STUNNING: University of Florida’s DEI Programs ‘Stunning Scope, Scale, and Radicalism’ Exposed

Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the director of its anti-Critical Race Theory initiative, recently released an article on substack that exposed the “stunning scope, scale, and radicalism of… ‘diversity and inclusion’ programs” at the University of Florida (UF). He noted in his article that while the university professed to Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) that it only “hosts 31 DEI initiatives at a cost of $5 million per year”, he contended that this was misleading given what the cache of internal documents from the university shows.

Mr. Rufo detailed that it “appears to show that UF has created 1,018 separate DEI initiatives…that the process of ideological capture has spread throughout the university’s departments and divisions: 73 percent “have a DEI committee” and “DEI officer”; 70 percent “espoused commitment to DEI”; 53 percent “have a DEI strategic plan”; and 30 percent have “DEI in annual reports” and use “DEI in performance review.”…The message from the top is not hard to decipher: departments must stack the deck in favor of racial minorities and use racial identity, rather than pure academic merit, as a key qualification in faculty hiring.”

He added that “the [university] administration will be watching—DEI bureaucrats are maintaining a spreadsheet of departments and faculty that comply with these practices and those that do not.” He further noted the radicalized and racialized attitude that these DEI bureaucrats bring and the ideology that they force down the throat of the university’s staff.

A lecture about “white privilege,” “white fragility, and “‘unearned advantages’ of whiteness” was listed in the documents and white participants of this lecture were forced to internalize mantras like “‘[w]e admit our collective history is rooted in white supremacy’; ‘I have come to admit that I am powerless over my addiction to racism’; ‘I believe that only a power greater than me can restore me in my humanness to the non-racist creature as God designed me to be’.” The goal of this lecture program was “the abolition of whiteness.”

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Other training programs featured the goals of dismantling “‘white supremacy, patriarchy, [and] exploitive capitalism’, which are based on pathological ‘whiteness.'” Being at a university one might imagine that these programs were meant to further the object of academic scholarship and learning. Instead, the DEI-related programs complain that “the culture of academia” is merely the “institutionalized effects of white terror” and that “[w]e got to save life in the universe from these capitalists in America. They’re out to destroy every damn thing. So that’s the mission.”

Scholarships are not spared from this racialized and socialized spoils system as the university “administers and promotes a range of scholarships that explicitly prohibit whites, and sometimes Asians, from applying.”

I concur with Mr. Rufo that action by the Florida legislature is needed to prohibit race-based baiting and hatred from being institutionalized. Such actions must, however, take into account “that DEI has embedded itself in every department, program, and initiative” at the University of Florida. Rigorous constitutionally sound laws with vigorous enforcement are needed to combat this scourge.