Ron DeSantis’s ‘war on woke’ hits art universities

Colleges and universities throughout Florida have been feeling the weight of governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke”, a conservative plan to reform the state’s public education system that many see as an assault on academic freedom. From Gainesville to Miami, universities’ arts and humanities departments have been especially vulnerable to attempts to dictate exactly what can be taught there and how.The New College of Florida in Sarasota is one of only two public liberal arts colleges in the state—the other, Hodges University in Fort Myers, recently announced that it would permanently close. In January, DeSantis appointed six conservative members to New College’s board of trustees; that board fired the college’s president and installed a Republican politician in her place. The board then swiftly dissolved the college’s diversity office, abolished its gender studies programme, fired a lesbian librarian who was deemed a “troublemaker” and denied tenure to five professors set to receive it. By July, more than a third of the faculty had left. Many students have since transferred to other schools. Some professors and students are now suing the school.Amid this upheaval there was an effort to “beautify” New College’s campus, which included painting over five student murals. When two art students, Annie Dong and Hannah Barker, returned after their summer break, they discovered that the large-scale, colourful pieces they had painted were gone. In making the works, part of an advanced murals class taught in the autumn of 2022 by Kim Anderson, students had done extensive research and written proposals, and their projects had been approved by a committee working on an initiative to unite the campus post-Covid.“The murals elevated and celebrated the students’ diversity, cultural heritage, college experiences and LGBTQ+ communities on campus,” Anderson says, adding that these efforts had occurred “before the overthrow”.To Dong, now in her senior year, painting over the murals “is another way for them to control the culture”. Her mural had included vibrant Chinese cranes in celebration of her identity. Barker, a third-year art student, had covered a wall with Nepali mosaic designs and flora representing the country of her birth. “It feels like we have been erased,” she says.A spokesperson for New College says that the murals were removed as part of an effort “to resolve the multiple cracks and issues in the stucco” of their buildings, adding: “We will absolutely find a way for our artists to create pieces again, but we must maintain and upgrade all our buildings before greater costs occur.”It feels like we’ve had our house broken into. At first, we thought it was a bad parody Kim Anderson, New College, FloridaBut Anderson and the students say that they had planned the locations of the works carefully and in concert with an expert. “It feels like we’ve had our house broken into,” says Anderson. “At first, we thought it was a bad parody. But, piece by piece, our lives have been more personally affected by the politics here in Florida.”Censorship 101New College is far from the only Florida institution turned upside down by the culture wars. Last year, a Republican senator from Nebraska was appointed as president of the University of Florida (UF) in Gainesville, one of the largest universities in the state, which led to a backlash from UF students—what came next confirmed the worst fears of many.In April, several banners were taken down from outside UF’s off-campus art gallery. They had prison abolition and anti-police messages written on them as part of the exhibition Burn It Down: Communications of Resistance, a collaboration between members of the Florida Prisoner Solidarity organisation and UF art students. After the banners were removed at the behest of university administrators (a spokesperson for the college noted that they had been installed outside of the gallery without permission), rocks were thrown through the gallery’s windows.“The next day, I had students who were afraid of going in to take a class at the gallery,” says Angela DeCarlis, a UF art professor. Nevertheless, the gallery decided to rearrange the exhibition, emptying out the show but displaying the rocks used to vandalise the gallery, the windows’ shattered glass and the censored banners (now returned to the gallery). The words “censored by UF + UFPD” (in reference to the university’s police department) were painted on one of the blank walls.Repercussions of DeSantis’s education laws have also been felt beyond UF facilities. In June, DeCarlis organised a figure-drawing workshop for trans and non-binary youth. After the UF newspaper The Independent Florida Alligator published a positive article about the workshop, right-wing media outlets began to target and mock its organisers and participants.“It was scary,” DeCarlis says. “This is really about the attack on education and the assumption by right-wing media that higher education pushes leftist agendas—someone was specifically trolling university newspapers for these kinds of stories to target.”Ripple effectsOnly public colleges and universities are required to implement DeSantis’s education laws, but they are affecting private universities too. In October, the Rollins Museum of Art, part of Rollins College (a private liberal arts school), opened an exhibition titled The Voice of the People: Freedom of Speech. “Had this been at a public university, I don’t think we could have done that,” says the museum’s director, Ena Heller. Yet the political climate has still impacted the museum.Last year, the Rollins started a professional development programme for public school teachers to guide them on engaging with the LGBTQ+ artists featured in the museum’s collection. But then, the state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill passed into law, so the museum decided to try a focus group first to see if teachers could even use the curriculum in their classrooms. While in previous years such a workshop would have brought in numerous attendees, this time not one person showed up.“I grew up under communism,” says Heller, who was raised in Romania. “I know what censorship, book banning and minimising freedom of speech means in a society, and I see the signs here in Florida.”