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Dive Brief:
Florida’s public universities could be barred from hiring any new employees through the H-1B visa program this year under a policy the system’s leaders are considering this month.
The university system’s Board of Governors plans to vote on introducing the proposed policy change for public comment during its meeting on Jan. 29. The proposal says trustee boards “shall not utilize the H-1B program” for new hires through Jan. 5, 2027.
The policy would carry out the wishes of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who directed the system’s governing board in October to end what he described as “H-1B abuse” at Florida universities. DeSantis argued that Florida’s universities were hiring foreign workers through the program over qualified Americans.
Dive Insight:
The H-1B visa program is intended to allow U.S. employers to hire highly educated foreign workers for specialized positions, such as software development or research. Many high-profile universities, including those in Florida, rely on the program to hire researchers.
The University of Florida, the state’s flagship, employed 253 workers through the H-1B visa program in fiscal 2025, according to federal data. Statewide, it was followed by Florida State University, with 110 H-1B workers, and the University of South Florida, with 107.
Officials from those universities did not immediately respond to Higher Ed Dive’s request for comment on the policy proposal.
In October, DeSantis directed the state’s university system during a press conference to “pull the plug on the use of these H-1B visas in our universities.” With the new proposed policy, the governing board would carry that out through a roughly one-year pause on H-1B hiring.
DeSantis’ views on the H-1B program are in line with the Trump administration’s. In September, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation creating a $100,000 fee on new applications for H-1B visas, setting off alarms in the higher education world and other sectors that rely on these workers.
Nearly three dozen higher education groups have asked U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for a sectorwide exemption to the fee.
In an October letter to Noem, American Council on Education President Ted Mitchell argued that carving out an exemption for higher ed would be similar to the sector’s current exemption from the nationwide annual cap on new H-1B awards,set at 85,000 per year.
The $100,000 policy has also drawn several lawsuits. However, a federal judge sided with the federal government last month on one of those legal challenges, ruling that Trump did not exceed his authority by issuing the proclamation.
The groups who sued, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Association of American Universities, appealed the ruling on Dec. 29.
DeSantis told universities in October to end the use of the visa program.
All Florida public universities would be banned from hiring foreign workers on H-1B visas under a policy change that the Florida Board of Governors will consider next week.
Next Thursday, the board’s Nomination and Governance Committee will consider adding to a policy a line saying the universities can’t “utilize the H-1B program in its personnel program to hire any new employees through January 5, 2027.” If the committee and full Board of Governors approve the addition, there will be a 14-day public comment period.
The proposal, reported earlier by Politico, comes after Florida governor Ron DeSantis ordered the state’s public universities in October to “pull the plug on the use of these H-1B visas.” Fourteen of the Board of Governors’ 17 members are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate.
DeSantis complained about professors coming from China, “supposed Palestine” and elsewhere. He said, “We need to make sure our citizens here in Florida are first in line for job opportunities.”
Last fiscal year, according to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services database, the federal government approved 253 H-1B visa holders to work at the University of Florida, 146 at the University of Miami, about 110 each at Florida State University and the University of South Florida, 47 at the University of Central Florida, and smaller numbers at other public institutions. Universities use the program to hire faculty, doctors and researchers and argue it’s required to meet needs in health care, engineering and other areas.
Spokespeople for the State University System of Florida and DeSantis didn’t respond to requests for comment Thursday.
The policy revisions would also say that each university board’s “personnel program must not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex.”
Florida is now the second state to drop its requirement that lawyers in the state hold a degree from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association, The Tallahassee Democrat reported Thursday.
The Florida Supreme Court, which sets law-licensure requirements, said the decision is designed to open the door for more law school accreditors.
“The rule changes create the opportunity for additional entities to carry out an accrediting and gatekeeping function on behalf of the Court,” the Jan. 15 opinion read. “The Court’s goal is to promote access to high-quality, affordable legal education in law schools that are committed to the free exchange of ideas and to the principle of nondiscrimination.”
Republicans, including Florida attorney general James Uthmeier, who called the ABA “a captured, far-left organization,” have targeted the ABA, which accredits the vast majority of law schools in the country, as part of a broader crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Last year, the ABA suspended its DEI standards in response to conservative criticism.
On Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis praised the state Supreme Court’s decision as a “Good move” in a post on X. “The (highly partisan) ABA should not be a gatekeeper for legal education or the legal profession.”
For now, though, a new law school accreditor has yet to emerge. And experts say it’s unlikely most law schools will abandon their ABA accreditation any time soon, because it’s created reliable professional standards that make it easier for lawyers to practice in multiple states.
Justice Jorge Labarga, the only dissenting vote in the Florida opinion and the only justice who wasn’t appointed by DeSantis, cautioned that a new law school accreditor would have a tough time rivaling the ABA.
