left-wing groupthink.
On Tuesday, the Navy veteran and Harvard Law School graduate signed House Bill 233, which requires state colleges and universities to “conduct annual assessments of the viewpoint diversity and intellectual freedom at their institutions to ensure that Florida’s postsecondary students will be shown diverse ideas and opinions, including those that they may disagree with or find uncomfortable.”
This means that unlike other states, Florida won’t allow its schools to devolve into one-sided hive minds that brainwash students to hate America and judge one another on the basis of their skin color.
Hopefully, colleges will also make an effort to recruit more right-leaning professors instead of stacking their staffs with left-wing activists masquerading as academics.
It is widely known that many colleges — especially those in the Ivy League and other so-called elite universities — tilt heavily to the left.
Now Space Is Racist: Ivy League Class Highlights Connection Between Black Holes and Black People https://t.co/hkF10dn96A
— Capitalism Institute (@Cap_Institute) June 25, 2021
In announcing a trio of new laws aimed at providing students with a well-rounded civics education, the governor said “it is abundantly clear that we need to do a much better job of educating our students in civics to prepare them for the rest of their lives.”
That same day, DeSantis signed two other bills aimed at ensuring students are exposed to historical facts about radical ideologies and to diverse political opinions:
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- House Bill 5 requires public schools to teach students about the evils of communism.
- Senate Bill 1108 requires college and university students to take both a civic literacy course and a civic literacy assessment as a graduation requirement.
DeSantis is making this push amid the left’s ongoing romanticization of socialism and communism — destructive ideologies with a well-documented history of resulting in mass poverty and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.
The governor won high praise from Republican lawmakers and other conservatives for trying to ensure that Florida schools prioritize diversity of viewpoints — and not just diversity of race, which has been the obsessive focus of Democrats for decades.
“When educational institutions place a premium on people that look different but think the same, that’s not diversity — that’s conformity,” state Rep. Spencer Roach said in a statement.
“I thank Governor DeSantis for ensuring that Florida’s 12 state universities and 28 state colleges will foster ideological competition and diversity of viewpoint to make all campuses a true marketplace of ideas.”
State Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez said it’s important for students to learn about the evils of communism and not be spoon-fed the romanticized, sanitized version pushed by Democrats such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
“As a daughter and granddaughter of Cuban refugees, my family knows firsthand the dangers Communism and the fatal consequences of totalitarian regimes,” Rodriguez said. “May this bill serve as a tool to assure history doesn’t repeat itself in our great nation.”
State senator Ray Rodrigues underscored how crucial it is for students to be exposed to both conservative and liberal viewpoints to ensure our youth are not intellectually manipulated.
“Without a measurement of intellectual diversity, it is impossible to know if Florida taxpayers are providing an education or an indoctrination,” Rodrigues said. “Governor DeSantis understands the difference and I am grateful for his commitment to ensuring viewpoint diversity exists on our campuses.”
DeSantis has rocketed to the top of the GOP thanks to his skillful handling of the pandemic and his bold maneuvers to combat Big Tech censorship, voter fraud and the invasion of critical race theory in schools.
Predictably, the governor was slammed by the left-wing peanut gallery on Twitter for enacting the trio of education-focused legislation.
However, these kinds of laws — to ensure that conservative viewpoints are not suppressed or censored on college campuses — should have been in place years ago.
A 2018 survey published in The New York Times showed that most college campuses are run by liberal administrators and professors.
The poll of 900 university administrators found that liberal staff members outnumber conservatives by a staggering ratio of 12-1, according to Samuel Abrams, a professor at left-wing Sarah Lawrence College.
A whopping 71 percent of college administrators across the country identified themselves as “liberal or very liberal,” while just 6 percent classified themselves as somewhat conservative, the survey showed.
“It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate — and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators,” Abrams concluded.
SCOOP: The principal of East Side Community School in New York sent white parents this “tool for action,” which tells them they must become “white traitors” and then advocate for full “white abolition.”
This is the new language of public education. pic.twitter.com/0XA3xUpcuT
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) February 15, 2021
From elementary school to high school to colleges to the workplace, America’s youth are being taught to lionize career criminals such as George Floyd and are being told that all whites are “oppressors” while all blacks are “oppressed.”
This kind of mass, one-sided indoctrination has spawned the bloody race wars erupting in Democrat-run cities across the nation. These incidents confirm that legislation such as that signed this week by DeSantis is long overdue.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
