Florida’s public colleges are banned from applying state and federal funding to DEI programs and activities under a new rule unveiled Wednesday by the Florida Board of Education.
There are 28 schools in the Florida College System, such as Broward College and Palm Beach State College, that will be mandated not to use such money for DEI.
“The rule adopted by the Board defined, for the first time, DEI and affirmatively prohibits FCS institutions from using state or federal funds to administer programs that categorize individuals based on race or sex for the purpose of differential or preferential treatment,” the board wrote in a statement.
The board also replaced the course “Principles of Sociology” with a general-education core course in American History, with the intention of teaching students “an accurate and factual account of the nation’s past, rather than exposing them to radical woke ideologies, which had become commonplace in the now replaced course.”
The new rule represents an extension of Governor DeSantis’s existing initiatives to eliminate wasteful, politicized DEI departments in academia.
In May, he signed legislation that prohibited state colleges and universities from using public funds to support DEI programming. In addition to defunding DEI projects, the law also bars public colleges from infusing critical race theory and related grievance politics ideologies into curricula for general education courses. Those classes “may not distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics” stemming from “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities,” according to the law.
“Higher education must return to its essential foundations of academic integrity and the pursuit of knowledge instead of being corrupted by destructive ideologies,” Florida’s Commissioner of Education, Manny Díaz Jr., said. “These actions today ensure that we will not spend taxpayers’ money supporting DEI and radical indoctrination that promotes division in our society.”
In January 2023, DeSantis announced a plan to reverse New College’s progressive bent by overhauling its board of trustees, six members of which he replaced with conservative appointees. The DeSantis administration’s main criticism of the school’s trajectory was its embrace of DEI initiatives. That same month, DeSantis’s office announced it would be requiring Florida state college and universities to report their spending on DEI as well as projects and initiatives related to critical race theory.