Left-wing bureaucrats have embedded identitarian radicalism into virtually every department on campus.
The University of Florida has created a radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy that promotes racial and political preferences in faculty hiring, encourages white employees to engage with a twelve-step program called Racists Anonymous, and maintains racially segregated scholarship programs that violate federal civil rights law.
I have obtained a cache of internal documents via Sunshine Law records requests revealing the stunning scope, scale, and radicalism of UF’s “diversity and inclusion” programs. Officially, the university has reported to Governor Ron DeSantis that it hosts 31 DEI initiatives at a cost of $5 million per year. But these figures don’t capture the extent of the university’s rapidly growing DEI complex. In reality, DEI is not a series of standalone programs but an ideology that has been embedded in virtually every department on campus. (In an email, a University of Florida spokesman declined to answer specific questions about UF’s DEI bureaucracy and claimed that the university is “not indoctrinating.”)
These changes happened quickly. Following the death of George Floyd in May 2020, UF leaders rolled out a massive number of diversity-focused initiatives. In July 2020, chief diversity officer Antonio Farias organized a university-wide plan for “antiracism measures,” which included mandatory diversity training for all students, faculty, and staff; an entire academic year focused on “the Black experience, racism and inequity”; a presidential task force to explore the university’s racist past; recommendations for renaming buildings, removing monuments, and banning “historic racist imagery”; and a host of programs, speakers, workshops, and town halls dedicated to racialist ideology.
The programs quickly spread. Under chief diversity officer Marsha McGriff, who replaced Farias in December 2021, DEI blitzed through the university administration. According to internal documents, McGriff’s three-year plan included the creation of an “institutional equity and inclusion blueprint,” the expansion of a university-wide “DEI infrastructure,” and the deployment of DEI cadres to each division, school, and college, to monitor and enforce DEI ideology at every level of the bureaucracy. As part of this program, the embedded cadres were tasked with conducting loyalty surveys, with questionnaires asking faculty and staff to rate their agreement with statements evaluating their unit’s “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion,” financial support for DEI, and trainings on “unconscious bias” and “micro-aggressions.”
