Where’s New York’s Ron DeSantis? The question’s never been more urgent: We need a leader who will step in and save the State University of New York from woke madness with the same grit and calm the Florida gov showed in staring down the College Board over an agitprop-laced AP black-history curriculum.
SUNY — one of the nation’s best public higher-ed systems, with undergrad enrollment topping 326,000 across 64 colleges — has announced to its incoming freshmen that each and every one of them must take and pass a class on “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Social Justice” to graduate.
That’s right: Bending the knee to a nonsense ideology is now required to take home your degree. Even in majors like math and engineering that have nothing to do with the themes the class emphasizes (that is, all the usual buzzwords: “dynamics of power, privilege and oppression”; “rights, access, equity.”)
In other words, it’s exactly the kind of propaganda DeSantis beat back, nixing the use in Florida high schools of a proposed new curriculum that devoted an entire quarter to one-sided presentations of critical race theorists like Kimberlé Crenshaw and came down hard in favor of the reparations movement.
Despite the usual accusations of racism and smears (including from the White House, which accused the governor of wanting to “block” the “study of black Americans,” though Florida already requires significant African-American history), the gov stood blazingly firm. The College Board blinked — and took the woke BS off the table.
Which is as it should be. The AP nonsense wasn’t history. It was indoctrination into a toxic worldview that seeks to divide Americans by race while teaching nothing. And SUNY’s new “class” is cut from that precise cloth, no matter the lame obfuscation from Chancellor John King that its aim is “fostering respectful dialogue and debate.”
The Florida example proves that these ideas can be defeated if politicos are willing to show some sanity and spine. Unfortunately for SUNY students, those are the precise qualities missing from New York’s leadership.
