Florida’s rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, has engineered a second “hostile takeover” of a liberal-leaning state school, education watchers say, after he installed a number of staunch conservatives to the board of trustees at the University of West Florida (UWF).
The move almost exactly mirrors the governor’s 2023 seizure of power at Sarasota’s New College of Florida, in which he ousted the sitting board of the popular liberal arts school and replaced them with hardline cronies in what a national university professor’s union denounced as an “aggressively ideological and politically motivated” move.
