In fewer than four months’ time, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s hard-right governor, will be termed out of office, and what critics saw as his relentless eight-year, “anti-woke” assault on higher education in the state will finally be over. But while DeSantis himself will be gone, numerous hand-picked loyalists will remain in positions of power to protect his ideological makeover of universities and colleges. The latest, Alex Kelly, the governor’s former deputy chief of staff, and Florida commerce secretary, was named last week as the sole finalist in Pensacola state college’s search for a new president, at least the 12th close DeSantis ally to win such a plum post.
If he is paid the same salary as Edward Meadows, the college’s outgoing president, Kelly’s earnings will soar from $186,000 at the commerce department to more than $353,000, according to the Miami Herald. DeSantis’s two terms were marked at regular intervals with unprecedented attacks on the established order, notably his “hostile takeover” of New College, the former liberal arts college; a push to end campus diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and stifle free speech, struck down in July by a federal judge. There was also a steady drum beat of conservative Republican acolytes placed controversially in key university leadership roles, many with no previous experience of higher education administration.
They include Jeanette Nunez, DeSantis’s former lieutenant governor, installed despite protests at Florida International University; and Marva Johnson, a lobbyist, businesswoman and tight political ally nicknamed “Maga Marva”, who last year became president of Florida A&M, the state’s largest historically Black public university, over fierce objection from students, faculty, alumni and four board trustees. Republican former state representatives Mel Ponder, Tommy Gregory, Fred Hawkins and John Temple all secured lucrative presidencies at state colleges; as did three of DeSantis’s former education commissioners, Anastasios Kamoutsas, Manny Diaz and Richard Corcoran. All were selected by university boards of trustees and confirmed by the state university system’s board of governors, a 17-member panel of which 14 are direct DeSantis appointees.
Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the state system, is another long-serving Republican politician. William Johnson, Florida director of PEN America, the free expression advocacy group that has challenged many of DeSantis’s policy changes and political maneuvers, said his administration had “made public education an apparatus of the state”. He said: “Political influence over higher education isn’t new.
Rick Scott [DeSantis’s predecessor] did something similar, but the difference is the scale and the explicit ideological goals behind it. One of the key differences between DeSantis and everyone else is basically that you know these appointments have no experience in higher ed, so we can infer their main skill set is simply to follow the administration’s ideological mandates. What I am interested in is cross-checking how many folks have come from any kind of higher ed background and understanding of academic freedom and has that ever been the focus of any of his appointees?
And I would imagine that the answer is very few, if any.” Amanda Phalin, an associate professor in the University of Florida’s school of business, experienced first-hand the state’s approach to university hires as a faculty representative (not appointed by the governor) on the state board from 2023 to 2025. She remains outraged by its rejection of Santa Ono, an experienced academic chosen as UF president last year by the university’s own trustees, after his earlier advocacy for DEI initiatives came to light. They were all DeSantis appointees, but they were having sort of an internal squabble.
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