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The University of North Florida has received two letters from the Executive Office of the Governor’s DOGE task force informing them about the state’s encroaching investigation into the university’s finances.
The first letter, sent to UNF on March 26, served as a general warning, essentially telling UNF President Moez Limayem that any information that the EOG DOGE team desires is up for grabs.
Of course, the letter did not deign to name President Limayen by name, instead addressing the letter to “University President.”
Why take the time to personalize each letter when you have to send them out to a grand total of 12 public universities? Especially if in doing so, you can make everyone feel just a little bit less important.
Nine days after EOG DOGE sent that message, UNF received a second letter. This letter served as the first official information request from the DOGE team.
In the letter, the outlined requested information included: all data related to grants UNF received in the last six years, all staff positions from the last six years, all published research from the last six years, and UNF policy towards grant allocation.
This set of an overwhelming amount of records is expected by April 18, allowing UNF a 14-day turnaround time. 12 days later, the EOG DOGE team expects more detailed information related to these areas.
When speaking on why he wants the EOG DOGE to target higher education in Florida, Gov. Desantis eloquently called out “woke,” stating, “There are certain subjects that, you know, look, if you want to do some of this — go to Cal Berkeley, go to some of these other places, we don’t really want to be doing some of this stuff in Florida.”
He went on to add that “[s]ome of the ideological studies stuff, we just want to prune that and get that out.”
This is notably not the first time that Gov. DeSantis has attempted to purge Florida’s public schools of woke ideology.
During the same press conference where he related the need for a leaner state educational system to ideological issues, DeSantis also indicated that “we were DOGE before DOGE was cool.”
It certainly feels like DeSantis wants to seem cool after an overwhelming rejection of his presidential campaign. And for the governor, using domineering, impersonal threats, styled after the Trump administration, is a last ditch effort to both exert control over knowledge and try to regain public favor.
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