DeSantis’s Higher Education Agenda, Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), and Student Protest

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Florida is ground zero in the reactionary right’s attacks on Higher Education. In Spring 2023, the super-majority Republican legislature under Governor Ron DeSantis passed the far-reaching SB-266. This law follows in the wake of the now-enjoined Stop Woke Act to ban from General education core courses “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States”. It also bans the expenditure of state or federal funds on programs or campus activities that “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or promote or engage in political or social activism”.

While suppressing ideas and activities concerned with creating a more equal and democratic society, the right has introduced curriculum and programming which seeks to verse students in the ideology of the status quo. SB-266 mandates that general education courses “promote and preserve the constitutional republic through traditional…coursework”. It elevates the status of centers established on three Florida campuses to offer classical and civic education and to “highlight the possibilities created by individual achievement and entrepreneurial vision”.

Some commentators read DeSantis’s attacks on Higher Education as novel. The reactionary right has in fact broken with neoliberal Democrats and centrist Republicans in their response to the outcry over racial inequality that erupted following a police officer’s murder of George Floyd. After Floyd’s murder, Florida’s Board of Governors (BOG) called for campuses to find “solutions to eliminate racism and discrimination” and appointed the head of diversity and inclusion at JP Morgan to oversee the work. This approach was supplanted when DeSantis became captivated with the thought of rightwing ideologue Chris Rufo. Rufo asserts that universities engage in “woke indoctrination” by making white students feel guilty about their role in past oppressions. Rufo argues state institutions must be redirected to encourage “classical liberal arts” over Gender Studies or Critical Race Theory. DeSantis broke with a response that acknowledges racism but applies a band-aid solution to embrace a response denying structural racism.

If facets of the reactionary right’s higher education agenda are novel, neither is it true that Florida’s colleges and universities were “not broken” prior to DeSantis’s assent as some of the Governor’s most fervent critics have maintained. For example, DeSantis has encroached upon faculty’s role in shared governance by undermining their role in determining curriculum or academic programming. Yet as critical literature on higher education has revealed faculty, student, and public stakeholders’ voices in the governance of universities is marginal as trustees from the corporate sector wield enormous power (Newfield 2007, Rhoades 2005, Slaughter & Leslie 1997). DeSantis may end DEI - but none of the DEI programs tackle some of the most glaring consequences of structural racism - that majority minority institutions within the state university system like University of Central Florida (UCF) and Florida International University (FIU) are underfunded relative to the disproportionately white University of Florida (UF) or that adjunct faculty are disproportionately people of color and women (Hamilton and Nielson, 2021, Robertson 2022).

If DeSantis accentuated the crisis that has long characterized public higher education in Florida, his attacks also brought an unprecedented awareness to the fact that our universities are not serving the public good. Student socialists with the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) have stepped into this space to organize their campuses, building on histories of student organizing and resistance in educational institutions (Kirshner, 2015, Ginwright, Noguera, Cammarota, 2006) and of creating radical spaces for study and struggle in universities (Patel, 2021, Meyerhoff, 2019).


On the campuses of UF, UCF, and FIU, the YDSA have been the strongest and most visible organizers against the attacks on Higher Education. YDSA students have organized teach-ins, protests, marches on administration buildings, and passed resolutions against curriculum-banning legislation in student government bodies. In doing so, YDSA reclaims campuses as sites of struggle interconnected with broader societal struggles around inequality (O’Conner, 2020, Ferguson, 2017, Choudry and Vally, 2020). Student socialists are advancing a vision for how the fight over public higher education is related to the struggle for a society that fulfills the needs of the many instead of the greed of the few.

Most students on Florida campuses, more gender non-conforming and less white than any previous generation, oppose curriculum bans and the gutting of DEI but are not engaged in resistance. Neither do the majority of students understand the attacks as part of a long standing effort to structure society for elite benefit. As a well-organized but small minority, student socialists are working to scale up the resistance movement and must grapple with important strategic questions including:

1. Social movements have a vital role to play in “framing” – or in naming the problem, proposing a solution, and making an appeal to become involved. How do youth engage in framing? To what extent is YDSA using this moment to not only oppose Desantis but to gesture toward a more expansive or liberatory vision of education?

2. How do socialist students relate to and organize with non-socialist students? Is the primary objective to build an issue-based movement in coalition with other student groups or to bring more students into a YDSA-led movement?

3. In resisting DeSantis’ Higher Education agenda, how do students relate to the labor movement? How are you engaging with academic workers, educator unions and yourselves as current or future workers?

4. What is our target? Policies are coming down from the state legislature yet they are being implemented on our campuses. Short of changing the composition of the legislature, what kinds of targets and demands can we mobilize campus around?

5. Florida is deeply gerrymandered. Decades of appointees by Republicans and Neoliberal Democrats have stacked the Board of Governors, the Board of
Trustees and the judiciary such that protest can feel futile. How do we build a movement that can sustain itself over the years or decades that it will take to realize education as a quality public good in Florida?

6. What do YDSA activists learn as they organize, and what kinds of knowledge do they produce through struggle, teach-ins, and otherwise organizing?

Sub Unit

• 21st Century Educational Alternatives: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Patriarchy, Militarism, and the Climate Crisis

Chair

• Alice Taylor, University of Denver

Individual Presentations

• Rank and File Teacher Pipeline: Engaging future educators on FIU’s Campus - Felipe Barroso Ramos

• Responding to the Rise of Fascism in the South and the Protestival: A View from UCF YDSA - Maria Alejandra Franzblau, Young Democratic Socialists of America at FIU

• The fight against Tallahassee's tightening grip at UF: lessons learned and next steps - Oscar E Alvarez, Young Democratic Socialists of America at FIU

Discussant

• Katie Rainwater, Florida Inter