- This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- Coming up next, governor DeSantis moves to transform New College in Sarasota into a version of one of the country's most conservative schools.

The chair of the Florida Democratic Party steps down in the wake of the party's defeat last November, and the governor calls out the National Guard after thousands of mostly Cuban refugees land in Florida.

These stories and more coming up next on Florida This Week.

(upbeat music playing) Welcome back.

Joining us on the panel this week, Christian Ziegler is the vice chair of the Florida Republican Party.

Zach Anderson is the political editor of the Sarasota Herald Tribune.

Representative Fentrice Driskell is from District 67 in Tampa and the Democratic leader in the Florida House and Diane Roberts as a writer for the Florida Phoenix and a professor at Florida State University.

Nice to have you all here.

Great to see you.

Thank you for coming.

Well, governor Ron DeSantis caught many people by surprise last week when he announced six new board members for Sarasota's New College.

According to the DeSantis administration, the aim is to transform the school into one modeled after Michigan's Hillsdale College.

That's a conservative, private Christian school, which emphasizes the classics.

Hillsdale graduates filled key positions in the Trump administration, ranging from speech writers to legal counsel.

Most of the DeSantis appointees to the New College board are well-known conservative academics or activists who appear to live outside of Florida.

The most prominent is Washington state resident, Christopher Rufo, who gained national attention for his campaign against the higher academic concept of critical race theory.

New College is consistently rated high.

US News and World Report ranks New College the fifth best public liberal arts college in the nation.

The Princeton Review, Kiplinger's Personal Finance, and the Fiske Guide to Colleges consistently placed New College among the nation's best academic values.

So, Zach, tell us why the governor made these appointments and what his intention was in making these appointments, and what are the appointees to the board, what are they saying?

- Well, the intention appears to be a complete makeover of the school, a complete transformation, which is really remarkable.

You know, the governor appointed six new board members, and that's not unusual.

The governor appoints board members to universities all the time.

But with those appointments came some pretty strong statements from the governor's administration and from the board members, themselves.

People in the governor's administration, as you pointed out in your intro, are talking about transforming New College into a Hillsdale of the South.

And Hillsdale is a conservative Christian school.

New College is much different than that.

This would basically turn New College upside down and turn it into kind of the opposite of what it is now.

The school started, it was founded in 1960 as a progressive private college.

It's right there in the name New College.

It was started as sort of a new take on education, that wave in the sixties where people were trying to reimagine higher education.

And it really had some different aspects to it.

The students don't have grades.

They do longer term projects where they do in-depth studies and it tended to attract students who were interested in that kind of thing.

Students who tended to be a little bit independent, a little bit quirky maybe even.

And often they fell on the liberal side of the spectrum.

The school has developed a kind of a reputation as more left leaning over the years, and that seems to be why DeSantis is taking aim at it.

It's sort of in line with his whole war on woke, trying to go after things that are deemed too liberal or outside of the ideological views that he holds.

And so it's a pretty aggressive attempt to remake this college.

These six board members are all, have pretty public conservative profiles.

One's associated with the Claremont Institute, which is a conservative think tank.

Others are associated with Hillsdale.

Chris Rufo is very well known.

He's been on Fox News a lot for some of his conservative activism.

So it would be a big, big change.

And they're talking about completely remaking the school.

- Christian, make the case for us.

Does New College need to be changed and why?

- Yeah.

Look, this is a college.

Memories are short for some, but this is a college that over the last couple sessions has been on the ropes and they, I know in 2022, they missed their enrollment goals by like 45%.

So this college is in trouble.

It is a failing college when you look at it in terms of the finances and the way it's been run and the legislature has taken aim.

So I think there are a lot of people on the other side that should actually be thanking the governor for doing this.

He's coming in and he's gonna revamp this college.

Obviously we saw with the board members, we saw the commitment for turning this college from one of the most woken, one of the most liberal colleges, into hopefully more of a classical college on the Hillsdale style.

And I think there's a big market for it.

We've seen, if you just look at the voter registration, you look at the trend our state's going in, people are moving here and this state is shaping in a different way.

And I think this college can serve those individuals that are moving here.

