Results are in from the Florida’s first mandated system-wide survey of ”intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” at its public universities, and one indisputable conclusion can be drawn from it: most students, staff, and faculty ignored it, yielding little in the way of trustworthy results.

The survey was required when Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature at the urging of Governor Ron DeSantis, enacted House Bill 233, creating section 1001.73(13), in Florida Statutes, entitled INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM AND VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY ASSESSMENT. That section read, in part:

The Board of Governors shall require each state university to conduct an annual assessment of the intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity at that institution. The Board of Governors shall select or create an objective, nonpartisan, and statistically valid survey to be used by each state university which considers the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented and members of the university community, including students, faculty, and staff, feel free to express their beliefs and viewpoints on campus and in the classroom. The Board of Governors shall annually compile and publish the assessments by September 1 of each year, beginning on September 1, 2022.

Florida universities distributed two separate forms of the survey - one for students and one for faculty and staff - in April through the web-based platform SurveyMonkey.

Student Response Rate

Of the 368,000 college students who...

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