“[The ABA] has cultivated unmatched proficiency in dealing with Florida law-school-specific issues that would require decades for any successor to develop,” he wrote in his dissent. “Refinements can always be made. However, replacing an established entity with an unknown alternative is detrimental in the context of disputes.”
The University of West Florida approved the hire of former Republican lawmaker Manny Diaz Jr. Thursday, seven months after he was appointed interim following a search critics saw as flawed.
Diaz was the only candidate to emerge from a group of 84 applicants, according to past board statements. His elevation prompted faculty questions about why a more robust pool was not considered and whether Diaz could be properly evaluated for the job when there were no other finalists to weigh him against. Diaz, who has split his career between education and politics, must still be approved by the Florida Board of Governors, a body he served on for three years in his role as state education commissioner from 2022 to 2025. Before taking on that job, Diaz was a member of the State Legislature from 2012 to 2022.
Between his base salary and other perks, he’ll earn nearly $1 million a year.
Diaz joins a slew of other Republican politicians who have ascended to a top job at one of Florida’s 40 public institutions. Among the 12 institutions in the State University System of Florida, seven are led by former GOP lawmakers or others with ties to Republican governor Ron DeSantis. Multiple institutions in the 28-member Florida College System are also led by ex-politicos.
Process Concerns
The UWF Board of Trustees formally signed off on hiring Diaz on Thursday in a meeting that began with a statement of concern from a faculty member during the public comment section.
Faculty Senate vice president Amy Mitchell-Cook told the board she had heard concerns from faculty, staff, students and community members about the legitimacy of the search effort.
“I have served on and/or chaired several academic searches. If the committee in any of those searches thought that only one candidate was qualified, the search would have been reopened and expanded,” Mitchell-Cook told trustees. “If the search truly produced only one worthy candidate to bring on campus, then this should be considered a failed search. If, however, there were other worthy candidates, then the perception is that this search was predetermined or flawed.”
Mitchell-Cook also questioned whether the search complied with Florida Board of Governors policies and argued that the unusual nature of the search created doubts about the legitimacy of the effort.
Faculty Senate president Heather Riddell, a voting member of the UWF Board of Trustees, expressed similar concerns. Riddell was the lone vote against hiring Diaz at Thursday’s meeting, noting that her dissent was not aimed at the candidate but rather a questionable search process.
“As a public institution, we are accountable to taxpayers and our community,” Riddell said.
She pointed to a FLBOG regulation that stipulates a university must advance three applicants, unless there are extenuating circumstances, which she said there did not appear to be. Ultimately, she said, “Stakeholders are left without a clear understanding of the decision.”
But Riddell was outnumbered by trustees supportive of Diaz, including some who have worked for Diaz in the political arena. Trustee Ashley Ross, for instance, was a contracted fundraiser for Diaz from 2018 to 2022, a fact she acknowledged in an email to Inside Higher Ed and at the meeting.
“Since that time, I have had no business or employment relationships with him. I have consulted legal counsel, and it has been determined that I have no voting conflicts,” she wrote by email.
Public records show that Diaz spent tens of thousands of dollars with the trustee’s firm, Ross Consulting. Diaz also appointed her husband, Scott Ross, to the Florida Education Foundation Board of Directors in 2022, along with current UWF board chair Rebecca Matthews, who also voted to hire him Thursday.
Conflict of Interest Concerns
The hiring process wasn’t the only concern that critics raised about Diaz.
On Monday someone using the pseudonym ConcernedArgonaut—the UWF athletics moniker—wrote to state officials to express concerns about Diaz’s leadership as state education commissioner, as well as a potential charter school project under discussion at UWF.
The writer pointed out a recent financial debacle at the Florida Department of Education, noting that an audit found that the state mismanaged its school voucher system under Diaz—Florida lost track of 30,000 students and the voucher program cost $398 million more than planned under Diaz’s leadership. The writer also referenced Diaz’s personal bankruptcy in 2012 and questioned whether the new president was capable of managing UWF’s budget.
ConcernedArgonaut also noted “Diaz’s deep connections to the Florida charter school industry.” The letter pointed out that Diaz once worked for Doral College, which is connected to Academica, a large education company that provides services to more than 200 charter schools. Shortly after Diaz announced that a prospective charter school could be coming to the UWF campus, a website for Somerset University Preparatory Academy surfaced, advertising “A Private Elementary School located on the Beautiful University of West Florida Campus.”
The address listed on the website is the same as UWF’s School of Education.
The board did not ask Diaz about financial mismanagement concerns in a Thursday interview preceding the vote but offered him a chance to address the charter school discussions.
Diaz dismissed the charter school concerns as “completely erroneous,” telling the board that discussions about establishing a school preceded his time there. He also said UWF would need approval from both trustees and the state before it could open a charter school on its campus.