So kudos for Governor DeSantis.

By stepping up, he is showing that conservatives can institute higher ed reform, if they're just willing to take a bold stand and lead.

And that's what we've seen here with these appointments.

And that's what I expect to happen.

And for the community, the impact on the community is gonna be incredible, what's gonna happen to this school.

- Fentrice, how do you see it?

Is New College broken and is it a good idea to turn it into a version of Hillsdale College, a conservative college there in Michigan?

- No, I don't think this is a good idea.

And I guess memories are short.

I look at that in a different way.

I think about Senator Joe Gruters, who penned a letter not too long ago, praising New College for being just the example, the shining example that it is, and how important it is to the community there and what a good job they do.

And now there's been a complete about facing, "We need to reform New College."

If the challenge is that New College perhaps needs a turnaround plan in order to help it modernize or whatever it it needs to do within its current framework in order to make sure that they're meeting their enrollment goals and things like that.

I think that would be the better approach.

But using taxpayer dollars for something that's clearly a campaign ploy, to me, is a move in the wrong direction.

The goal should be, "How do we make sure that our institutions of higher learning are the best?"

Not, "Are they conservative?

Are they liberal?"

How do we make sure that they are the best?

That's the focus.

And that's really one of the chief criticisms that I have of this governor.

He focuses very much on campaigning.

But once you are elected, that's where you have to shift to governing.

And it's not just about conserving, governing people who happen to agree with your ideology.

It's all Floridians because this is a state that is for all of us.

- Diane, I talked to one of the professors down there and she said that currently, there are about 700 students enrolled.

And she said that at the peak, there were about 850 students enrolled.

But I'm wondering, do you agree with Christian that New College is broke and that the way to fix it is to turn it into more along the lines of Hillsdale College, teaching the classics and that sort of thing?

And will there be a big demand for admissions, if they do that?

- I do not agree.

Hillsdale College is a religious, private college.

We have no business using taxpayer dollars, public money, to transform a public institution into a religious school.

New College has enrollment problems.

So do many other institutions of higher education post-COVID.

All of our enrollments have gone down.

There are good reasons for that.

New College, because it's so little, really struggles there.

But it's not struggling because it's woke, whatever that means.

And you can never really get anybody to define that anymore than you can get these conservatives to explain what critical race theory is because they haven't done the reading.

New College is academically very sound.

I would argue that some of the people getting put on this board, especially the ones associated with Hillsdale, are academically suspect.

One of them has been associated with the 1776 Project, which is an historical curriculum absolutely riddled with factual errors.

And I would hate to see New College turned into this kind of spurious, little Bob Jones of Sarasota.

Conservative students can go to FSU, they can go to Florida, they can go to Bob Jones University, they can go to Ave Maria.

They have lots and lots and lots of choices.

No one is shut out.

I teach students of all kinds and somehow we manage to get along without throwing bricks at each other's heads.

- All right, so Zach, I want to ask you, Christopher Rufo in the New York Times says that New College is gonna look very different in the next 120 days.

We're gonna be conducting a top-down restructuring to design a new core curriculum from scratch.

And Governor DeSantis is going to lay siege to the university's diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

That's some of the things that Christopher Rufo says as one of the new board members.

But do all the new board members that the governor appointed this week agree?

- No, they don't.

There doesn't seem to be universal agreement, although I haven't talked to all of them.

But Rufo is definitely the most aggressive.

He's a pretty high profile activist.

He gets a lot of attention nationally.

He seems to want to go in there and really make a splash and change things in a big way and change them very quickly.

But another board member that I spoke to, Mark Bauerlein, who's a former professor at Emory University and now an editor at First Things, which is a conservative Catholic journal and has also written a lot about higher education reform.

I spoke to him for an article this week and he said that he didn't think, he wasn't sure that turning New College into the Hillsdale of the South is feasible or even desirable.

He's saying something very different than what we've heard from DeSantis' administration and from Rufo.

He said that it takes time to change things in a university.

There's bureaucratic processes, there's tenure for professors.

You have an existing student body, existing personnel.

