‘He feels empowered’: DeSantis kicks off takeover of second liberal Florida school

Florida’s rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, has engineered a second “hostile takeover” of a liberal-leaning state school, education watchers say, after he installed a number of staunch conservatives to the board of trustees at the University of West Florida (UWF).

The move almost exactly mirrors the governor’s 2023 seizure of power at Sarasota’s New College of Florida, in which he ousted the sitting board of the popular liberal arts school and replaced them with hardline cronies in what a national university professor’s union denounced as an “aggressively ideological and politically motivated” move.

Making campuses more conservative has been a popular ideological cause among rightwingers, especially those emboldened by Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Many influential Republican and far-right activists see US colleges as dominated by liberals and in need of political transformation.

One of the new UWF appointees is Scott Yenor, a professor of political science at Boise State University exposed by the Guardian last year as the driving force behind an Christian nationalist activist group called Action Idaho, which was accused by civil rights advocates of spreading conspiracy theories online and promoting rightwing extremism and bigotry.

Yenor, an avowed anti-feminist, has spoken previously of career-oriented females being “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome”, and has called US universities “citadels of gynecocracy”.

About 60% of UWF’s student population of 14,300 is female, and the Pensacola school embraces “the liberal arts tradition as the foundation for educating future generations”, according to its website.

A second controversial figure among DeSantis’s five appointees is Adam Kissel, a former education department official during the first Trump administration and Heritage Foundation visiting fellow on higher education reform. Kissel reposted to his X account this week a celebratory message from a Proud Boy founder convicted and jailed for attacking police during the deadly 6 January Capitol riot, who was pardoned by the new president on Monday.

Both DeSantis picks are rooted in the principles of the Heritage Foundation, the ultra-conservative thinktank that produced the Project 2025 policy blueprint for the second Trump presidency.

Among its proposals is the abolition of the federal Department of Education and concentrating power in state hands, which analysts say is music to the Florida governor’s ears.

The state, they say, has been the perfect proving ground for Republicans’ wider agenda to remake higher education in the US, which Trump, DeSantis and their allies insist has become overrun by what they see as “leftist ideology”.

“DeSantis is really running with this Trump empowerment thing, he feels empowered and he wants to be very aligned with President Trump,” said Katie Blankenship, Florida director of PEN America, which has chronicled the governor’s assaults on freedom of expression in education and other areas.

“Florida has been friendly territory to roll out these sorts of strategies, and they’re just going to go as hard as they can because they feel as if they’ve been given the green light, and unfortunately, in many ways, they’re right.

“New College of Florida was one of the best liberal arts schools in the country, but now that doesn’t exist. It’s been completely replaced with an ideological education, and has become the blueprint of what it looks like to politicize our basic concept of history and education. What’s going to come from that is horrifying to think about.”

Others fear a similar future for UWF, even if DeSantis’s rightwing rebranding of Florida’s university system has not always gone to plan, and sparked an exodus of academics.

As well as the attempted takeovers at UWF and New College, which was followed by a hiring spree of ideologically aligned rightwing faculty and staff, DeSantis installed the Republican former Nebraska senator Ben Sasse as president of the University of Florida, before his turbulent 17-month tenure ended under a cloud amid accusations of his “exorbitant spending”.

And with the enthusiastic consent of a Republican-dominated legislature, DeSantis passed a series of laws aimed at combating perceived “wokeism” on Florida campuses, including outlawing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, removing protections from tenured professors, gutting race and gender classes seen as too liberal, and promoting the alternative Classic Learning Test favored by conservative Christian colleges as a pathway to university admission.

The UWF appointments, which are expected to be confirmed by the Florida senate, have drawn extra scrutiny. Kissel, who has advocated for the privatization of public universities, has previously donated to DeSantis’s election campaign. Yenor, a fierce opponent of university DEI and affirmative action initiatives, praised the governor on X after his appointment. “No one has done higher education reform better,” he wrote.

Critics note neither has any relevant experience of, or connection to Florida’s higher education system, and have spoken out against Yenor’s misogyny, which includes comments to the 2021 National Conservatism Conference in Orlando that he would prefer to see women at home having babies instead of attending college or in the workforce.

“If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to be mothers, not finding every reason for women to delay motherhood until they are established in a career or financially independent,” Yenor said.

The Florida Democratic congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz condemned his UWF appointment in a statement posted to X. “Yenor consistently makes disgusting comments about women. He’s said women shouldn’t pursue a career, and instead just strive for motherhood,” she said.

“This is 2025, not 1825. How dare DeSantis appoint a guy who thinks women only belong in the kitchen, or birthing babies. More than half of West Florida’s students are women. If Yenor refuses to support their education he should be nowhere near making decisions at UWF.”

DeSantis attempted to defend Yenor at a press conference in Jacksonville, the Florida Phoenix reported, claiming he was “not familiar” with his views on women, and assailing the media for reporting his past comments.

“What I don’t do, what I don’t like, is cherrypicking somebody saying this, and then trying to smear them,” said DeSantis, who removed the Democratic Hillsborough county state attorney, Andrew Warren, from office in 2022 for comments he made attacking Florida’s then 15-week abortion ban and supporting gender-affirming treatments.

Jono Miller, a retired New College lecturer and president of the NCF Freedom group attempting to preserve the university’s liberal values, questioned DeSantis’s motives in looking outside Florida to appoint Yenor and Kissel.

“We should be able to field competent, appropriate boards of trustees primarily from within the state, and the fact that he’s reaching out of state to get these people that have reputations that are more mission-aligned with what he’s trying to do is significant,” he said.

“You also look at presidents that are being appointed to these institutions, current or former politicians to fill these roles, so between the two, between the presidential trend and the governor’s predilection for appointing people with strong views that match his, we’re very worried about academic freedom.”