A student carries a University of North Florida pride flag to protest the LGBTQ+ Center’s closure. Photo: Bob Self/Florida Times-Union / USA TODAY NETWORK via IMAGN
The University of North Florida (UNF) has shut down its LGBTQ+, intercultural, interfaith, and women’s centers to comply with Gov. Ron DeSantis‘s (R) 2023 law banning publicly-funded universities from spending money on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
The LGBTQ Center had been open for 18 years — it closed just seven days before graduation. It’s just one of several queer centers that have closed in state schools since DeSantis signed the law.
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In a message to students, UNF’s now-shuttered Office of Diversity and Inclusion wrote, “Associated physical locations and communication methods are no longer in active operation… we would like to extend our deepest gratitude to every [student] who supported and engaged with this office throughout the years. It was an honor to have been a part of your UNF journey.”
The LGBTQ Center shuttered its doors on April 26. Student workers there cleared out rainbow flags and a bin of free clothing, binders, and accessories. Doyle Tate, an assistant professor of psychology at UNF researching LGBTQ topics, took the center’s artwork of a giant rainbow Osprey, the bird of prey that is UNF’s mascot.
“I’m currently safeguarding [it] in my office until Florida decides to stop their crusade against DEI on college campuses and [the LGBTQ Center] one day hopefully reopens,” Tate told OutSFL.
UNF announced in January that it would close the office and centers to comply with the anti-DEI law. The law defines DEI programs as any that classify “individuals on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, gender identity, or sexual orientation and promotes differential or preferential treatment of individuals on the basis of such classification.”
When signing the law, DeSantis said, “DEI is better viewed as standing for ‘discrimination, exclusion, and indoctrination,’ and that has no place in our public institutions. [DEI] has basically been used as a veneer to impose an ideological agenda and that is wrong… If you want to do things like gender ideology, go to Berkeley, go to some of these other places… You don’t just get to take taxpayer dollars and do whatever the heck you want to do and think that’s somehow OK.”
Critics of the law said that it will hamper efforts to recruit students and educators and will also shut down courses examining gender inequality, LGBTQ+ discrimination, and racial injustice.
“No staff members will lose their employment at UNF as a result of the closures of these centers,” UNF President Moez Limayem wrote in an email announcing the DEI office and centers’ closures. “We are working with affected employees to establish new work assignments within the University at their current salary or above.”
“We want UNF to be a place where all people feel safe and welcome, and where there is no place for hate,” Limayem added. “This semester, we will begin seeking ways to reinforce UNF’s values in everything we do, and we will review and expand resources as necessary to ensure success for all members of our campus community.”
While the school has allowed diversity-related student groups to continue existing, UNF students protested the centers’s closures. On January 24, over 100 students rallied on the lawn in front of UNF’s Fine Arts Center to specifically protest the closing of the LGBTQ Center.
“The center provided me friends; it provided me education to learn more about my gender and sexual orientation,” UNF student Lissie Morales told WTLV. “In regard to the turnout, it warms my heart to see people care about something as much as I do, especially when it comes to the LGBT Center, because it was one of the reasons why I came to UNF in the first place.”
The closure will certainly tarnish UNF’s university reputation for championing diversity. UNF had been ranked as one of the best LGBTQ+-inclusive campuses in the state by Campus Pride, an index of pro- and anti-LGBTQ+ campuses.
Florida Atlantic University closed their DEI centers in 2023, and the University of Florida in Gainesville closed its diversity departments in March, firing 13 full-time DEI positions and ending 15 administrative appointments, the Independent Florida Alligator reported.
Carlos Guillermo Smith, a former Florida House Democrat who advises the state LGBTQ+ advocacy group Equality Florida, called the anti-DEI law “a rubber stamp for Ron DeSantis’s agenda of censorship and surveillance.”
“The Board of Governors had the opportunity to hit the brakes, but instead, shamefully followed their censorship agenda off a cliff in service to DeSantis’s failed political ambitions,” Smith said.
DeSantis also signed the state’s “Stop WOKE Act,” which forbids schools and businesses from offering educational programs on racism and gender-based discrimination. The law is currently on hold as a court considers its impact on constitutionally protected free speech rights.
Federal Judge Mark. E. Walker, who blocked the Stop WOKE Act last year, called the law “positively dystopian,” stating that it “officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints.”
“Professors enjoy ‘academic freedom’ so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves,” Walker said of the law.