And even if you could completely remake the college, he wasn't sure that it's desirable to turn it into something that is focused on one political ideology.

He said that, to be intellectually honest, you have to include people from all different ideologies and that he didn't necessarily want to see it become a completely conservative institution.

Now he also was very complimentary of DeSantis and said he very much supports him.

So we'll see.

I think that once they get down here, there's a board meeting at the end of this month, we're gonna hear a lot more about what they want to do and what they can do.

- All right, and Christian, I want you to respond to what Diane said, especially the part where she said, "Look, there are plenty of other small, conservative colleges out there and that people, if they want to go to the one, they can apply to those."

- Yeah, and it's interesting she rattles off the University of Florida as a conservative college.

Far from the truth.

I think what you heard Zach say when he led off is this is a college that was founded as a progressive college.

Since then, in his mission vision values, they mentioned diversity, equity, inclusion.

That's really what they're focused on.

They partner with organizations like Planned Parenthood to send their interns into.

And what this college has done is, and this is what Governor DeSantis is focused on reforming, is they are teaching people what to think, not how to think.

And all these board members, I mean, basically what they're on record saying is we're gonna flip that around.

We believe college should teach you how to think, not what to think.

That's what they're gonna institute.

This is not, I've heard some of these accusations about some of these other schools are linking them to them.

But it's very, very clear what they're doing here.

Again, teaching people how to think, not what to think and stopping all the woke that they're pushing into these programs.

And frankly, this is in their mission vision values.

And when they're struggling financially and they go to the state for resources, how can members of the state legislature that are spending all day every day fighting some of these woke things in all parts of our culture, really want to give them resources to help be successful.

That's why they've hit a wall.

And thankfully, Governor DeSantis is coming here to reform this, and you'll see resources come as he reforms it, as well.

- So Fentrice, if you do away with diversity, if you do away with the quote woke ideology, are you just being neutral or are you replacing it with another ideology?

- Well, they're replacing it with another ideology.

And if the goal is to teach students how to think, then mix it up.

Let the students decide.

But to say that you're gonna make a university one way over the other or one way or another is not the right move.

And if I just could, because it's not, it's not a laughing matter, but this is a joke.

It makes Florida look like a joke.

We have worked so hard for many years to try to improve our system of higher education.

And just as a reminder, in this midterm election, all around the country, states rejected this brand of conservatism.

This extremism, is really what it is.

It's not classical conservatism, it's extremism.

Was rejected on the ballot in every state where Trumpism was on the ballot and all of these things.

And so Governor DeSantis, if he thinks he's going to run for president and take these policies wholesale to the country and expect to be welcomed, he's got another thing coming.

- They have been rejected other places.

But right here in Florida, almost a 20 point victory by the same person that was just mentioned.

- We're gonna talk about in a second, just real quickly, do we know what woke ideology is?

The governor uses it over and over again.

Has he issued a strong definition of what woke is?

- No, I've not seen it.

I've not heard it.

I've not heard.

I agree with Diane.

I've not heard it defined.

What I have seen it used is to create a boogeyman and to make people afraid.

And that's what I mean by these extremist policies, right?

Whether it was that, whether it's critical race theory, which by the way is not taught in our public schools K through 12.

And even if it was, who's been in charge of education policy in this state since the late nineties?

That would be the Republican Party, who's led the legislature and the governor's mansion.

So we create these boogeymen, getting people afraid.

And that's just another example of how those policies work.

- All right, very good.

I wish we had more time 'cause there's a whole lot more to say.

But we're gonna move on.

The head of the Florida Democratic Party resigned this week.

Manny Diaz, the former Miami mayor, had pledged to rebuild the Florida Democratic Party after years of losses, but he was unsuccessful.

Diaz's departure came after Florida Democrats suffered some of their worst losses ever in November, including the reelection win of Governor DeSantis by 19 points over Charlie Krist, along with the election of a super majority in the state legislature, a pickup of four congressional seats, and the flipping of several counties, including once reliably blue Hillsborough and Miami-Dade counties.

Florida, once considered the country's largest swing state, has moved decidedly into the red.

