Dispatches from the academic trenches of public higher education in Florida to help you prepare and resist the horrors that will soon descend on you.
By Chris Robé
April 28th, 2025
Greetings from Swamp U.
On 7 March 2025, Christopher Rufo, one of the central polemicists against critical race theory had a revealing interview with The New York Times conservative opinion writer Ross Douthat. Although not remarked upon by many, he outlines the playbook of the assault against higher education that we have been living with here in Florida and my home institution, Swamp University, for the past two years. New College of Florida serves as ground zero for the assault. Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new Board of Trustees that included Rufo in 2023 and selected Richard Corcoran, a Republican Speaker of the State House, to be interim president in 2024 to takeover the historically progressive college. The goal was to remake it in the conservative mold of Hillsdale College, a Christian liberal arts school located in southern Michigan. Instead, it has been plagued with a series of controversies like dumping books related to gender and sexuality studies, faculty fleeing the institution at alarming rates, and, most recently, the arrest of its marketing director for allegedly exposing himself.
Regardless of these complications, Rufo marches on and champions a hostile takeover of public higher education in general during his interview. He identifies Ron DeSantis’ re-election in Florida by 20 points as “an indicator of how the political calculus was changing,” allowing those attacking public education to become further emboldened. However, he is aware of the popularity of some programs provided by the Department of Higher Education like the student loan program and funding for K-12 low-income school districts. He suggests keeping them for the time being before implementing “reforms, reductions, and privatization down the line.”
Rufo holds particular disdain for the humanities. He asserts, “I think we need a total overturning of its ideology, along with a return to the classical understanding of the humanities adapted for modern conditions and popularized for large state universities.” How this exactly is to be done remains a lingering problem. Quite often conservative education can be quite superficial and unengaging.
Douthat raises this concern. He notes that the United States “is a big, complicated and messy society. And I feel like certain versions of that conservative patriotic education don’t feel as deep and rich as America deserves.”
Rufo agrees that such education can be “sterile, one-dimensional and jingoistic.” Then he mentions a recent course being offered at New College on “wokeness” by Andrew Doyle, a British conservative satirist who holds a Ph.D. in early renaissance poetry. Even the conservative paper, New York Post, critiques the course by highlighting how the catalog description of it suggests “wokeness” as “a kind of cult” advocated by “generally decent people with good intentions, but their methods are essentially illiberal.”
Needless to say, some students enrolled in the course are upset. According to them, it has been “very slanted” and plays into a general unhealthy learning environment that has engulfed the campus.
Somewhat implicitly conceding the stupidity of his example, Rufo quickly advocates for plan B (pro-abortion joke intended) of his attack: using the defunding public education as leverage:
A medium- or long-term goal of mine is to figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror and have them say, Unless we change what we’re doing, we’re not going to be able to meet our budget for the year. We’re going to have to wind certain things down and then make the universities make those hard decisions.
This is an interesting admission that suggests that the cultural terrain of public higher education is already lost for a generally conservative outlook. Instead, one must put the economic squeeze on universities and colleges to get them to cave. In some ways, this is an astute analysis that recognizes a true pressure point: many university and college administrators don’t want to have their names associated with a funding crisis that might tarnish their CVs as they scout for better career opportunities elsewhere.
We have been witnessing such tactics at the state level on our humble Swamp University and upon other colleges and universities across Florida as our general education curriculum came under the crosshairs during the summer and fall of 2024. According to state law, such introductory courses “may not distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics,” an intentionally vague directive that makes any reference to race, gender, sexuality, climate change, and systemic oppression fall under suspicion and flagged for removal. If colleges and universities don’t comply, they could potentially lose their state funding. During many contentious meetings at Swamp U. where faculty pushed back against such blatant political attacks against the curriculum and student interests, Swamp U officials constantly trotted out how the university could potentially lose two millions dollars in state funding.
Such attacks have now risen to the federal level of funding. Universities and colleges are having their federal grants threatened with some elite institutions like Columbia University conceding and learning quickly how this doesn’t lessen the attack but instead further emboldens it.
This “existential terror” is exactly where someone like Rufo wants to place college and university administrators, who are now caught between upholding the bureaucratic pragmatics of running a university and clinging onto any remote ideals they might still hold of academic freedom, faculty governance, and the public good of higher education. Under a previous liberal governing order the corporatization of the university and the integrity of the ideals of higher education might have seemed compatible. (Though many adjuncts, graduate students, non-unionized staff, and others at the bottoms of the institutional ladder would suggest otherwise, such as the adjuncts living out of their cars). But the new illiberal order rips through this veneer, exposing the ultimate end game that the corporatization of public higher education always implied: submit to an economic order that instrumentalizes education in producing good future workers and obedient subjects . . . or die.
Rufo wants to stick a knife into this open wound of terror. He recommends: “Never solve your opponent’s problems for them. Certainly don’t solve them in advance. Create a standard, you enforce the standard, and let them grapple with the outcomes.” This is the limbo we have been hanging in for the past two years at Swamp U. Only through our union and the coalitions we are forming with students and community members provide any semblance of hope and resistance.
Finally, some higher education institutions are waking up to the unsolvable crisis that compliance creates and are pushing back. Harvard pushed back against Trump’s demands that it relegate its autonomy to the government. Rutgers University faculty senate passed a resolution to form “a mutual defense compact” that constitute the Big Ten Academic Alliance. Such a compact would provide “immediate and strategic support to any member institution under direct political or legal infringement.”
More recently, The American Association of Colleges and Universities released a collectively signed letter of around 200 presidents from institutions of higher learning that “speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.”
Tellingly, not one president from a public Florida university or college has signed the letter so far.
