How it started:
Get ready for UF to lose many top professors - Colleges and Universities A-Z / University of Florida - College Confidential Forums
How it’s going:
https://twitter.com/JeffreyASachs/status/1677274050924617729
https://twitter.com/saraannhart/status/1677319167278456836?t=egCZTSYpSF6_VnsMSW00CA&s=03
It is worth reading all 23 tweets in this thread:
https://twitter.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1677155991203332103?t=FVC0X70YXK55fyL6nsPQaA&s=03
If you don’t want to go through Twitter, the first tweet links to this page:
One sentence on that page says that “The African American studies department at UF made nine offers while trying to fill three positions. None accepted.” No surprise, since potential faculty may think that the entire department will be eliminated because it is considered “too woke” or “critical race theory” by the Florida state government.
I know many, many families that pulled applications to any Florida schools due to the Politics and new state culture.
Wow, this surprises me! I mean I knew that Florida’s political climate would make professors want to quit, and would make newly minted PhDs want to avoid getting in Florida. But with the glut of PhDs that exist, I didn’t think they would actually follow through. Good for them.
I was thinking the same. It’s somewhat easier for Ph.D.s to decide not to apply to X or Y job (granted, there are so few jobs, but applicants make these decisions all the time), but leaving a tenure-track job for another is hard, and leaving a tenured job is even harder unless you’re such a star that other universities will try to snag you. There just aren’t very many openings for tenured candidates. The fact that so many people are leaving anyway speaks volumes about the hostility toward higher ed in Florida.
If you want me to worry about Florida attracting professors, show statistics on history professors. If that is a problem despite the glut, then I will accept it is impacting higher ed there
Florida has a concentration of researchers in my discipline. I trained in a med school there for a while and still have collaborators there.
They’ve been upset with the way things have been going there for several years, but mostly kept a positive attitude and tried not to get too flustered about anything. I saw a bunch of Florida profs at a conference earlier this year. They don’t have a positive attitude anymore and most of them are applying for other jobs. It’s gotten bad enough that it’s a real distraction from their work. Probably 10 people on the job market have told me they’re not applying to open positions in Florida due to all of this. This is despite the major group(s) of researchers in my field there.
Will they still have good professors in Florida? Yes, I’m sure they will, due to the overproduction of PhDs and lack of tenure-track positions. But there’s a lot of wonderful people who will be leaving, and plenty who won’t even apply in the first place. I wouldn’t have taken the position I had there in this climate.
I was surprised but UF – according to data presented at a recent Board of Trustees meeting – had the highest percentage ever of out-of-state students in its entering class (I think that’s what they said); it was a significant jump up from last year (16% to 19% basically) and a larger percentage than they had predicted (closer to 17%).
Good article on professors leaving New College of Florida–40 so far–and the resulting cancellation of a number of courses.
Interesting tactic to increase enrollment–add sports teams and recruit athletes. The only problem is that resulted in lack of dorm space.
There is a discussion about New College and this specific article on this thread: DeSantis seeks to transform Sarasota's New College with conservative board takeover - #189 by MYOS1634