Florida's Higher Ed Battles are, in Fact, Highly Precedented

Governor Ron DeSantis’s agenda to transform education in Florida is sometimes deemed “unprecedented.” In fact, there are some important precedents for the changes that his administration is making in the state’s higher education system. Understanding these precedents helps to understand what is familiar, what is new and what is at stake.

In my book Wrecked (Rutgers University Press, 2022), I refer to the process by which a state undermines its higher education system as “deinstitutionalization.” That word is a mouthful, but its meaning is straightforward. Deinstitutionalization is the process of making higher education less central to society by compromising its institutional independence.

During the 20th century, higher education became institutionalized—a core part of modern society—thanks to a combination of public resources and public trust. Families aspired for their children to attend. A growing percentage of jobs required a postsecondary credential. The production of new knowledge through academic research contributed to vibrant cities and regions.

In this capacity, higher education was an institution, like churches or courts. Higher education was part of public life, but it was not an arm of state legislatures or governors.

Institutional independence is important to higher education because no political party has a monopoly on knowledge. For this reason, institutional independence is enshrined in labor practices like faculty tenure and governance arrangements like statewide boards, both of which seek to protect academic freedom from political influence.

As deinstitutionalization compromises institutional independence, colleges and universities have less latitude to pursue their missions. Instead, they may become focused on efforts to cope with immediate crises—what I call partial defenses. Eventually, campus leaders may even prioritize compliance with political demands over the educational mission.

Thinking about events in Florida as an instance of deinstitutionalization helps to identify some precedents from the recent past.

Wisconsin from a decade ago is a good example. In a precursor of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Inside Higher Ed dubbed former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker “a primary antagonist of the academy.” Walker told public university professors they should be “teaching more classes and doing more work.” Proposals to monitor faculty time were introduced. Many Wisconsinites came to mistrust higher education. Rising mistrust eventually underwrote efforts to remake shared governance and tenure in the University of Wisconsin system—direct forerunners of Florida’s undermining of faculty tenure now.

Efforts like Walker’s spread over time. By the middle to late 2010s, polling and research indicated that Republican and Republican-leaning voters increasingly mistrusted colleges and universities.

Republicans have voiced hostility toward many nonpartisan institutions, not just higher education. Yet colleges and universities face particularly intense scrutiny. This seems to relate to the changing racial demographics of college enrollment. Republican-controlled states tend to fund higher education at lower levels than do other states and make even deeper than average cuts when college enrollments are more racially diverse than the state’s population.