Independent journalist Kevin Danko, who writes the Higher Ed Heist newsletter, also flagged a potential conflict of interest in Diaz’s recent involvement with a new company called MDJ Consulting Group. The company was opened several months after Diaz was hired as interim, following the resignation of UWF president Martha Saunders, who stepped down in May amid tensions with trustees.
A UWF spokesperson told Danko that the company “is Manny’s wife’s LLC” and was established “for special education consulting services.” Diaz, however, is also on the business filing. UWF spokesperson Brittany Sherwood told Inside Higher Ed by email the “LLC is for outside activity, allowed within the terms of his contract,” such as “consulting, speaking engagement, etc.”
She added that work with the consulting firm is “separate from any University affairs.”
Danko also shared records with Inside Higher Ed that show Diaz was already picking out office furniture in September. Those records show furniture package options ranging from $49,379 to $54,216.
Sherwood wrote that standard practice at UWF is that “when a departing president returns to faculty, existing office furniture moves with them, leaving the space unfurnished. As a result, new furniture was required regardless of who serves as the next president.”
“Furnishings were purchased with the intent of creating a long-term legacy office that will remain in place for many years and serve future University leadership,” she added. “The timing of the purchase does not reflect a predetermined outcome of the presidential search, which was conducted in accordance with Board of Governors regulations and Florida statute.”
But Danko believes the UWF presidential search was a rigged game all along.
“It’s clear that this is done according to an established plan, a template they’ve worked to perfect for installing state university system presidents,” he wrote by email. “Stack the board of trustees so they can install an unqualified non-academic with political connections as interim president of the school, using the interim period to graft credentials onto the candidate that can give a minimal appearance of legitimacy. Wait 6 months, pretend it wasn’t the plan all along, [and] hold an expensive, sham search process revealing the interim president as the best candidate all along.”
Florida professors, university faculty, and teaching assistants could soon be able to openly carry firearms on campus, thanks to a sweeping new measure filed by a Republican lawmaker.
Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Crestview, is sponsoring the legislation, entitled “School Safety,” to address security concerns in higher education. If passed, the bill would remove college campuses as gun-free zones — marking a significant shift in how Florida handles gun issues.
It would become one of the few Second Amendment expansion bills adopted in Florida since the Parkland massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, which prompted a higher gun-purchasing age and red flag laws.
In an interview with the Phoenix, Gaetz called his legislation “sadly timed,” adding that he “never wanted” to file a bill like this.
He referred to a slate of violent incidents in the past few months, including a shooting spree at Florida State University in April, the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in September, a shooting at Brown University over the weekend, and, most recently, an anti-Jewish shooting in Australia that left 15 dead.
“We’re living in a world where our institutions are being threatened,” Gaetz said, adding that he’s already filed another bill aimed at increasing protection outside of churches, mosques, and synagogues. “I’m sorry that I’m having to do this, but it just seems as though places in our society that we thought were safe, even sacrosanct, are now becoming targets.”
Although he anticipates objections that teachers may abuse the ability to bring a gun to school, Gaetz pointed out that there have been no instances of a school shooting sprouting from an unwell volunteer in the guardian program. This school safety initiative allows trained and vetted school employees to carry concealed weapons on K-12 campuses.
“None of the parade of terribles have happened that the opponents to the guardian program tried to advance,” he said. “While none of that has happened, people have been killed.”
What else is in the bill?
Gaetz isn’t this first Florida lawmaker to try to promote campus carry. At the start of the 2025 legislative session, then-Sen. Randy Fine brought his all-encompassing campus carry bill to its first committee — unlike Gaetz’s, Fine’s bill would have allowed all students to carry — but it was voted down. Fine later left to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Gaetz said that the heart of his bill is hardening Florida’s state colleges and universities by requiring better threat assessments, better responses to threats, and better communications between first responders and faculty in emergencies.
SB 896 would allow university employees, faculty, and students who are also working for a college to either openly carry or carry conceal weapons on campus. It also would expand the school guardian program to the university level and create an offense of discharging a firearm within 1,000 feet of school.
Gaetz said his measure also would require universities to ensure all classroom doors lock during an emergency — especially after FSU students discovered during the April school shooting that their doors could not lock. He estimates that around $60 million will end up being appropriated for the effort, in line with what Gov. Ron DeSantis requested in his budget proposal last week.
An identical bill has been filed in the House by Rep. Michelle Salzman.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: [email protected].
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A week after Florida health officials brought the state one step closer to abolishing childhood vaccine mandates, pediatricians, parents and advocates are expressing alarm over the ramifications.
If such a change goes into effect, “pediatric hospitals will be overwhelmed with [childhood] infections that have virtually been non-existent for the last 40 years,” said Florida-based infectious disease specialist Frederick Southwick. Southwick attended a Dec. 12 public comment workshop on the issue hosted by the Florida Department of Health.
“We’re in trouble right now,” he added, pointing to falling vaccine rates and the likelihood that some diseases could become endemic. “We’re getting there, and this [ending the mandate] would just do-in little kids.”
