I’m a University President. Here’s What Florida’s Gov. DeSantis Doesn’t Get About College Students

Timothy Law Snyder, Ph.D., president, Loyola Marymount University (CA), writes: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has offered a consistent rationale for his attacks on higher education: Colleges and universities should not teach concepts like critical race theory or intersectionality, he says, because doing so pushes a political agenda and “impose[s] ideological conformity” onto impressionable young minds. Has DeSantis met the college students of the year 2023? If he has, he has somehow missed entirely their makeup and conviction. This generation of young people — Gen Z as they are commonly known, but whom I call the Solidarity Generation — requires no prodding by college professors to stand up for social justice or oppose systems of oppression.
One need only survey the global landscape of political activism to see this in action.