Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) speaks at the 2025 Education Commissioner’s Summit at Miami Dade College.
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00:00Please be seated. Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be back at Miami-Dade College.
00:11You know, Madeline said you've got to make sure to say that it's the best college.
00:16But I know that would be controversial in this room. But I will say this, I don't think there's a better college in the state of Florida
00:23that serves pastelitos and croquettas and cappuccinos. So you guys have that covered. And we're really excited to be here.
00:31I also see some new faces from recent things. I see Marva. Congratulations. That was interesting to watch.
00:42And I know we have our former lieutenant governor that I was just here, Jeanette, and so many others that are.
00:48How many of you are your positions are within the last six years? Hand raised. How many?
00:55Okay. Yeah. So we've got a lot of new blood. And there's a lot to do.
01:00Ray Rod highlighted, I think, the central fact is that a higher education has lost its way in this country.
01:08We've seen that for many, many years. But I think most significantly, we saw it after October 7th, 2023,
01:15where universities like Columbia University not only failed to stand up and do what was morally right,
01:24but they let the inmates run the asylum. They let their universities really crack under the pressure of some really nasty ideologies.
01:35Now, in Florida, I'm proud to say that that didn't happen here. People will sometimes say, yeah, you know, why did it happen in Florida?
01:43Florida is so fortunate it didn't happen. And there's nothing fortunate or it's not luck.
01:48The reality is, is people knew if that did happen at our universities, the people in charge of those universities would be out of a job.
01:55Because we're not going to tolerate that here in the state of Florida. We have a focus on excellence.
02:02We have a focus on teaching our students to pursue truth. We want to have, of course, high standards.
02:09We want to ultimately prepare our students to be citizens of the republic.
02:13That's different, a different model than what prevails in many parts of this country
02:18and has been very prevalent over the last 40, 50, 60 years, but much more aggressively, I would say, over the last 10 or 15 years.
02:26Our model is more consistent with the traditional mission of higher education.
02:31We are not trying to create the imposition of ideological conformity.
02:38And that's what you see in so many different places around this country.
02:42We want our students to be able to think for themselves.
02:46Now, there's a lot that goes into, and so I think that is the central problem that we've seen with higher education.
02:51There's a lot of different things you do. Oh, you know, we're going to do better with an engineering school here.
02:56We're going to do this. We're going to do that.
02:57Some of you guys have done a lot. I know we've expanded nursing.
03:00We've done a whole bunch of good things there. And it's all important.
03:03But I don't think if you don't have the solid foundation about what's the purpose of higher education,
03:09it's going to run aground at some point. So, yes, you can have a good program here.
03:13You can hire a good faculty member there. But unless you're built on a solid foundation of understanding why we're actually doing this,
03:22I think it's ultimately all for naught. But there's a lot that goes into that.
03:26And sometimes people ask me, how come these colleges and universities are like this?
03:31Why are they doing this? Why are they doing that? And it's not like it just happened overnight.
03:36It's also not like it just happens out of thin air. There are incentives that have been built into the system for a long time to produce some of the outcomes that so many people have found objectionable.
03:47One of the things that's underappreciated, it's not something that grabs headlines, is how these accreditation cartels have worked to create universities behaving in certain ways.
03:59I mean, the whole DE&I concept was something that was embedded in the accreditation.
04:04If you weren't doing that, then they would threaten to pull your accreditation.
04:08Without that, obviously, you wouldn't have access to federal funding.
04:12Now, we have taken on the accreditation cartel in the state of Florida.
04:17And now with the Trump administration in office, the U.S. Department of Education, they agree with us on the need to overhaul accreditation.
04:26Biden, not so much. That was not something that we got a very receptive response from.
04:31But the current administration, so I think we are poised to see a real positive overhaul of this education accreditation cartel around the country.
04:41And you think about it, few things are more influential in how these universities function but have less accountability or less public awareness.
04:53Who selects these people? How did they end up in these places?
04:57I mean, I remember when Corcoran was the commissioner of education, you know, we're doing battle with some of these, like this southern accreditor thing.
05:08And I'm like, who is this? Who are these people? How did they get there?
05:11Nobody elected them to anything, and yet they have seemingly a lot of power.
05:16We've been willing to stand up to that. So I'm very, very happy with what Florida's been able to do.
05:20But there is definitely more to come.
05:23The other thing that we've done is people complain about faculty. They're, you know, they're ideological activists. They're doing all this as if that somehow just happens out of thin air as well.
05:35No. Part of the reason is the way the hiring process has worked. It's geared towards producing more and more of the same, except here in the state of Florida.
05:44We have overhauled the tenure laws for professors at our state universities. So now all tenured professors must undergo review every five years and can be let go for poor performance.
05:57If you want to teach, if you want to research, if you want to do things you're supposed to do, you know, you're going to be met with support from the people that run our universities.
06:05But if you're there to not do those things and indulge in whatever type of ideological vacations that you may think you're entitled to do, you know, you're free to do that, but you're not going to do that on our dime.
06:19And you can go. There's other places that may want you to do that, but not here in the state of Florida.
06:25So that post tenure review has already led to unproductive tenured faculty being processed out and probably numbers that we have never seen even approaching in the history of the state.
