"From early on in DeSantis’s governorship, it was apparent that here was someone who took extreme pleasure in malice and cruelty. In him, the political is personal. Which is to say he has no politics beyond the reach of his shadow, neither care nor imagination nor interest. Here was someone who had witnessed and approved force-feeding at Guantánamo. He told asylum seekers there was something waiting for them, and flew them to the middle of nowhere (he alone had the pleasure of knowing it was the playground of the enemy, Martha’s Vineyard). He took funds away from schools that, against his wishes, kept mask regulations in force. He sacked a public prosecutor in Tampa who said he wouldn’t criminalise abortion, and another in Orange County who refused to turn a blind eye to police crimes. He fired a data scientist who collated coronavirus statistics. He seems to have special antennae attuned to the category ‘small opposition’. And these individuals – librarians! – he goes after with his thunderbolts, with the astonishing array of state power. Not bad for a party that claims to want to drown it in a bathtub."

"His special animadversion is education: teachers, school libraries, syllabuses, test preparation. Dreary enough, ordinarily, to kit out the most colourless political career imaginable, but because invested by DeSantis with a kind of berserker fury, and because the annihilation of his tiny targets implies a vast inversion, an extraordinary attention to detail and limitless reserves of force, terrifying. How does he know? What does he care? Why does he bother? It all makes for a formidable politics of intimidation. This kind of thing feels like it’s only ever been deployed historically in spy-riddled, denunciatory or panoptical societies, but the new technology makes it possible; first the discovery of the hold-out, the lone exception, and then the magnification of the consequent annihilation."

"In Sarasota, in South Florida, DeSantis took it upon himself to take a small liberal arts college, New College of Florida – six hundred students, founded by Unitarians in 1960 – and give it a conservative overhaul. He named Richard Corcoran, former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, president, appointed a bunch of mostly out-of-state ideologues to the board, and settled back to watch the damage. It’s the small target that really gives bang for the buck. The faculty quit, the students were terrorised, the press was agog, intellectual standards plummeted, jocks enrolled and sports teams were started up. (Previously, there had been no sport other than sailing in Sarasota Bay.)"

Sounds like Sasse and DeSantis have similar plans for Florida's flagship university.

I tried to sound the alarm a few years ago when people seemed determined to force STEM down everyone's throats, and throwing the liberal arts under the bus. I felt as if the tech companies were trying to force our public schools to train programmers and coders for Amazon and Apple and the humanities be damned.

Let the liberal arts vanish at our perish.

Whereby, the State of Florida would withhold part of the State college and university funding and make those institutions "earn" that funding back. The lost funding would be earned by graduation rates. Most technical degrees and certificates would earn more than liberal arts degrees. Funny how that calculation was weighted!

Well that plan fell through for reasons too complicated to go into here....but the hand writing was on the wall - fuck the liberal arts. Go study humanities and social science on someone else's dime.