In a statement to Democrats, Diaz said he was unable to carry out his plans to build a year-round operation that would carry the party forward, blaming unnamed Democrats and others.

He also criticized the national groups for not providing more funding to the state party.

So Fentrice, was this change necessary at the head of the Florida Democratic Party?

- Look, apparently it was necessary for former Chair Diaz.

And so we thank him for his service.

We wish him well in his future endeavors.

But now we have to look forward and there's a lot of rebuilding to do.

Listen, I was talking with one of our guests prior to the panel and the reality is that the Florida Democratic Party is really reaching rock bottom.

So we've got a lot of work to do to build that up and I think we need to look for a chair who understands that reality, understands the slow rebuild that it's gonna take, make sure that they get the basics down first.

Don't over-promise and under-deliver.

To say that we're gonna completely transform the party overnight is not realistic.

But one other point that I wanted to mention.

Now that I'm in the leadership role, I kind of look at the electoral trends a little differently.

And even though Governor DeSantis, yes, it's hard to argue with the obvious math of his victory, but it wasn't so much that Republicans had a red wave.

What I'm seeing is that Democrats stayed home.

And so that lets me know that there's an opportunity on the horizon.

If we can really get better about communicating our message and communicating our values, reaching out to voters, then perhaps we can start to turn things around.

- Your name has come up as a possible replacement for Manny Diaz.

Do you want the job?

- Actually, as an elected official, I cannot do it as a sitting elected official.

- All right.

Yeah.

Chris, why is Florida red state and why did Democrats do so badly?

Why did you guys do so well in November?

- It's a very, it's gotta be very depressing to be a Democrat in the state of Florida.

When you look at, obviously, we have the results, but this has been a long term battle.

In 2000, I think it was 2008, there were 650,000 more Democrats than Republicans in the state of Florida.

When Governor DeSantis took over in 2018, there were 250,000 about more Democrats than Republicans in the state of Florida.

Now, when we look at 2013, we're at 350,000 more Republicans than Democrats in the state of Florida.

DeSantis, since he's taken office, we've seen a net increase of 510,000 Republicans in the state of Florida, while Democrats have only picked up 17,000.

This state is shifting red and we've seen dozens of counties flip.

We just celebrated Hamilton County.

We saw the last election results.

Governor DeSantis wins by 19, almost 20 points.

Senator Rubio by 16 points.

We have super majorities in the House and Senate.

Really, the Democrats across the board have been a complete failure.

And you look at the party structure, they really haven't been competition to the Republican party of Florida.

And we see this state shifting to the red, but I think a lot of it actually has to do with their policies.

They've embraced such an extreme platform and agenda that Democrats have frankly rejected them.

Democrats staying home, independents flipping to Republican, We're seeing it because of some of these issues they've championed and they've pushed because their base, their hard left base has hijacked the Democrat party.

And that has infiltrated into Tallahassee.

And we saw some of the most woke, most of the hard left elected officials on Democrat side actually lose their seats and seats they had no business losing this cycle.

And that's because they embrace that extreme agenda.

So it's really gotta do, they have to do a two-part structure here.

They gotta look at their policy and their agenda.

They gotta water it down because right now, Floridians are rejecting it.

Then they need to come over and look at their structure for their organization and what are they gonna do to register voters, turn out the vote, and really excite and mobilize.

I mean, we're gonna start celebrating, not Republicans flipping Democrat counties.

Now we're starting to celebrate independents are surpassing Democrats in these counties.

That's a tough spot to be in if you're a Democrat.

- Diane, what about that?

Do you agree that the Democrats have adopted an extreme agenda and that's why they've lost so dramatically here in Florida?

- I do not.

I don't know what this extreme agenda is, unless talking about, excuse me.

The danger to this state of climate change or talking about women having control over their own bodies is considered extreme.

But there's no denying that Democrats are a complete and utter mess in the state of Florida.

A train wreck.

And the Democratic party's gonna have to figure something out.

It is not working in any way, shape, or form.

And sure, there are some external reasons to the party.

Things like extreme gerrymandering; that hasn't helped.

The Democrats own complete inability to talk to Latinos, talk to people in South Florida in a way that makes any sense.

