Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ growing intrusion into academia has sparked plans for a nationwide student network backed by billionaire George Soros that promised Mr DeSantis a well-funded fight for the future of US higher education.
The new student organisation, known as Defy – Defending Educational Freedom for Youth – is being grown out of the New College of Florida, the public institution where Mr DeSantis replaced the majority of the trustees as part of a series of moves statewide to bolster conservative viewpoints in education.
At an inaugural event sponsored by Soros-funded entities, one of Defy’s organisers, Joshua Epstein, a third-year student at New College, promised that Defy would grow so strong “that politicians will think twice before they go ahead and attack a university”.
“DeSantis has a lot of money behind him; I think with a lot of money behind us, we’ll win,” Mr Epstein told the online session. “We’ll strike back, and I think he’ll be sorry that he picked on us.”
Mr Epstein was joined by Michael Ignatieff, a professor of history who headed the Soros-created Central European University in 2018 when it was pushed out of Budapest by conservative Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. CEU is a graduate-focused institution for the social sciences and humanities that reluctantly relocated to Vienna.
Professor Ignatieff used the Defy event to praise Mr Soros for his establishment of CEU in 1991 as a means of helping Eastern Europe transition from communism to democracy, and to draw parallels between Mr Orbán and Mr DeSantis as autocrats who see great political value in casting higher education as an enemy of common people.
“Ron DeSantis wants to clobber New College so he can run for president,” Professor Ignatieff said. “The cynicism is absolutely unbelievable, and it’s the same cynicism I saw with Viktor Orbán.”
Mr Soros has a fortune estimated to exceed $8 billion (£6.5 billion). That suggests there is the prospect for meaningful resistance to Mr DeSantis, who is already among the best-known and best-funded possible 2024 US presidential candidates.
Yet Mr Soros also has the potential for creating political distraction. A survivor of the Nazi occupation of his native Hungary, Mr Soros has spent decades aggressively funding socially progressive causes aimed at promoting worldwide understanding, making him a favoured bogeyman for a global array of nationalists and authoritarians who parody his name as a generic symbol of out-of-touch liberal elitism.
In the case of New College, in January Mr DeSantis appointed a majority of trustees with conservative viewpoints, who in turn replaced the 600-student institution’s president and eliminated its office of diversity programmes. Republican governors in Texas and Virginia – also potential US presidential candidates – have signalled plans for similar disruptions of their public universities.
A Soros presence in the fight will surely be exploited by believers in a DeSantis-like approach to education, said Geoffrey Jones, a professor of business history at Harvard University who teaches graduate students about Mr Soros and his Open Society Foundations philanthropic network. But an expectation of shameless belligerence shouldn’t deter Mr Soros or the OSF organisation, Professor Jones said, given the stakes involved.
“There are disturbing parallels with 1930s Germany, and I believe one lesson from that history is that you need to stand up and say no,” he said. “If Open Society funding can help a fightback, I would say that is a better outcome than watching American freedoms and democracy being eroded.”
The political sensitivity of acknowledging Soros involvement in the DeSantis resistance already appears evident. The inaugural Defy event listed its chief sponsors as including the CEU Democracy Institute and the Open Society University Network (OSUN), a Soros-created grouping of 45 like-minded institutions established in 2020. Yet Jonathan Becker, the vice-chancellor of the OSUN, downplayed the Soros sponsorship as minor and said Defy was getting its financial support from an online GoFundMe campaign.
“Defy is a student and alumni group with which OSUN partnered,” said Dr Becker, the vice-president for academic affairs at Bard College, an OSUN partner. “It is autonomous and not funded by OSF or OSUN.”
And students from New College were working with OSUN on the effort, he said, “in part because faculty were afraid to participate”.
Faculty support, however, will be critical to the long-term success of any pushback against Mr DeSantis at New College and beyond, Professor Ignatieff told Times Higher Education after the Defy event. “If faculty across the state’s higher-ed system roll over in the face of these challenges,” he said, “then the implications for academic freedom in the US as a whole will be truly serious.”
