Conservatives have made no secret of their desire to dismantle the current university system and replace it with their own, “anti-woke” version that would discourage the advancement of women and minorities.

Scott Yenor, nominated to chair the board of trustees at the state-run University of West Florida, is one of the lightning rods in this crusade — and if he is confirmed to that post, he will make Florida his proving ground. State senators should vote to reject his nomination when they meet in their annual legislative session next month.

Yenor is a politics professor at Boise State University and a former fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He calls himself a “trad dad” who believes universities are “indoctrination camps” that need a massive overhaul because they are responsible for undermining traditional American families.

He drew gobs of attention when he announced, in a 2021 speech before the National Conservatism Conference, that it was time for a “sexual counterrevolution” and described career-oriented women as “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.”

“Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers,” Yenor declared. “Ditto for med school and the law and every trade.” The way to discourage women from entering these careers, he said, is “to de-emphasize our colleges and universities” where women are concerned.

An educator who believes not everyone is deserving of college, Yenor’s body of research focuses on feminism, sexual liberation, and dismantling social justice in academia. He has written about the need to socially engineer society back to a time when women stayed home and had more children. He points to the decline in birth rates and college enrollment and concludes that “state legislatures and Boards of Regents should now consider policies of patriotic downsizing and reorganizing.”

And gender isn’t his only target: Yenor and colleagues also wrongly claim that the 1964 Civil Rights Act “traded one set of racial preferences for another.” And last month, in a series of posts on X, he implied that being Jewish, among other traits, made some U.S. senators unfit to lead.

In January, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed Yenor to the board overseeing the University of West Florida, one of the smallest in the state’s 12-university system. Yenor has no connection to Pensacola, the community the university serves, but he, along with four other conservative appointees, will — if confirmed — be in a position to use the university as a laboratory to reengineer Florida’s higher education, providing a model for other states to follow.

Under DeSantis, Florida has been a willing petri dish for the conservative movement to revamp higher ed, banning and defunding diversity programs at universities, lowering teacher standards, sidelining sociology courses, and helping to create a new accreditation system for universities and colleges that discourage a diversity focus.

Two years ago, DeSantis removed the leadership at New College of Florida, the smallest college in the system, and installed conservative administrators who helped him write his Stop WOKE Act, tossed hundreds of library books, canceled the school’s gender studies major and bulldozed coastal preserves to make way for more sports fields.

Yenor is poised to use UWF to push a similar approach, one that is focused on diminishing female advancement, elevating White men and whitewashing history. He said he wants to eliminate the university’s well-regarded anthropology department and its archaeology program because he considers the study of human societies and culture “kind of corrupt.”

Yenor is obsessed with the idea that America’s declining birth rate is a result of young people deciding “that the sacrifices and duties involved in family life are not worth it.” He contends that “patriarchal norms” — such as making sure “men’s earnings are substantially higher than women’s” and reducing the number of women with formal education — will result in the desired baby boom.

Completely absent from this argument are the large bodies of research that point to policy changes that could make it more economically viable for more American couples to have kids: like increasing access to affordable childcare, meaningful parental leave, workplace protections for caregivers, higher wages, and programs that subsidize assisted reproductive treatments for women over the age of 35. And he totally ignores the data that show that reducing female college enrollment would be a disaster for women’s earning power and the U.S. economy, in which women now make up just over half of college-educated labor.

Somehow, Yenor also believes that female education is antithetical to motherhood. Of course, there’s nothing further from the truth. Not all women will pursue a college degree or a professional career, but nothing about additional years of education makes someone a bad parent. To the contrary, research shows that higher-educated parents are more likely to marry and tend to spend more time with their children — even though they also spend more time working outside the home.

On the surface, some of Yenor’s suggestions have a virtuous veneer. He argues that the move toward elective courses in general education has diluted the intentions of the classical liberal arts education. But he uses this rational argument as cover for a more insidious goal: to wipe out the economic independence women have achieved over the last 60 years.

Yenor has earned his right to have a voice in academia. He has a right to hold a wrong opinion. But as he has argued, “it would be nice if there were some social opprobrium that attached to opinions that are basically uncivilized and dishonoring of essential institutions for any civilization.”

He’s right. Most Americans would agree that education and motherhood are essential institutions — and arguing, as Yenor does, that they are incompatible ought to attract some social opprobrium.

Florida’s Republican-controlled state Senate will have the final say over Yenor and the four other reactionaries appointed to the board to turn its state university into an ideological battleground. They should reject Yenor’s arguments and demand that DeSantis instead appoint mainstream thinkers who acknowledge reality: The US needs more educated and empowered women, not fewer.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

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