Professors from across the country have long been lured to Florida’s public colleges and universities, with the educators attracted to the research opportunities, student bodies, and the warm weather.

But for a swath of liberal-leaning professors, many of them holding highly coveted tenured positions, they’ve felt increasingly out of place in the Sunshine State. And some of them are pointing to the conservative administration of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis as the reason for their departures, according to The New York Times.

DeSantis, who was elected to the governorship in 2018 and was easily reelected last fall, has over the course of his tenure worked to put a conservative imprint on a state where moderation was once a driving force in state politics. In recent years, DeSantis has railed against the current process by which tenure is awarded, and with a largely compliant GOP-controlled legislature, he’s imposed conservative education reforms across the state.

  • @Rhoeri
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    596 months ago

    Good for them. Everyone should bail on that piece of shit. Show future pieces of shit that pieces of shit won’t be tolerated.

    • @ChexMax
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      -236 months ago

      All leaving does is turn Florida more red. Stay and vote!

      • @agent_flounder
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        486 months ago

        I guess you and others could always move there and try to move the needle.

        • @[email protected]
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          126 months ago

          Right, let me leave my home to go to increasingly red and shitty Florida all because I want to add one more blue vote. No thanks, I want to flood the state with MAGAs and flood it with hurricanes.

        • @ChexMax
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          15 months ago

          I do live here. Why do you think I care so much?

        • @Rhoeri
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          506 months ago

          People will go where they’re wanted/needed. Academics and doctors should ABSOLUTELY bail when the system they work under fails them so miserably.

          The rest will follow suit and all that remains will be what all the conservatives deserve: nothing.

          And for the record- they’re not “trying” fascism, they’re DOING fascism.

          • @ZoopZeZoop
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            176 months ago

            I agree with most of what you said. One issue, and it’s a big issue, there’s one other group that won’t leave: the vulnerable. People who are too poor or don’t have support to leave will be left behind. It is their vulnerability preventing them from leaving that will likely be their vulnerability staying. The bad things happen gradually and you adjust for them a little bit each time, until you can’t adjust anymore and you’re stuck.

            That said, I can’t blame anyone for leaving/wanting to leave.

            • @[email protected]
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              -66 months ago

              No it’s not just the senate. If people keep running away to a handful of “nice” states and give up on the others, then bye bye House. Bye bye Executive branch. Bye bye Judicial branch.

              And then you’ll get the same dumbasses wondering why their nice place isn’t so nice anymore.

              • @[email protected]
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                96 months ago

                If people keep running away to a handful of “nice” states

                I feel like it’s only people who don’t actually live in these places or, if they do, aren’t the current targets of christian fascist terrorism (yet) who actually say insensitive, tone deaf, privileged shit like this.

                When your actual safety is under threat because of the majority ideology where you live, you gtfo. If you look at history (which is all real stuff that actually happened…) the academics were always right after the LGBTQ community. Then writers and artists and musicians. Look at Germany and the multiple South American countries the US helped to destroy.

                • @[email protected]
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                  -96 months ago

                  Florida is not Nazi Germany. It is if you consume all your news from lemmy headlines, but in real life it is not. It and the rest of America can be if people keep moving away - like I said in my original comment.

        • cheesepotatoes
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          6 months ago

          You go live in a Christo-fascist shit hole. I’d rather take my family and go live somewhere safe, sane and better educated.

          • @kofe
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            -26 months ago

            I’m in one of these shit holes, and what’s frustrating about your attitude is the privilege behind it assuming all of us can leave.

            • cheesepotatoes
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              216 months ago

              I never said everyone can leave, I never even implied it.

              • Schadrach
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                05 months ago

                Similarly, today, when all the votes in your area have been neutralized by extreme gerrymandering

                Exactly the wrong way to look at it. The way to overcome gerrymandering is to push higher turnout.

                Short version is that in order to do that kind of extreme gerrymandering successfully, they have to make assumptions about what the vote will look like. One of those assumptions is that Dem turnout is lower than GOP turnout, because it is - GOP treat voting like a civic duty, Dems generally don’t. This is why putting even mild roadblocks in front of voting (like having ID, or waiting in line, or w/e) favor the GOP - GOP voters will jump through whatever hoops are necessary to do their civic duty, Dems get dissuaded from voting with much less effort.

                What this means is that if Dems turnout in force, they win. In most places they outnumber GOP, even in gerrymandered maps - they just have to actually vote en masse.

                  • Schadrach
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                    05 months ago

                    No. You have no idea what you’re talking about.

                    It’s literally impossible to draw districts in such a way that a minority party is the majority of voters in every district. You have to either pack the opposition into seats you are basically giving them to secure yours or you are doing some math on expected turnout and thinking how to promote turnout for your party and depress it for the opposition and aiming to win by a smallish but predictable margin.

                    It sounds an awful lot like you are in a very red state, and there isn’t a blue majority that can hypothetically vote.

                    Or they’ve packed enough Dem voters into a single district (depending on the state not doing this can be considered illegal racial gerrymandering, depending on how majority-minority districts fit in - in some cases not having them is racist, in others packing minorities into them is racist). But that requires a small number of total districts, or surrendering more than one to the opposition (the more districts you have, the less impact surrendering one district gives you).

                    Really, we just need to switch to some fixed, abstract mathematical process that cares not about how people will vote and use that to draw district lines. Something like least split line. But that’s a hard sell, because the people who would need to pass it are the people who benefit from it not existing.

            • @agent_flounder
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              276 months ago

              The best time to resist is before it is overrun with regressive extremists.

              I don’t blame anyone for getting out now that it’s a total shit hole.

                • @bostonbananarama
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                  246 months ago

                  It’s like this, I’m not going to fault anyone who decided to get out of Germany in the 1930’s. Similarly, I can’t blame people who prefer to leave for greener pastures rather than deal with Christian White Nationalist a-holes everyday.

                • TwoGems
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                  06 months ago

                  What a lot of people here don’t realize is a fascist USA will still affect them even if they move abroad.

        • @[email protected]
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          156 months ago

          It would be a bad strategy if people’s main goal in life was to influence national politics, but it’s not.

        • @affiliate
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          106 months ago

          yeah everybody knows the only way to stop fascism is by voting

        • @[email protected]
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          86 months ago

          Eventually Florida will have no GDP, no productive members of society, etc… it’ll just be a bunch of trashy people with no money contributing to nothing. All of the businesses will leave the state, and the fascists can rule over a wasteland while the rest of the country moves on and tries to forget Florida even exists.