I suspect the effect is bigger among students (out of state undergrads and graduate students) & postdocs, since they will often have other options (more often than faculty candidates).
Anecdotally, yes. I know of several UF professors who are leaving or trying to leave. Kymyz Mustache would have a good perspective.
My sense is that in Texas, there's less whiplash around the deterioration. My African-American studies prof friend is worried, because we outlawed DEI positions at public universities, and no one really knows what could be collateral damage. They didn't end up ending tenure this time around. At least in math, I'm told that open positions at local state universities still pull in hundreds of qualified applicants.
The stuff they're doing at the New School in Florida is just way worse than anything happening in Texas, right? They're purposefully destroying a school to make an example of them. I think Florida is probably seeing recruitment problems much worse than Texas or NC or wherever else.
The New School thing is so fucking depressing. "Look! we destroyed this unique and beautiful tiny refugee for lefty youth!"
My wife is an assistant prof in a natural science dept at the UF ag school. No real obvious brain drain yet in her circle--her department has lost a few people recently, but politics was only one among many reasons in those cases, and they brought in a new chair without any trouble this year. She expects that she won't have any trouble finding students, even if they're more likely to be international than before. But her field is pretty conservative--I can't imagine anthro or sociology are filling positions much easier than Af Am studies. If I had actually managed to land a job in the geography dept when we moved here, I bet I'd be feeling it more.
Anecdotally, I have heard about UF making faculty job offers this year with very short timelines for acceptance, in an attempt to prevent people from finding out if they have other options. Like, offer to negotiations to acceptance deadline all happening in less than a week.
Scott Aaronson (a well-known CS type in quantum) is at UT Austin. He blogged about the TX "let's nuke tenure" thing:
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7243
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7287
His politics .... well, I can't say I agree with them. I think he's significantly to the right of where I sit. But even he can see that this shit is bad for business.
Scott Aaronson is a pretty standard north lefty on anything that's not specifically about the online shaming of Scott Aaronson and who was nice or mean to him during it.
That was supposed to say "normie" but autocorrect doesn't think that's a word.
ISTM that these bills are 100% an expression of contempt for educators and education, and basically nothing else. There are going to be people who will endure contempt for enough money, but over time, those assholes in Florida and Texas are going to get what they want: a lot of people who care about education will find somewhere else to be.
7: This might just be in my (first) discipline, but I seem to recall back when I was on the market that if a department didn't abide by certain rules (such as a specific amount of time for candidates to be able to consider an offer) that it could lose the right to post job ads with the national scholarly organization. Of course, the situation in Florida is so far beyond normal that who the hell knows?
AIMHMHB I have a former TA about to start her second year as TT in one of the targeted disciplines at a FL uni, and I worry about both her job and her personal safety so much. My home state has just done a fabulous job screwing everything up.
More anecdotal, but I was in a search committee last year and we had some really great people applying from Florida schools, folks that I'm 90% sure were only on the market bc of this stuff.
4 is what I was going to say. There's always been some tension between TX gov't and TX higher ed, whereas I don't think state gov't was (perceived as) a factor in FL higher ed until the last few* years. So not only has FL moved further in less time, they're also doing it in an extremely high profile way.
Meanwhile, an interesting perspective: AB has been active in FB groups around parent-of-college-kid stuff since Iris was getting ready to search/apply a couple years ago (mostly how-to-pay stuff). To our surprise, the big FL schools were viewed as huge prizes in a way that, frankly, made no sense to me based on living in FL when my sister was looking at schools. I'd have to ask, but my impression was that it was definitely about money as about quality, but the perception of quality is just vastly higher than it used to be (same case with Pitt, incidentally, at least on the latter point). So the flagship schools are in a very different environment than they used to be, and I'm curious how this will play into that. To the extent that it's about money, a lot of parents probably won't care, but at some point the reputational hit means you're spending less to get less, and that's not a tradeoff parents like.
*maybe more than a few, I've lost track of how long the FL leg has been over the edge. But 10 years ago it wasn't just a rubber stamp for the latest rightwing lunacy
11: I think this is right. You do have enough desperation in those just out of school that it may work for a while.
Building on 14, the first cohort of local friends kids are now heading off to college, and I'm shocked by how difficult it is to get into UT-Austin. Basically, in a field like Engineering, their slots are entirely taken by top 6%ers, and by absolutely phenomenal out of staters or unusual circumstance kids. You can't switch majors into engineering once you're there, without showing truly phenomenal performance, because there's such high internal competition for the few slots that open up.
This is all hearsay, obviously. But I heardsaid it myself.
It's like the TV show, Austin City Limits.
14: My cousin is a philosophy prof in Jacksonville Florida. He said that his university has been very cheap, so it had its pick of students and they got very good ones. They are able to have a disproportionately good student body.
He says DeSantis is wrecking it and he has some tiny hope that because the entire board of regents has been Republican, that maybe they would get mad about a Republican governor wrecking what had been a Republican effort to build up the university but he doesn't really think that even a Republican board of regents will stand up for the university.
I don't really understand what power/mojo DeSantis has in FL. Like, I get that most (elected) Rs are on board with all of this shit and don't need to be dragged, but ISTM that he's treated as this utterly irresistible force, and I don't get it.
My understanding is that DeSantis isn't actually that popular anymore. I agree with saiselgY's argument that DeSantis's popularity was all about being a prominent opponent of anti-covid measures in 2021 and 2022, and everything he's done since then has been massive overreach, which is why he's getting clobbered by his more moderate opponent in the presidential primary.
Yeah, but he's still got a lot of power over the state of 22 million people until January 2027.
And it's not like the average replacement Republican will have much interest in undoing what he's done.