The session delved into the proposed language the department has drafted for a rule change that would do away with vaccine mandates for four key immunizations: varicella, more commonly known as chickenpox; hepatitis B, pneumococcal bacteria and Haemophilus influenzae type B, or HiB. Currently, children cannot attend school in Florida without proof of these four immunizations, among others, including the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.
Although Florida is not considering removing the mandate for the MMR vaccine, health experts see the move it is contemplating as eroding childhood immunization generally. It comes when more than 300 people are being quarantined in South Carolina because of a burgeoning measles outbreak.
Rana Alissa is the president of the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. (American Academy of Pediatrics)
Rana Alissa, president of the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, was also in attendance to express her concerns. She told The 74 this week that thanks to the success of vaccines, she’s never had to treat some of these “horrible diseases,” including HiB, which can lead to meningitis.
“Don’t make our kids — Florida’s kids — guinea pigs to teach me and my classmates and other pediatricians how to manage these diseases,” she implored.
Tallahassee parent Cathy Mayfield lost her 18-year-old daughter, Lawson, to meningitis in 2009, a few months before she was supposed to leave for college and just before she was due for a booster shot. (At the time, the booster was not recommended until college, according to Mayfield.)
“You just don’t realize until it happens to you,” she said.
She hopes others will learn the importance of vaccinating their own kids from her family’s story.
Cathy Mayfield, and her daughter, Lawson, who died in 2009 from meningitis. (Cathy Mayfield)
“All the information I learned through our tragedy about vaccinations made me very supportive of the safeguards [they] offer,” she said.
“You’ve also got to realize,” Mayfield added, “that your decisions affect your community, and that’s something I think has gotten lost in … all this conversation and hesitancy about vaccinations.”
Equating vaccine mandates to slavery
The workshop, which was announced the day before Thanksgiving, was held in Panama City Beach, in the Florida Panhandle, far from the state’s main population centers. About 100 people showed up to the session, which was characterized by attendees as heated but civil. Northe Saunders, president of the pro-vaccine advocacy organization American Families for Vaccines and who was there, estimated that about 30 people spoke in favor of keeping the current vaccine mandates, while approximately 20 spoke in opposition.
Some speakers opposed to vaccine mandates included conspiracy theories in their arguments, according to news reports and numerous people present at the workshop, echoing language heard from the federal government since Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time vaccine skeptic, took over the Department of Health and Human Services.
One attendee argued that giving children multiple jabs in a 30-day period “accounts to attempted murder,” according to NBC News. A number of others questioned if this year’s reported measles outbreaks, which resulted in the deaths of two school-age, unvaccinated children in Texas, had actually occurred.
Florida leaders’ desire to become the first state to end all vaccine mandates was announced in September by its surgeon general, Joseph A. Ladapo, standing beside Gov. Ron DeSantis in the gym of a private Christian high school. In sharing their plan, Ladapo claimed that “every last [mandate] is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”
Only four vaccines are mandated through a Department of Health rule and are therefore under Lapado’s purview. The remaining nine, which in addition to the MMR shot include polio, are part of state law and can only be changed through legislative action.
Experts told The 74 this is a much more difficult feat, one that state legislators — even conservative ones — don’t seem to have an appetite for. Richard Hughes, a George Washington University law professor and leading vaccine law expert, said such a legislative attempt would “warrant legal action.”
‘We really need to turn this around’
The debate in Florida and other states over mandatory childhood immunization comes as the country teeters on the edge of losing its measles elimination status. This year alone has seen nearly 2,000 confirmed cases, the most since 2000, when measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. by the World Health Organization. Just over 10% of cases have led to hospitalization. The current South Carolina outbreak has infected at least 138 people, and among those forced to quarantine are students from nine schools.
Significant educational implications from the outbreaks emerged in a new study by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, which found that absences increased 41% in a school district at the center of the West Texas outbreak, with larger effects among younger students.
The spread of measles is also a warning of the ramifications of dropping vaccine rates, according to William Moss, executive director at Johns Hopkins’ International Vaccine Access Center.
“Measles often serves as what we [call] the canary in the coal mine,” he said. “It really identifies weaknesses in the immunization system and programs, because of its high contagiousness.”
“Unfortunately, I see a perfect storm brewing for the resurgence of vaccine preventable diseases,” he added, “… We really need to turn this around.”
Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention got rid of a recommendation that all newborns receive the hepatitis B vaccine, and in the preceding months changed policies surrounding the measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chickenpox) combination vaccine and this year’s COVID 19 booster — all based on recommendations from an advisory committee hand-picked by Kennedy. The universal birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine, in place for decades, was credited with nearly eliminating the highly contagious and dangerous virus in infants.
Lynn Nelson, the president of the National Association of School Nurses, fears that other, more conservative states will now look to Florida as an example.
