That doesn’t appear to be what DeSantis has in mind. DeSantis’s administration recently asked all public colleges and universities to offer it with data about resources they use related to diversity, equity, inclusion and significant race theory. Christopher Rufo, considered one of the six appointments, tweeted on Jan. 4: “Gov. DeSantis goes to put siege to college “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs.”
Rufo is a Republican activist who in 2020 caught Trump’s eye with an appearance on Fox News through which Rufo declared that critical race theory had “pervaded every institution within the federal government.” He urged the president “to stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology.”
Critical race theory is a decades-old academic discipline that investigates systemic racism in the USA, which Rufo and others insist doesn’t exist; they are saying racism is the act of people alone. Critical race theory isn’t taught in K-12 schools or regular classrooms, though the incontrovertible fact that there’s institutional racism on this country sometimes is. Rufo’s appearance on Fox News got here not long after Minneapolis police killed a Black man named George Floyd, which was followed by a racial justice movement within the country that was decried by conservatives.
Inside days of Rufo’s appearance on Fox News (on which he has appeared persistently), Trump had signed an executive order canceling all federal diversity training programs — though President Biden has since rescinded it. States followed Trump’s move, passing laws restricting what teachers could say about race and racism. DeSantis signed into law laws that also barred businesses from providing diversity training to employees, but a Florida judge last 12 months blocked parts of the law.
One other of the six appointees is Matthew Spalding, a government professor and dean at Hillsdale College, which provides education — and has created K-12 curriculums — that’s centered on Western civilization and designed to assist “students acquire a mature love for America.” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has called Hillsdale “a shining city on a hill,” and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, was hired by the school to assist establish a full-time presence within the nation’s capital.
James Uthmeier, DeSantis’s chief of staff, told the far-right Day by day Caller website (which was founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and pundit Neil Patel): “It’s our hope that Latest College of Florida will turn out to be Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”
Hillsdale’s president is Larry Arnn, who was within the news recently when he said that teachers “are trained within the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges within the country” and that “anyone” can teach. He headed Trump’s 1776 Commission — geared toward countering the Latest York Times’s 1619 Project and its aligned K-12 curriculum. The 1619 Project was a group of essays and articles that put slavery and its consequences at the middle of America’s historical narrative.
The Hillsdale K-12 civics and U.S. history curriculum extols conservative values, attacks progressive ones and distorts civil rights history, saying, for instance: “The civil rights movement was almost immediately became programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the Founders.” Hillsdale College itself offers a “classical liberal arts core” to its students; the web site lists greater than 30 authors and thinkers that students will encounter — nearly all of them White men. The school has helped launch dozens of “classical” charter schools across the country (Hillsdale doesn’t own or operate the faculties but trains faculty and staff and shares curriculum).
DeSantis also appointed to the board:
Charles R. Kesler, government professor at Claremont McKenna College and editor of the Claremont Review of Books, a publication of a conservative think tank in California called the Claremont Institute; Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University who’s aligned with Trump; Eddie Speir, superintendent of a non-public Christian school in Florida called Inspiration Academy; and Debra Jenks, a graduate of Latest College who works as a mediation lawyer in Florida.
DeSantis signaled that he would take motion in the upper education arena on Tuesday when he gave his second inaugural speech and said:
We must ensure school systems are aware of parents and to students, not partisan interest groups, and we must be certain that our institutions of upper learning are focused on academic excellence and the pursuit of truth, not the imposition of stylish ideology.
My Washington Post colleagues Laura Meckler and Josh Dawsey wrote about Rufo in 2021, saying partly:
Rufo has played a key role within the national debate, defining diversity trainings and other programs as critical race theory, putting out examples that legislators and others then cite — though not all of Rufo’s details hold as much as scrutiny.
He continues to look recurrently on Fox News to debate the problem and infrequently offers strategic advice over win the political fight. In March, he wrote on Twitter that his goal was to conflate any variety of topics right into a latest bucket called critical race theory.
“We’ve got successfully frozen their brand—’critical race theory’—into the general public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We are going to eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the varied cultural insanities under that brand category,” Rufo wrote. “The goal is to have the general public read something crazy within the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We’ve got decodified the term and can recodify it to annex the whole range of cultural constructions which are unpopular with Americans.”
Rufo said in an interview that he understands why his opponents often point to this tweet, but said that the approach described is “so obvious.”
“If you should see public policy outcomes you have got to run a public persuasion campaign,” he said. Rufo says his own role has been to translate research into programs about race into the political arena.
