From now on, thanks to conservative Governor Ron DeSantis, taxpayer subsidized universities in Florida are required to grill “both faculty and students” to find out their “political beliefs and viewpoints.” If the state legislature, currently held by Republicans, doesn’t like the answers to the quiz questions, the institutions lose their public paycheck.
DeSantis wants answers
The provision was quietly buried in the text of a law passed by the Florida House and Senate, then signed by DeSantis on Tuesday, June 22, and comes as part of a nationwide effort by conservatives to promote “intellectual diversity” on campuses.
What they mean by that is preventing liberal professors from cramming left-wing propaganda down the throats of impressionable students. Democrats are terrified about the “lack of details on the survey’s privacy protections,” and they have some questions “over what the results may ultimately be used for.”
Another thing that Democrats don’t like is the provision that makes them take personal responsibility for their political beliefs. “Based on the bill’s language, survey responses will not necessarily be anonymous.” Liberals scream “Wow! No way! DeSantis can’t do that!” He did.
Professors are especially worried that “they may be targeted, held back in their careers or even fired for their beliefs.” Maybe not. Florida Senator Ray Rodrigues, a sponsor of the bill, assures panicky progressive educators that “faculty will not be promoted or fired based on their responses.” All that will happen is the school loses it’s funding. If the school wants to fire people for their beliefs in order to keep that funding, that’s their problem.
Rabidly liberal magazine Salon complains that the “only details on the survey come via a passage over its purpose.” They’re furious that conservatives want to discover “the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented” at public universities, and whether students “feel free to express beliefs and viewpoints on campus and in the classroom.”
Students aren’t there to express their own views, they are there to be indoctrinated in the ones Democrat’s believe in. DeSantis and both houses of the state legislature are fed up with it.
Shunned or suppressed viewpoints
At the press conference for the bill signing, DeSantis explained that it “used to be thought that a university campus was a place where you’d be exposed to a lot of different ideas.”
“Unfortunately, now the norm is, these are more intellectually repressive environments. You have orthodoxies that are promoted, and other viewpoints are shunned or even suppressed.”
Everybody knows that modern universities are nothing but indoctrination centers for the liberal left. They’re notorious for promoting “left-wing ideologies” and discriminating “against conservative students and staff.” It turns out that despite Democrat fears, “the bill does not specify what the survey results will be used for.”
Both Governor DeSantis and Senator Rodrigues did confirm that “the state could institute budget cuts if university students and staff do not respond in a satisfactory manner.” They say look at the responses and then they’ll decide if schools are inclusive of conservatives or not. If not, they won’t get funding. Liberal brainwashing is “not worth tax dollars and that’s not something that we’re going to be supporting moving forward.”
DeSantis didn’t fall for the trap laid by reporters to give specific examples of abuse. Instead he noted that “a lot of parents” worry about their kids being “indoctrinated” on college campuses. Florida Senate President Wilton Simpson isn’t shy with his opinion. He calls the institutions “socialism factories.” From now on Democrats won’t be able to limit campus speech that “may be uncomfortable, disagreeable or offensive.” Conservative speakers will even be allowed back on campus. The next step is to expand the free speech protections to K-12 education.
“The truth of the matter is that kids are being indoctrinated from an early age,” conservative Barney Bishop relates. “I think that those of us who have diverse thinking and look at both sides of the issue, see that the way the cards are stacked in the education system, is toward the left and toward the liberal ideology and also secularism — and those were not the values that our country was founded on. Those are the values that we need to get our country back to.”