“We already have seen outbreaks all over, and they’re only going to escalate if you have an area of the country whose herd immunity levels slip down further than they already are, which I think will happen if those [anti-mandate rules] come into effect,” she said. “That, in combination with some of the other misinformation that’s coming out, people will feel validated in decisions not to immunize their children.”
Florida’s Department of Health appears to be moving ahead to end requirements for the four vaccines it controls, despite a recent poll indicating nearly two-thirds of Floridians oppose the action. Proposed draft language presented at the Dec. 12 workshop would also allow parents to opt their kids out of the state’s immunization registry, Florida SHOTS, and expand exemptions.
Currently, all 50 states have vaccine requirements for children entering child care and schools. Parents across the country are able to apply for exemptions if their child is unable to get vaccinated for medical reasons and most states — including Florida — also have religious exemptions. Part of the proposed changes presented at the Dec. 12 meeting would add Florida to the 20 states that additionally have some form of personal belief exemptions, further widening parents’ ability to opt their kids out of routine vaccines.
The public comment period remains open through Dec. 22, after which the department will decide whether or not to move forward with the rule change. In the interim, advocates are pushing state health officials to conduct epidemiological research around the impact of removing the vaccine mandates and studies on the potential economic costs. Florida is heavily reliant on tourism and out-of-state visitors.
Without that information, pro-vaccine advocate Saunders said these critical public health care decisions will be made “at the whim of an appointed official.”
“The nation,” he added, “is looking at Florida.”
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Dive Brief:
The New College of Florida could take control of the University of South Florida’s Sarasota-Manatee campus under a new proposal from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Under DeSantis’ 2026-27 state budget, New College would assume control of USF Sarasota-Manatee’s 32-acre property and related liabilities by July. In exchange, the college would pay USF roughly $166,600 per month for debt tied to the property.
Current USF Sarasota-Manatee students would have a “reasonable opportunity” to finish their degrees at the campus before New College could fully take over the property, according to the proposal. If the proposal takes effect, USF could not enroll new students at its Sarasota-Manatee campus going forward.
Dive Insight:
With DeSantis’ proposal, the liberal arts-focused New College, also based in Sarasota, would undertake a major expansion. However, the governor’s budget proposal essentially represents a legislative wish list, making the ultimate outcome still uncertain.
“This is a policy matter that is going to be discussed, debated and worked through over the coming months of the Legislative Session,” Will Weatherford, chair of USF’s governing board, said at a meeting on Thursday, according to local media. “We don’t control the outcome of that discussion.”
The proposal would not transfer USF’s Sarasota-Manatee students or employees to New College.
USF would retain its intellectual and other intangible property, as well as records and equipment, and have priority over the space while its current students finish their degrees.
However, the budget provision states that the two institutions could forge a “mutual agreement to share or use space in any of the transferred properties or facilities when it is in the best interest of both institutions or their students.”
News of such a plan for New College to take over the campus broke earlier this year.
Emails unearthed in March by WUSF — a public news outlet owned by USF — included a draft press release penned by New College announcing it would integrate the Sarasota-Manatee campus. The draft release trumpeted millions of dollars in potential savings and the elimination of redundancies between the two institutions.
The draft said the “strategic partnership between the next door colleges aims to create a unified, world-class institution that maximizes resources, eliminates redundancies, and elevates opportunities for students, faculty, and the region.”
“New College’s rapid growth will immediately benefit from the additional physical space provided by the USF-SM campus,” the draft release also stated. “The integration also addresses longstanding inefficiencies, consolidating administrative functions and aligning academic offerings.”
In New College’s envisioning, according to the draft, the integration would create “streamlined transfer pathways” for USF Sarasota-Manatee students to the university’s Tampa flagship or St. Petersburg campuses, or New College.
Prior to those discussions of a transfer, New College in 2024 took over a 9-acre waterfront property, originally set aside for USF Sarasota-Manatee, which the college said would grow its student population.
New College has become a lynchpin in DeSantis’ efforts to remake higher education in Florida. In 2023, the governor revamped the college’s board and named his longtime ally Richard Corcoran — former Republican state House speaker and Florida education commissioner — as its president.
In October, New College became the first to publicly volunteer for President Donald Trump’s higher education compact, which offers colleges priority in research funding in exchange for adopting a slate of policies put forward by the Trump administration.
The legal foundations of the compact have been widely questioned, and most of the nine research universities directly offered the deal rejected it over concerns about free speech, institutional independence and maintaining meritocracy in funding. New College, on the other hand, said it would “happily be the first” to embrace the compact.
“We have no affirmative action or DEI, and we have been building a campus where open dialogue and the marketplace of ideas are at the forefront of everything we do,” Corcoran said at the time.
Meanwhile, USF Sarasota-Manatee has been growing its physical footprint. The campus, long a commuter-only institution, last year opened a new 100,000-square-foot combined residence hall and student center that it billed as the campus’s first student housing and major expansion since opening in 2006.