The Democrats allowed themselves in 2020 to be defined as somehow a socialist party on the order of what's happening in Venezuela or Cuba.

That, of course, is completely silly, but the messaging was pathetic.

So that's something the Democrats are gonna have to really think about, really work on, and figure out how to help people deal with the problems of their day-to-day lives.

What really is things like your house falling into the sea because we build in stupid places, or your kid not being able to get an abortion if she gets pregnant at the age of 16 or lots of other actual, real issues.

We have nothing to do with this complete nonsense of woke.

- Zach, have you seen any evidence that the Democrats have figured out how to register voters and overcome the disadvantage that they currently have?

- No.

There's really no evidence of that at this point.

And that was one of the big failures of Chair Diaz during this last election cycle.

He was promising to come in and change things up and raise the money that was needed to build an infrastructure that could do things like that, that could register voters, that could recruit volunteers, that could recruit candidates.

And it didn't happen.

And that seems like the reason that he stepped down.

It takes a lot of time and money and investment.

It's not easy to do.

And Democrats, when you're this far out of power and you don't have control of any of the levers of power in Florida, it's hard to climb back from that.

Republicans really dominated in voter registration for the last few election cycles and closed the gap.

The last time that Democrats were really strong on voter registration was when Barack Obama was running for president and he really came in and spent some money and developed the infrastructure that was needed for the party.

But really, this collapse of the Democratic Party, it's been a couple decades in the making.

Leader Driskell said that they're at rock bottom.

I think that's true.

I don't see how they could go much farther down.

When you lose Miami-Dade County, when you lose Palm Beach County, these historic Democratic counties, when you lose Hispanic voters, when you lose female voters, I mean, your party's in a really bad place.

I'm not sure that there's any real silver bullet that whoever takes this job, which is pretty thankless, as the chair of the party, is gonna be able to change that much.

- Christain, I gotta ask you, the chairmanship for the Republican Party is up for grabs, you're in the running.

But the Politico had an article this week saying it's really a proxy war between the Trump faction and the DeSantis faction, you representing the Trump faction.

Yes or no?

Is that fair?

Is that fair?

- No, it's not.

It's not a fair statement.

Look, my opponent's trying to drive that message.

If you look in the press, if you look for the last four or five years, no one's been a stronger supporter of our governor.

- Okay.

Well last week, Governor DeSantis mobilized the Florida National Guard to respond to a large influx of Cuban migrants landing in the Florida Keys.

DeSantis said Florida will deploy airplanes, helicopter, and marine patrols to the area to support water interdictions and ensure the safety of migrants attempting to reach Florida through the Florida Straits.

In a statement, the governor criticized Democratic President Joe Biden and the federal government's immigration policies and response to the migrants landing in the keys.

The White House fired back, criticizing DeSantis for deploying the National Guard.

A White House spokesperson said people are fleeing political strife and asking for asylum, and instead are being treated like pawns and accused DeSantis of creating a problem.

Almost 8,000 Cubans and Haitians have been intercepted since August, about 50 per day, compared with 17 per day in the 2021, 22 fiscal year.

Officials said at least 65 migrants have died at sea since August.

Christian, we only have 45 seconds left.

Could you take 15 seconds and tell us, does this change anything by the governor calling out the National Guard?

- I think it's showing governors DeSantis is once again acting when Washington's refusing to act.

We see four x the number of migrants that are hitting our shorelines here.

We're looking in the country when you talk about the southern border, as well.

2.2 million people last year crossing our border.

It's outta control what's going on and it's forcing the states to act.

And that's what we're seeing Governor DeSantis do.

- Diane, in 20 seconds, would it change things if we had relations with Cuba?

If we had normal diplomatic relations with Cuba?

- Well, possibly.

But a lot of people in Cuba are fleeing not just the repression, which is real, but also the economic disaster that is Cuba.

So what would help is if we had a sensible immigration policy.

So perhaps the Republicans now in control of the House could consider that.

- All right, that is all the time we have.

There's so much more to say.

But thank you all for a great show.

What an informed panel.

Thank you very much.

Well, that's it for us.

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