Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) blasted the students at San Francisco State University and Stanford Law School who shouted down and attacked speakers on their campus, saying that if students did that at a Florida institution, they should be expelled.

At an event Monday at the New College of Florida where he signed a number of bills reforming higher education in the state, DeSantis said that universities should be places open to different opinions, and he criticized students at Stanford Law School who shouted down U.S. 5th Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan and students at San Francisco State University who chased former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines.

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"That is wrong," DeSantis said of the two incidents. "It also shows a cancer that's developed in some of these institutions amongst the student body. The idea that there's a viewpoint you disagree with, that the appropriate recourse is to try to drown them out by yelling or screaming or trying to take over the event, that is antithetical to what a free society is all about. If there's behavior like you saw at Stanford or like you saw at San Francisco State University by students at Florida universities, they should be expelled from the university."

The governor made the comments while a group of protesters had congregated on the campus of the New College of Florida to protest his visit. The governor was visiting the campus to sign eight bills making changes to higher education in the state, including affording the liberal arts college a significant funding increase. DeSantis appointed several new members to the college's board of trustees and tasked them with remaking the notoriously liberal school in the image of the conservative Hillsdale College.

"I would love for this to be, and I think it will be, the top classical liberal arts college in America," DeSantis said. "Certainly the top state liberal arts college in America."

The bills the governor signed Monday included a statutory ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in higher education and expanded funding for state university civics centers, among other reforms.

University presidents will also have unilateral power to hire new faculty, and will no longer have to rely exclusively on faculty hiring committees, a move DeSantis said would empower university presidents to hire faculty that feel silenced at other institutions.

"People feel like they're walking on eggshells [and] that [if] they say the wrong thing, they can be blackballed," DeSantis said. "That's not a healthy environment, they don't believe that they have the freedom to speak their minds on a lot of these university campuses. And so they see they see a college like New College or a system like Florida going in the other direction where we're welcoming that debate. There's a lot of people that are going to be interested in that."