New College is renting space in USF Sarasota-Manatee’s new facility to house some of its students. That expense, combined with renting nearby hotel rooms for the same purpose, is costing the college millions of dollars each year, according to WUSF.
Chronic absenteeism is a longstanding problem that has surged to troubling levels. Recent data show that in 20 states, more than 30% of students are chronically absent, about twice the rate seen before the pandemic. Absenteeism is a multifaceted problem, and the reasons students stop showing up aren’t always academic. Sometimes it’s because they don’t feel connected to their school, or they are not engaged in the curriculum. Other times, they face adversity outside the classroom. While the problem is complicated, it’s easy to overlook one of its simplest, most effective solutions: What if the key to keeping students is a performance stage, a music room or an art studio — a creative outlet to shine?
Despite decades of research, arts education is still treated as a “nice-to-have” when education budgets allow. From 2015 to 2019, the NAMM Foundation conducted a four-year study across 1,700 New York City public schools serving over 1.1 million students. They found that schools offering music and arts programming had lower rates of chronic absenteeism and higher overall school-day attendance than those that didn’t. Similarly, a comparison of cohort data over seven years found that dropout rates fell from 30% to just 6% among students participating in consistent arts programming.
Clearly, the arts are a powerful tool for academic engagement, resilience and, most importantly, graduation. For example, after tracking more than 22,000 students for 12 years, the National Dropout Prevention Center found that those with high levels of involvement in the arts were five times more likely to graduate from high school than those with low involvement.
But while over 90% of Americans feel the arts are important for education, only 66% of students participate, and access remains uneven. Charter schools, the fastest-growing segment of public education, have the lowest availability of arts courses: Just 37% of public charter high schools offer arts instruction. Students in charter schools, military families and homeschool programs are too often the ones with the fewest opportunities to engage with the arts, despite needing them most.
This is an issue that the Cathedral Arts Project in Jacksonville, Florida, is trying to solve.
In partnership with and with funding from the Florida Department of Education, our program piloted a year-long arts education initiative during the 2024-25 school year, reaching more than 400 students in charter schools, homeschools, military families and crisis care. Our teaching artists visited classrooms weekly, providing instruction in dance, music, visual arts and theater. Throughout the year, students in kindergarten through high school found joy, confidence and connection through creative learning. Homeschool students brought history to life through art projects, children from military families found comfort and stability during times of deployment and young people in crisis discovered new ways to express themselves and heal. Each moment affirmed the power of the arts to help children imagine what’s possible.
To better understand the impact of this work, we partnered with the Florida Data Science for Social Good program at the University of North Florida to analyze reports and survey evaluations collected from 88% of program participants. Here’s what we found:
Students grew not only in artistic skill, but also in self-confidence, teamwork, problem-solving and engagement. After completing the program, over 86% of students said they “like to finish what they start” and “can do things even when they are hard” — a key indicator of persistence, which is a strong predictor of long-term academic success. Students rated themselves highly in statements like, “I am good at performance.”
Families noticed, too. In the age of screens, nearly three-quarters reported that their child had increased in-person social interaction since beginning arts programming and had improved emotional control at home. Nearly one-third saw noticeable gains in creative problem-solving and persistence through challenges.
According to the State of Educational Opportunity in America survey conducted by 50CAN, parents view the arts as a meaningful contributor to their child’s learning, and they want more of it. In Florida, where families have been given the power of school choice, they’re increasingly seeking out programs that inspire creative thinking and meaningful engagement while promoting academic success. But finding them isn’t always easy. When funding allows, traditional public schools may offer band or visual arts, but these options are often unavailable to families choosing alternative education options for their children.
Now in its second year, our program fills this critical gap by working directly with school choice families across northeast Florida, bringing structured arts instruction to students who otherwise wouldn’t have access.
What makes the arts such an effective intervention? It’s structure, expression and connection. When students learn through the creative process, they navigate frustration, build resilience and find joy in persistence. These are not soft skills — they’re essential for survival, and increasingly important in today’s workplaces.
Arts education is a necessary investment in student achievement. It’s time for other states to treat it that way and follow Florida’s lead.
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Dive Brief:
State University System of Florida institutionscollectively plan to terminate 18 academic programs and suspend another eight after reviewing how many degrees they award,Emily Sikes,the public system’s vice chancellor for academic and student affairs,said at a meeting last week with lawmakers.
In the review, SUSF officials identified 214 programs systemwide that they say are underperforming based on how many graduates they’ve produced in the past three years. System universities plan to continue at least 150 of those programs while consolidating another 30.
The large majority of underperforming programs, 68%, are in the liberal arts, education and science fields, including ethnic and cultural studies, foreign languages, philosophy and religious studies, and physical and social sciences programs.
