Governor DeSantis is shaking up another Florida college led astray by progressive ideologues, appointing five new conservative members to the University of West Florida's governing body.

University of West Florida will be the the second school DeSantis has redeemed from Leftist rule as part of his mission to reform higher education in the Sunshine State: In 2023, he installed a conservative board to run the New College of Florida. His selections at the time included activist Chris Rufo, Hillsdale College professor Matthew Spalding, and Claremont Institute fellow Charles Kesler.

Located in Pensacola, West Florida is a public research university with roughly 10,000 undergraduate students and 5,000 post grads. The school, which runs students $8,000 in annual tuition, lists diversity and inclusion among its guiding values, in addition to integrity and innovation. One of the school's strategic initiatives for 2022–2027 is to create a "culture of inclusion and civility," which will be assessed by an annual diversity report and other barometers.

DeSantis's five appointees to the UWF Board of Trustees are Paul Bailey, Gates Garcia, Adam Kissel, Chris Young, and Scott Yenor. Together, their credentials and experience signal an intention to implement a classical academic philosophy of educational excellence at the school.

"Under the leadership of Ron DeSantis, Florida made a commitment to refocus the state's universities on their classical mission: promoting academic excellence and preparing students to be citizens of this republic," DeSantis's office said in a statement to National Review. "Bringing in these new board members will break the status quo and help refocus the university on the core mission of education. We look forward to seeing the new board members hit the ground running."

The school's interdisciplinary humanities program currently has a concentration in Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies designed to provide students with a "critical and creative approach to gender and sexual politics" and direct them to explore the "significance of gender in all areas of life." Courses include Issues in Gender and Diversity; Human Sexuality and Culture; and Race, Gender, Ethnicity, and Crime.

UWF's website advertises the Women's Studies Collective, a group to "promote a feminist presence on campus and in the UWF community" that is overseen by a faculty member. Last January, the group invited students to attend a drag show titled "Mardi Gays, Slay!" All proceeds from the event went to the Pensacola Abortion Rights Taskforce. The collective recruited student talent to compete in a "Twerk Off." In 2020, the group lobbied against a state bill that criminalized administering radical, irreversible sex-change procedures to children.

Throughout the years, UWF's faculty and curricula have taken a leftward turn.

In 2018, UWF's Anthropology department offered a course called "Sex Roles in Anthropological Perspective" that studied the experiences of gay and lesbian sex workers in transitional political economies via a book, After Love: Queer Intimacies and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba.

The Women's Studies Collective in 2018 honored a UWF English professor, a specialist in Victorian ecofeminism, organizer for the 2017 Pensacola Women’s March, and scholar on an Arctic climate change expedition. Dr. Kelly Bushnell, the professor, was photographed smiling holding a tongue-in-cheek sign that read a quote by televangelist Pat Robertson: "Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft and become lesbians."

While they must first be confirmed by the GOP-controlled state senate, the selections are on board with the governor's plan to refocus UWF.

A fellow at the Claremont Institute, Yenor has a body of research that focuses on feminism, sexual liberation, and dismantling social justice in academia. He previously served as a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and as a fellow for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Bailey served as an Adjunct Professor at Pensacola Christian College and is a registered instructor with the National Rifle Association. Kissel is a fellow on higher education at the Heritage Foundation. He is also currently a member of the Civics, History, and America's Future Advisory Council for America250, a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging the public on the United States Semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence. Garcia serves on the Catholic University of America Busch School of Business Board of Visitors and also participated in a fellowship with the Claremont Institute.

Last January, the Board of Governors of the Florida University System banned funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at the state's colleges and universities. They also removed sociology from the state’s core curriculum. In compliance with the statute, the University of Florida announced that it had dissolved its DEI department and halted DEI-focused contracts with outside vendors.

In his inaugural address, UF president Ben Sasse, who has since resigned from the role, made it clear that universities ought not to be "in the business of advancing either a theology of the right, or a theology of the left."

Patricia Gleich, who teaches sociology at UWF, defended the DEI initiatives in an interview with WUWF last January. UWF does not appear to have an operational DEI department, only an Equal Opportunity Office, on its website.

"Oftentimes, when people think about DEI initiatives, they think about them from the perspective of how they are helpful to particular populations, maybe people of color, maybe LGBTQ plus people," Gleich said, ". . . (but) programs that benefit those groups benefit all students."

New College's gender studies department was similarly radical before DeSantis's appointees stepped in. Students who major in gender studies at NCF would complete an internship with one of several organizations, including, notably, Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida. The program's faculty were also well credentialed in gender ideology. For example, one assistant professor's class offerings included Introduction to Gender Studies; Feminist, Queer, and Trans Theory; Masculinities; and Gender, Race, and Surveillance. The professor had a published article that was titled "Penis is Important for That," in a collection of essays titled, Why Are Faggots so Afraid of Faggots: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification and the Desire to Conform.

In the case of New College, the new board's mission was to save the school from wokeness but also financial ruin. The student body had been shrinking, and the school was last in most of the state's performance metrics, including for the employment rate and wage levels of graduates. UWF's graduation rate appears to be somewhat stagnant, with only a marginal increase in recent years. In 2019, UWF was accused of pulling $1.5 million from state funds since 2015 to cover shortfalls in student tuition and fee revenue and address deferred maintenance issues on campus, Politico reported.

New College had also been infected with far-left ideology where students with dissenting opinions or disfavored religious beliefs were ostracized, Rufo told National Review in January 2023. Rufo and his co-appointees were tasked with reorienting the politically left-wing school as a classical liberal arts college in the mold of Hillsdale College, a private, conservative school in southern Michigan.

New College now offers a contrarian course on wokeness itself, taught by the British right-wing media commentator and comedian Andrew Doyle, that presents the movement as "a kind of cult" with methods that are "essentially illiberal" and whose members "are capable of the most dehumanizing behavior," according to a synopsis obtained by the Tampa Bay Times.

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Governor DeSantis Overhauls Another Left-Wing Florida College, Appointing Conservative Board Members

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