06:38But what we've also done and paired that with is an empowerment of the university presidents and the boards to be able to bring new faculty on directly.
06:47Because you don't want the same faculty to be able to keep good people out because they don't satisfy an ideological litmus test.
06:55You want to make sure that we can bring in folks who are going to challenge that old orthodoxy, that stale orthodoxy,
07:01and are going to help us recenter our colleges and universities on the traditional mission that they have.
07:07So that hiring ability is something that is being employed. It's been very effective so far, but we're really just in the opening innings of that.
07:16Of course, one of the things that we had to do battle with is so-called DE&I. They said it's diversity, equity, and inclusion.
07:25I've always referred to it as discrimination, exclusion, and indoctrination because in practice, whatever the intention was,
07:32some people say it was good intent. Other people say, no, actually, this was supposed to be ideological from the beginning.
07:38Whatever you think of that, as it was applied, clearly it was applied in ways that were not consistent with the values of the state of Florida.
07:47So this is something that really started taking off probably like 2020, 2021.
07:53And it wasn't just universities. I mean, pretty much every publicly traded corporation, a lot of really big companies that were doing it.
08:01Government, not necessarily Florida, but federal agencies at the time, other states were doing it.
08:06And people were criticizing it, we criticized it, but we were the first ones to really do anything about it.
08:13So when I signed the legislation defunding all DEI in Florida back a couple years ago, we were at the tip of the sphere.
08:21We were the only state that was doing that. Now, when we were seeking to do that, do you think that was portrayed in like legacy media as us fighting for?
08:31No, I mean, they were obviously caricaturing this and trying to smear what we were doing.
08:36And I think that's a lot of the reason why people didn't want to lean in on these issues, because they know that they will get hit from the political opposition.
08:44But but we knew we were doing the right thing. So we were able to do that. It saved a lot of money.
08:50It's helped streamline operations. But what it does is it really focuses on merit.
08:56And that should be at the heart of everything we do in the state of Florida, whether it's who gets hired in a government agency,
09:02whether it's the students that they get the best marks in a college or university, it should be based on merit.
09:09We shouldn't be giving people up by characteristics that don't have anything to do with merit.
09:15And so we really led the way on that. What's happened now since then in the country is basically DEI has fallen out of favor.
09:22See, a lot of companies have walked away from it. I think a lot of them could be subject to lawsuits by the Justice Department,
09:28quite frankly, who don't the way it's been applied. Colleges and universities, many of them have walked away from it
09:35because of really the problems with it. But we were doing that when it wasn't necessarily cool to do.
09:42We also as kind of a partial subset of that, the courses that are offered, you know, we want traditional meaty courses, right?
09:54You know, we want, yes, English history, kind of the core liberal arts, but engineering, business, science, all those things.
10:03All the stuff about where they're talking about ethnicity, gender, you know, racial, that is overwhelmed academia to where that is like the normal thing that you do.
10:15And to do a traditional course is much harder to find in many of these universities around the country.
10:22So we've worked hard to streamline that. Let's focus on the core subjects.
10:27I mean, I know at New College with Richard Corcoran, I know they eliminated some of these departments
10:33that were basically more about social activism than they were about academic integrity and high academic standards.
10:41And so we've really led on that. And I know there's more to do to be able to make sure that our universities are really offering our young people really sound, rigorous courses.
10:53We don't want it to be based on, you know, the latest political or ideological fad that happens to be ripping through the academy at any point.
11:02That is not why we're here. That's not what the voters of Florida have voted for over the years.
11:07And that ultimately would not serve the best interest of the state of Florida as a result of that.
11:13Another thing that I think flows from this, and we've seen great work in Florida, is, and you saw it at Columbia University,
11:20you've seen it at some of these other universities, and it's not just the really over the top stuff that they did after October 7th,
11:28which was appalling to so many people that were watching that. It's even things like if you have a speaker that you disagree with on campus,
11:36somehow it's become acceptable across the U.S. to just scream and yell and vote and basically do a heckler's veto,
11:44so they're not even able to come and speak their message. Heaven forbid you have some type of a conservative opinion.
11:50They don't want you even showing up on some of these campuses, and it's screaming and yelling and trying to drown out,
11:57even things like graduation ceremonies. If there's a speaker that a cadre of people don't like, they'll yell and they'll hoot and holler,
12:04and then they destroy the experience for everybody else. And so in Florida, we have the view that, you know,
12:11you're going to be held accountable for your conduct. You can believe what you want, you can exercise free speech,
12:18but you have to behave yourself, and you have to behave yourself in a way that's consistent with our standards.
12:24And so, if you have people who disrupt the graduation ceremony, I think, didn't you withheld, Richard withheld diplomas from them,
12:34you know, until they apologized or whatever. There's others that just got their diploma taken away
12:39because they were doing activities related to some of the Hamas nonsense that we've seen.
12:45And so you've actually seen people held accountable when they were trying to do these encampments everywhere,
12:51and they were doing encampments all across this country and just overtaking campus lawns and other things.
12:58In Florida, when that was tried at Florida State, 10 minutes in, they turned the sprinklers on, and those guys left.
