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‘Hostile takeover’: the tiny Florida university targeted by Ron DeSantis - The Guardian US

‘Hostile takeover’: the tiny Florida university targeted by Ron DeSantis - The Guardian US

‘Hostile takeover’: the tiny Florida university targeted by Ron DeSantis - The Guardian US
Jan 29, 2023 1 min, 29 secs

Its picturesque seaside campus in the city of Sarasota, Florida, finds itself in the crosshairs of rightwing Republican state governor Ron DeSantis’s latest culture wars crusade, in this instance to destroy its unofficial reputation as a haven for approximately 650 generally progressive-leaning students, about half of whom identify themselves as non-heterosexual.

To that end, he has taken on Disney for its chief executive officer’s announcement last March that the corporation would pause all political donations within Florida after the state legislature enacted a so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill that banned the teaching of lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity to public school students in the third grade or younger.

Earlier this month, he banned the teaching of an advanced placement African Studies course in all public high schools in the state because some of the course material allegedly used Black history to push a political agenda that he said was tantamount to “indoctrination”.

He announced plans to tour the campus soon with “our landing team”, and on 6 January when DeSantis’s office issued the bolt-from-the-blue statement about the future membership of the College’s board of trustees, Rufo tweeted that “we are over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within”.

X González, who uses they/them pronouns, graduated in May 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts, and cherished the school’s tolerance of diverse gender identities and the freedom to design their own area of concentration if none of the more than 50 existing majors on offer suited their academic curiosity and ambition.

“Their rhetoric focuses on pushing their Christian and anti-science agendas while pretending to be fighting for free speech and diversity of opinions,” said Riley Wood, 19, a second-year computer sciences student who posed a question to Rufo.

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