Earlier this week, I wrote that it’s good for conservatives to fight “wokeness.” In City Journal yesterday, Chris Rufo argued that the University of Florida has the makings of a battleground for such a fight. The school “has created a radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy that promotes racial and political preferences in faculty hiring, encourages white employees to engage with a twelve-step program called Racists Anonymous, and maintains racially segregated scholarship programs that violate federal civil rights law.”

Ben Sasse, the former Nebraska senator who recently started as president of UF, has declared that one of the goals of his tenure is to ensure the university can “champion pluralism, curiosity, viewpoint diversity, open debate, and intellectual rigor for our students and faculty.” He faced some resistance early on — and I mean early. On Sasse’s first day as president, for example, a group of protesters appeared at his office with a list of “demands.” So I asked Sasse’s office what it thought of Rufo’s report on the DEI presence at the school. UF spokesman James Wegmann responded thus:

As UF leadership has made clear this year: The University of Florida exists to serve our citizens by educating, not indoctrinating. This means we are committed to exposing students to a wide range of views, to rejecting compelled speech, and to endorsing an epistemological humility that rejects all determinisms — historical, racial, material, etc. — that deny agency to human beings. Education is about preparing students to engage the real world, not enforcing a quasi-religious zealotry that preaches intolerance.

It will be interesting to see what happens next at UF.