13:05They weren't going to stay in there for that. All the other places knew that that was not going to happen.
13:10We're not going to let you commandeer our property to be able to do your agenda.
13:16So all these things, I think, are really pillars for having a higher education system that's making a difference for the state of Florida.
13:25Now, we are in the process of utilizing DOGE to conduct oversight over our state universities, and I think a lot of them are run well.
13:36But I also know that just it's human nature that you have bloat. There have been grants that have been pulled down over the years,
13:43during the Biden years, that have a lot of the policies that we have argued against and implemented policies against.
13:50So we've sent that back. We've told, you know, we're not going to use those grants.
13:55And we've told universities, send it back if it's conflicting with state policy.
14:00So you're seeing that, which I think is something that's very, very significant.
14:03But part of the reason we're able to hold tuition down and keep it to where, I mean, the average tuition in state for universities is $6,300.
14:12There's no place that offers a quality education that's even close to that.
14:16But part of the reason, part of the way you keep it that way is to make sure that the universities are run well
14:21and that we don't fall victim to all this administrative bloat that you've seen in so many other places in the country.
14:27And in fact, you can almost track, as student loans have become so frequent, the increase in amount of loan has almost tracked perfectly the increase and expansion of administrative staff at these universities.
14:43Some have had massive increases in staff.
14:46And look, maybe there's an argument that that's really contributing to a better education, but I doubt it.
14:52I think a lot of that's probably dead weight.
14:54So you don't want to get caught into that because we want to make sure.
14:57And as long as I'm here, we will not increase tuition.
15:02But five years from now, 10 years from now, we want to continue to hold the line.
15:06The other thing I think we've done, and apart from really focusing on what the core mission of our university system is,
15:12is no state has done more to embrace workforce education than the state of Florida.
15:17When I became governor, we were in...
15:19I think in the bottom half of states for workforce education.
15:29Our goal was to be number one by the year 2030.
15:32I don't know if we're one yet, but we're getting closer and closer every year.
15:36And if you look at the results, we've doubled the number of apprenticeships.
15:40We've had this massive problem after COVID with shortage of nursing.
15:44We've had a huge increase in the number of nurses that are produced, and some of that's universities, but a lot of that is at our state colleges.
15:51We've also had state colleges do certain programs that are more unique to their local area in terms of what the economy is demanding.
16:01And that's true in all portions of the state of Florida.
16:04We've embraced things like expanding commercial driver's license, producing more truck drivers, all these things where people can get tangible skills at a very affordable price, not have any debt, and then immediately be able to have a lot of options in the economy because a lot of these skills are in high demand.
16:24And what I always say is traditional four-year brick and ivy university is one way that you can acquire advanced knowledge and skills, but it's not the only way.
16:33And for many people, it's not the best way.
16:35And we've got to stop with this saying that unless you go to four-year university and get that four-year, you can't be successful.
16:43That's what I was told when I was growing up.
16:46Growing up, and I think it was well-meaning.
16:49I think it's like, hey, make sure that you're preparing yourself.
16:52But there's a lot of ways where you can acquire skills that are going to allow you to earn a good income and provide for your family.
17:00And so we should just have these available for everybody to be able to make whatever choices they want.
17:06But we shouldn't try to force people into certain silos that you've got to go to university, otherwise it's just not.
17:12Because what's happened is you have a lot of these folks, they get degrees in zombie studies, they go deep into debt, and they end up in a job they could have had at a high school anyways.
17:22And that's been a generational issue where a lot of people have done that.
17:26You've had people go to universities, and some of these private universities charge a lot of money, and they'll go for five or six years, not even get the degree.
17:35And then they have all this debt, and then they're basically at square one anyways.
17:39You know, not everyone is going to excel in a university environment.
17:44And there's nothing wrong with that.
17:46Different folks respond differently to different things, just as there's probably people at our universities that wouldn't do as well in some of these other programs that we have.
17:54But forcing people to go in a way telling them they have to do that, that is not what we do in the state of Florida.
18:00So we are going to continue to do really big on workforce education.
18:04Our high schools have been in the game.
18:06Honestly, even our middle schools have done some stuff.
18:08But our state colleges are really a linchpin of that.
18:11So I want to thank everybody who's been willing to innovate.
18:13I mean, we've done a lot of events over the years highlighting some of the things that we've seen everywhere from Miami-Dade all the way up to Northwest Florida,
18:21about really strong, unique programs that are being offered to benefit the folks there.
18:26So I just want to thank everybody for what they've been doing.
18:29People look to Florida for leadership on this issue of higher education.
18:34They have – even some of these national publications have written about how the Trump administration's view is similar
18:42and is trying to build off what Florida's done at the state level.
18:45So you're the industry leader.
18:48We've done a lot.
18:49We've accomplished a lot.
18:50We've set a good course.
18:51But we've got to solidify that course and we've got to build off the success.
18:55And I know you've got folks up here that are committed to doing that, as well as the folks in the audience.
18:59So on behalf of the state of Florida, thanks for what you're doing.
19:02It's important.
19:03And I think the best is yet to come.
19:05God bless everybody.