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The University of North Florida is at a crossroads. The state’s latest directives, issued under the guise of “efficiency” and “value,” are not policies but verdicts. They demand the closure of DEI programs, the dismantling of courses and centers deemed “unnecessary,” and an audit of faculty and curricula that reads less like an audit and more like an inquisition. If UNF submits, it will not be an institution of higher learning—it will be an echo chamber, where knowledge is trimmed, tamed, and subjugated into obedience.

This is not about budgets. It is not about streamlining. It is not even about education. It is about control—who determines what is knowable, who may speak, and who must disappear. The rhetoric of “value” is the instrument of a larger violence: to turn Florida’s universities into organs of the state, where only sanctioned knowledge remains.

A university is not a machine; it does not hum along, frictionless, reducing students to outputs and faculty to cost centers. A university is a body—nervous, breathing, alive. Knowledge is its pulse. Debate, its oxygen. The state’s demands are not reorganization; they are vivisection, performed without anesthesia, in pursuit of a compliant corpse.

UNF does not have to capitulate. Others have not. When the University of North Carolina attempted to block Nikole Hannah-Jones’s tenure, faculty and students revolted—loudly, publicly, and with enough force to make retreat the only option. When Ron DeSantis came for New College, students occupied buildings, faculty refused to be silenced. What happens now is not inevitable. Resistance is always possible. UNF must decide what it is willing to risk.

Resistance is not just refusal; it is a declaration. It is the insistence that knowledge, community, and justice matter more than political expediency. A university is not just where ideas survive—it is where they clash, where they catch fire, where they take on new and urgent forms. Students and faculty do not have to accept these directives. They can make this fight loud, visible, impossible to ignore. They can remind UNF that its choice is not just about this moment—it is about what kind of institution it will be when the dust settles. 

The state demands submission. But there is still time to resist, to defend the right to learn freely and teach boldly. Now is the moment for UNF to decide what it will stand for—and what it will allow itself to become.

Holly Coleman is a graduate of the University of North Florida’s English MA program and a former adjunct instructor within UNF’s English department.

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