Liberal-leaning professors are leaving coveted jobs with tenure. And there are signs that recruiting scholars has become harder.
Gov. Ron DeSantis had just taken office in 2019 when the University of Florida lured Neil H. Buchanan, a prominent economist and tax law scholar, from George Washington University.
Now, just four years after he started at the university, Dr. Buchanan has given up his tenured job and headed north to teach in Toronto. In a recent column on a legal commentary website, he accused Florida of “open hostility to professors and to higher education more generally.”
He is not the only liberal-leaning professor to leave one of Florida’s highly regarded public universities. Many are giving up coveted tenured positions and blaming their departures on Governor DeSantis and his effort to reshape the higher education system to fit his conservative principles.
The Times interviewed a dozen academics — in fields ranging from law to psychology to agronomy — who have left Florida public universities or given their notice, many headed to blue states. While emphasizing that hundreds of top academics remain in Florida, a state known for its solid and affordable public university system, they raised concerns that the governor’s policies have become increasingly untenable for scholars and students.
At this point, I think the only conservative academics might be some economists and theology professors at religious universities. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out - if it’s true that lots of academics were not allowed into tenure etc because of bias rather than the alternate view that education corresponds with liberalism, there might be a flood of potential hires, albeit not with existing track records. However, if that isn’t true, then you’re going to be looking at the dregs of the academic system, people who both can’t get jobs elsewhere and don’t have an ability to get an associated job who are willing to go to a very annoying (to them) political climate.