Report: After DeSantis intervened, a state college scrapped its search for a new president and will hand the job to a politician
Something is rotten in Florida's Heartland.
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On April 14, just three days before trustees at a small state college in a rural corner of Florida were set to pick the school’s next president, Gov. Ron DeSantis suddenly intervened.
An outside search firm and a 25-member search committee had spent months combing through more than 60 applicants to be the next president of South Florida State College, a respected community college serving around 6,000 students amid the citrus groves, cattle pastures and phosphate mines of a region known as Florida’s “Heartland.” They had narrowed the field down to three finalists — all high-ranking college administrators — each of whom had already been in for campus visits and job interviews.
But then, “the governor’s office contacted the college on the Friday before the board meeting and put the process to a stop,” according to an April 28 report in The Herald-Advocate, a weekly newspaper in the region.
Within days, all three finalists abruptly withdrew their applications without any explanation. The South Florida State College’s Board of Trustees — which is controlled by DeSantis political appointees — announced it that would conduct another abbreviated search itself, rather than using an outside recruiting firm or separate search committee. And the trustees decided to throw the job open to candidates who lacked an advanced education, after initially insisting that any potential applicant have a doctoral or other terminal degree.
That second search — which lasted just seven days — concluded this week, when college trustees named a single finalist who is now all-but-guaranteed to become school’s next president: Fred Hawkins, a Republican state representative from the Orlando area.
Hawkins, 45, does not have an advanced degree or any experience as a college administrator. What he does have is loyalty to DeSantis — so much so that Hawkins recently stood by DeSantis’ side during a bizarre press conference at Walt Disney World, grinning as the governor threatened to build a state prison at Florida’s most important tourist attraction.
It’s still not clear who reached out to the college on the governor’s behalf, to whom they spoke, or what they specifically ordered the school to do. But it is crystal clear that DeSantis’ decision to intervene had an immediate impact.
Days after DeSantis’ outreach, the college trustees held a last-minute workshop to discuss the status of their presidential search. Minutes from that meeting show that the DeSantis-appointed board chair informed the other trustees that all three finalists had withdrawn from consideration — even though emails obtained by The Herald-Advocate show that not all of them had yet done so.
In addition, another trustee appears to have been upset by outside interference in the selection process. That trustee — Joe Wright, a dairy farmer who has served on the South Florida State College Board since 2011 — “expressed his concern about serving on the board and some intervening issues that occurred,” according to the meeting minutes. (Wright declined to comment further when later contacted by a local reporter.)
What’s more, The Herald-Advocate also reported that DeSantis had specifically “noted displeasure over the finalists.” And another college trustee explicitly cited the political affiliations of those finalists during an interview with the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald.
“You have to understand that we are political appointees, and they were all Democrats,” Trustee Louis Kirschner, a chiropractor and a local Republican Party leader, told the Times/Herald. “The governor doesn’t appoint all Republican trustees and expect us to select a Democrat.”
Still, most of those involved are refusing to answer detailed questions about what exactly went down in Florida’s Heartland, a forgotten part of the state that doesn’t usually face much outside scrutiny. That includes Hawkins, who did not respond to calls and texts from the Times/Herald, and the Governor’s Office, which refused to answer whether DeSantis supported Hawkins’ selection.
Other agencies have also been slow to fulfill public-records requests submitted by The Herald-Advocate.
But the process isn’t done: Trustees are scheduled to interview Hawkins on May 31 and vote on whether to hire him on June 7, according to The Herald-Advocate.
In the meantime, the 123-year-old community newspaper is continuing to dig into this story.
And you can help the paper keep pushing by signing up for a $5-a-month subscription.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the length of the second presidential search. That search lasted just seven days (not 10).
Jesus. Effing. Christ. Thank God for the The Herald-Advocate. Heaven only knows what shenanigans are going on these days because nobody's looking.
As a retired associate professor of Sociology and resident of Central Florida, I find this news as yet another terrifying sign of the decline of Higher Education in Florida, if not the decline of the America envisioned by its founders.
The only problem Florida schools have with ideological indoctrination is that being imposed by our governor. Florida’s educators are not engaging in indoctrination - a word that implies limits and narrowness of subject matter and knowledge - by sharing multiple perspectives, covering the full spectrum of our nation’s and state’s diverse population, nor by encouraging students to critically examine taken-for granted assumptions. These are the hallmarks of scientific inquiry and advanced reasoning, not ideological Indoctrination.
Ironically, the actual definition of “woke,” a word originating amongst 1930s Harlem musicians/performers, calls out a similar perspective of awareness & knowing, one that fits well within our Nation’s Founders ideas of education and knowledge, including the belief that knowledge is power. The word “woke” (it has never been a culture or ideology), like our modern public school curriculum, moves us away from a past that did impose ideological-based limits to the knowledge available to students, and the similar limits that our Governor is imposing on Florida Education
America’s first Patriots and Founders were quite clear - they believed that a expansive Liberal Arts Education was essential to American Freedom and Liberty (Liberal, as in the French source of the word, Liberated, or more precisely, the Liberation of the Mind), as it would teach our children multiple perspectives of all the disciplines, including both the successes and failures of our own, and other nations, governments past and present.
A liberated mind - one that is free to explore all knowledge, without parochial (local; familial) limits - is the fundamental foundation for a Liberated and Free People. Without it, America and the ideals left to us by the Founders, is lost. (I do encourage everyone to take the time to read some of the original papers/correspondences of America’s Founders; I wonder if many of us have learned this history primarily through the highly edited interpretations of others - I’ve been doing just this for the last 4-5 years, and it has been eye-opening, especially when these works are compared to what currently passes as political speech & debate in our country)
What we are seeing today is a direct attack on the very kind of education our founders envisioned for Americans. It’s not the first attack - after years of defunding public education, a growing anti-intellectualism equal only to the growth of conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, lies and misinformation, and a politically motivated push for far-right Christian ideologically-based policy and activism, we are now perhaps in the final massive attack on public access to scientific knowledge and factual information. I am shocked and terrified by the signs of tyranny in our (Florida) Governor’s words and actions; it should likewise concern anyone who believes that students ought to receive the highest quality of education and access to knowledge from our State’s schools and colleges/universities.
With DeSantis taking control of our States education, choosing what he believes is or isn’t valid knowledge, I believe Florida students will not find success outside of Florida, nor will they be considered top candidates for Stateside or International institutions or businesses. But our Governor will succeed in producing a new generation of Americans who lack the knowledge and ability to understand and protect the human rights of Liberty and Freedom from tyranny.
Final note:
Its been my observation over the years that those in power like to tell the masses that maybe their children aren’t “college-material” or that intellectuals/scientists are self-serving, biased and are dangerous to the White Christen Culture they say should prevail in America. Yet, those leaders, and the wealthy people behind them who donate substantial sums of money - both legally and not - to political leaders campaigns and other activities, pay top dollar for access to, and control over, knowledge. And their children - who from my experience are not anymore or less “prepared” for higher education - are always presumed to be “college-ready”.
This serves as an excellent reminder of an early paper written by John Adams (1765), Knowledge is Power, and without knowledge, People will not even know what it means to have Liberty or a Freedom, never mind achieve it. That’s why he argues that both Church and State have long worked to control access to knowledge and the dissemination of new advances in knowledge; it’s this control that allows both church and state, independently and together, to control, and remain in power over, people.
Think about that the next time you hear DeSantis or other politicians talk about education, educators and scientists.