Excerpt: At the end of January, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis held a press conference to announce a package of higher education reforms. I noted at the time that the details would matter, but that there was cause for concern.
We now have some details in the form of House Bill 999. If anything, the current bill is worse than the bullet points the governor outlined a few weeks ago. Hopefully the bill will be improved before its seemingly inevitable final passage. It is not quite as terrible as some critics are already claiming, but it poses a serious threat to tenure protections and faculty hiring. There will also be some substantial constitutional challenges to several provisions of this bill if it gets adopted in anything like its current form.