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As required by SUSF regulations, the 12-university system has conducted productivity reviews of degree programs every three to four years for roughly the past decade and a half, Sikes said.
Over that time, the system’s institutions have axed over 100 programs based on those reviews, she said. Most of those programs were cut in 2011, when the first such review yielded 492 programs deemed to be underperforming, leading university officials to terminate 73 of them.
In this year’s review, SUSF officials looked for bachelor’s programs graduating fewer than 30 students over the last three years,master’s programs awarding fewer than 20 degrees and doctorate programs with fewer than 10 graduates during that period.
Master’s programs made up 55% of the 214 that fell below graduate thresholds. But, Sikes added, there is a reason for that: SUSF universities often award master’s degrees to students who don’t complete doctoral programs so they have something to show for their time and effort.
Another 31% of the underperforming programs were bachelor’s, and 14% were doctorate.
For the eight programs set for suspension, the universities will stop enrolling students and “take a hard look” at either updating the curriculum to improve the program or deciding to wind it down, Sikes said.
While Florida’s university system has reviewed its program productivity for years, other states have begun mandating their public colleges trim their offerings along similar lines.
This summer, the Indiana Commission for Higher Education announced that six of the state’s public colleges planned to eliminate 75 programs, suspend another 101 and consolidate 232 others in response to a new state law.
In April, Indiana lawmakers introduced graduation quotas for public college programs, requiring a three-year average of at least 15 graduates for bachelor’s programs, 10 for associate degrees, seven for master’s programs and three for doctoral degrees. The quotas were part of a controversial last-minute bonanza of new higher ed policies that lawmakers baked into a budget bill this year.
The speed of the program cuts led to confusion and chaos for some Indiana faculty this summer. “Even tenured faculty are wondering, am I going to have a job in two months?” one faculty governance leader in Indiana told local media in June.
Ohio enacted a similar law this spring, called SB 1, which has led to dozens of proposed program cuts at the state’s public universities.
Amy Reid spent more than 30 years at New College of Florida, where she served as a professor of French and the founder and director of the gender studies program. Her relatively secure employment as a tenured professor emboldened her to become one of the most outspoken critics of the conservative effort to transform NCF into a “Hillsdale College of the South,” led by then-interim president Richard Corcoran, who was hired by a swath of conservative trustees installed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2023.
That same year, Reid was elected to serve as faculty representative on the Board of Trustees; she voted against Corcoran’s appointment to be the college’s permanent president and pushed back against numerous policies, including an effort by the administration to use the faculty to help enforce gendered bathroom laws.
Last month, Corcoran denied a recommendation from the New College provost that Reid be granted emerita status at the college, citing Reid’s advocacy for faculty and academic freedom, which he described as “hyperbolic alarmism and needless obstruction.” In response, the New College Alumni Association Board of Directors made Reid an honorary alum.
Since taking unpaid leave in August 2024 and then retiring a year later, Reid has brought her talents and penchant for advocacy to PEN America, a nonprofit focused on fighting education censorship and protecting press freedom.
Inside Higher Ed spoke with Reid over Zoom about her experience as the faculty representative on the New College Board of Trustees, the transformation of the public liberal arts college and expanding efforts by Florida conservatives to censor faculty speech.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Before you became faculty representative on the Board of Trustees at New College, the previous representative quit in protest. What motivated you to pursue the role and what were you hoping to do with it?
A: Things had been contentious on campus. Frankly, that’s an understatement. When the new board members were appointed that January [2023], they described their arrival on campus as a “siege”—using military language. So I began organizing with other faculty members and providing support to students so that they could respond to the rapid changes on campus, changes that included the immediate firing of our president [Patricia Okker], and then, over the coming weeks, a number of key leaders; the censoring of student speech and chalking on campus; the denial of tenure to a number of very qualified faculty.
I started holding weekly teas for students, providing them a place to ask questions and to be heard and also to have cookies. So working with my colleagues and providing support for students were the two things that I really wanted to do.
As a senior member of the faculty and as the leader of the gender studies program, I felt like I had a particular responsibility to speak up on campus. I knew that colleagues of mine who were not tenured couldn’t necessarily do that, so I tried to speak up for my community. And after Matt Lipinski resigned from the Board of Trustees and from his faculty position [after the board denied tenure to five professors], he actually reached out and asked me to stand for election as chair of the faculty, because I’d been both working in collaboration with others through the union and also because of my outspokenness as director of the gender studies program. So after talking with other colleagues, I agreed to stand for election in collaboration with two other colleagues.
Q: What was the initial reception from the board when you joined?
A: What I really remember, actually, was the real support that I had from colleagues and students and alums. So yes, there was a certain amount of tension with certain members of the Board of Trustees. There were people on the board who did reach out in friendly and professional ways—greeting me at meetings, things like that—but really I had strong support from faculty, alums and students, and that’s what mattered.
Q: Do you think you were successful in the faculty representative role?
A: That’s really a challenging question, and it depends on what metrics you want to use. I think I did a good job of raising serious questions and concerns in the trustee meetings, even if my votes were not often on the winning side. I always brought my integrity with me, and as an educator, that was really important to me. I think I was able to help rally faculty around various policy proposals that we put forth, because my job wasn’t just in the Board of Trustees, it was also in the management of the faculty, which meant multiple meetings every week about budgets and other administrative issues.
There was a lot of work there behind the scenes to support faculty, to support the curriculum and also to advocate for students in a number of ways. I know that students and faculty and alums felt that they could reach out to me about their concerns, that they knew I would listen and respond. When people spoke at Board of Trustees meetings, I paid attention and took notes on all of the people who came to speak. In that way, I think I was effective, but frankly, the votes on the board were stacked.
Q: When you resigned, you said that the “New College where you once taught no longer existed.” Was there a specific moment that tanked your faith in New College leadership?
A: It’s really not about a loss of faith in the new leadership. Richard Corcoran came in with a set of ideas about how he wanted to change the campus, to change what one trustee called the “hormonal and political balance on campus.” And Corcoran followed through on that. I can point first to the firing of valuable and dedicated campus leaders, including President Patricia Okker, the dean of diversity, the campus research librarian. [I can also point to] the denial of tenure to six very qualified and effective faculty, the chasing away of over 30 percent of the faculty and about 100 students—and that’s a real record for the first eight months of this administration.
Then you have the painting over of student art on campus, the replacement of grass with Astroturf and the plowing down of hundreds of trees along the bay front. You have the wasting of millions of dollars of state funds on bloated administrative salaries and portable dorms that were uninhabitable within three months due to mold. You have the abolishing of the gender studies program in the summer of 2023, the erasure of our budget, our eviction from our campus office in December of 2023. The imposition of a rigid and limited core curriculum in spring of 2024. The withholding of diplomas from a cohort of students in May 2024, the wholesale destruction of the student-led gender and diversity center in August 2024. That was a student-led space with a collection of books that had been curated by students for over 30 years, all thrown in the dumpster.
So not one moment, but a lot. But what I still have faith in, even today, is the determination of students and alums to pursue an education that embodies academic freedom, which I understand is the right of students to pursue an education free from government censorship. And also, I have great faith in those faculty who are remaining, who support the New College academic mission and who are doing their best day in and day out to support our students.
Q: Were you surprised when Corcoran denied the dean’s recommendation to grant you emerita status?
A: Not really. I’d say it’s par for the course, but I was surprised that he was so up front about his reasons. In his statement, he noted that despite my record of achievement as a teacher and a researcher, it was my advocacy for the college—my opposition to him—that was the problem. So now he’s on the record explicitly as punishing speech, and that is stunning.
What happened to me is just one small thing, but it reflects a pattern of censorship on the campus that needs to be called out. But more importantly at this moment, I really want to thank my colleagues who nominated me for emeritus status and the New College alums who adopted me as one of their own. That’s meaningful, and I am very grateful.
Q: As a reporter, I spend a lot of time reading and writing bad news, but I’m seeing the same types of attacks on faculty speech and academic freedom that happened at New College occur at other institutions, in Florida and elsewhere. Would you say these current attacks on faculty speech are unprecedented?
A: A lot of people have talked about this as unprecedented, but what I see is the culmination of a pattern of censorship we’ve seen playing out at state levels across the country. In Florida, in 2022, they passed House Bill 233, which allows or encourages students to surreptitiously record faculty if they intend to file a complaint against them.
Since then, really, the state has been tightening a gag around faculty speech in myriad ways. Just in the past couple of months, we’ve seen a number of faculty sanctioned—even one emeritus professor at [University of Florida] lost his status based on complaints about his social media posts. So what’s happening now could be cast as unprecedented, but yet, it’s part of this pattern we see playing out now, not just in Florida, but across the country, where some 50 faculty members have been sanctioned or fired because of their speech or social media posts since the start of September.
Since 2021, PEN America has been actively tracking efforts to censor speech in college and university classrooms across the country, and we’ve seen a real rise in the number of bills introduced to censor speech … and in the numbers that are being passed; 2025 was really a banner year for censorship in higher education in this country. There were a record number of gag orders passed across the country—10 of them, 10 bills that explicitly limit what can be said in college and university classrooms.
And then there are other restrictions designed to chill faculty speech—restrictions on tenure or curricular control bills, and let’s also remember the bills that were introduced or passed to limit student protests on campus. All of those things are designed to make people afraid to speak up and to question things on campus. That’s not healthy for our education system, and it’s not healthy for our democracy. Currently, about 40 percent of the U.S. population lives in a state that has at least one state-level law restricting classroom speech at the college and university level. Is that something we’re OK with as a country? Do we really think that our First Amendment rights are that fungible?
