Ron DeSantis: An Examination of His Educational Background
Ron DeSantis, the 46th governor of Florida, is a prominent figure in American politics. His educational background has become a topic of interest, especially considering his criticisms of "elite" universities and his focus on higher education reform. This article delves into DeSantis's educational journey, from his early years to his postgraduate studies and honorary doctorate.
Early Life and Education
Ronald Dion DeSantis was born on September 14, 1978, in Jacksonville, Florida, to parents Karen DeSantis (née Rogers) and Ronald Daniel DeSantis. He excelled in baseball at Florida’s Dunedin High School.
Ivy League Years: Yale University
After high school, DeSantis went north to Yale University, where he studied history. He was the captain of the Yale Bulldogs varsity baseball team. In his senior year in 2001, he achieved the team's highest batting average at .336. DeSantis was also a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and the St. Elmo Society.
Despite his later criticisms of his Ivy League education, DeSantis acknowledged the positive aspects of his time at Yale. At the Yale Baseball Leadoff Dinner in 2014, where he received the Yale Baseball Man of the Year award, he stated, "I wasn’t someone destined to go to the Ivy League. … The fact that we had the camaraderie of Yale baseball made Yale a positive experience for me." While studying, he worked several jobs to afford school.
Harvard Law School and Military Service
After graduating from Yale, DeSantis taught history at Darlington School, a private school in Rome, Georgia. He then attended Harvard Law School.
Read also: Comprehensive Guide to the DeSantis Scholarship
DeSantis joined the U.S. Navy in 2004 and was commissioned as an ensign in the Judge Advocate General's Corps. He completed Naval Justice School in 2005. Later that year, he was assigned to the Judge Advocate General Trial Service Office Command South East at Naval Station Mayport, Florida, as a prosecutor. He was promoted to lieutenant and served as a legal advisor to SEAL Team One. He was stationed at Joint Task Force Guantanamo in 2006 and deployed to Iraq in 2007, where he received a Bronze Star Medal for Meritorious Service and the Iraq Campaign Medal. In April 2008, he was reassigned to the Naval Region Southeast Legal Service. Before his honorable discharge from active duty in February 2010, DeSantis was assigned as a trial defense counsel and served with the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Middle District of Florida.
Early Political Career
With two law-school friends, DeSantis founded an LSAT test-prep company, LSAT Freedom, that one of the other co-founders billed as "the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates".
DeSantis's political career began in 2012 when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 6th congressional district. During his campaign, he aligned himself with the conservative Tea Party movement. His campaign was financially supported by the Koch Brothers' organizations FreedomWorks and Club for Growth. He was reelected in 2014 and 2016. During his tenure, he became a founding member of the Freedom Caucus and was an ally of President Donald Trump. In May 2015, DeSantis announced his candidacy for the 2016 United States Senate election in Florida, but withdrew when incumbent Senator Marco Rubio sought reelection.
During his time in Congress, DeSantis signed a 2013 "No Climate Tax Pledge" against any tax hikes to fight global warming. He voted in favor of H.R. DeSantis opposes gun control and received repeated "A" ratings from the NRA Political Victory Fund. He has said, "Very rarely do firearms restrictions affect criminals. In 2016, DeSantis introduced the Higher Education Reform and Opportunity Act, which would have allowed states to create their own accreditation systems. DeSantis supported the 2014 Venezuelan protests, calling them peaceful and a result of Venezuela's "socialist" economic policy.
Governorship and Policy
DeSantis was elected governor of Florida in 2018 and reelected in 2022. The day after his primary win, in a televised Fox News interview, DeSantis said, "The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state." His use of the word "monkey" received widespread media attention, and was interpreted by some, including Florida Democratic Party chair Terrie Rizzo, as a racist dog whistle alluding to the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Andrew Gillum, who is African-American. DeSantis denied the racism charge.
Read also: What makes a quality PE curriculum?
During his governorship, DeSantis has been involved in several key policy areas, including education, healthcare, and environmental issues.
In June 2021, DeSantis led an effort to ban the teaching of critical race theory in Florida public schools (though it had not been part of Florida's public school curriculum). He described critical race theory as "teaching kids to hate their country," mirroring a similar push by conservatives nationally. The Florida Board of Education approved the ban on June 10. The Florida Education Association criticized the ban, accusing the board of trying to hide facts from students. On September 14, 2021, DeSantis announced that Florida would replace the Florida Standards Assessment (FSA) test with a system of three smaller tests throughout the school year, in the fall, winter and spring. On December 15, 2021, DeSantis announced a new bill, the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act ("Stop WOKE Act"), which would allow parents to sue school districts that teach critical race theory. He framed the bill as a bill to combat "woke indoctrination" that would "teach our kids to hate our country or hate each other."
DeSantis expressed support for the Voting Rights Restoration for Felons Initiative after it passed in November 2018, saying he was "obligated to faithfully implement [it] as it is defined" when he became governor. After he refused to restore voting rights for felons with unpaid fines, which voting rights groups said was inconsistent with the referendum's results, he was challenged in court. In April 2019, DeSantis directed Florida's elections chief to expand the availability of Spanish-language ballots and Spanish assistance for voters. In June 2019, DeSantis signed a measure that would make it harder to launch successful ballot initiatives. Petition-gathering for ballot initiatives to legalize medical cannabis, increases to the minimum wage, and expansion of Medicaid were also under way. DeSantis instructed Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody to investigate whether Michael Bloomberg had criminally offered incentives for felons to vote by assisting in a fundraising effort to pay off their financial obligations so they could vote in the 2020 presidential election in Florida.
In 2024, Desantis signed into a law a bill that requires social media platforms to prohibit people under 16 years old from making accounts.
On June 1, 2021, DeSantis signed the Fairness in Women's Sports Act (SB 1028). It bans transgender girls and women from participating and competing in middle-school and high-school girls' and college women's sports competitions. In February 2022, DeSantis voiced support for the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act (HB1557), referred to by opponents as the "Don't Say Gay" law, which prohibits discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in school classrooms from kindergarten to grade 3. The Walt Disney Company, owner of Walt Disney World in Florida, called for the law's repeal, beginning a dispute between Disney and the state government. In April 2022, DeSantis signed a bill eliminating the company's special independent district act and replacing its Disney-appointed board of overseers. He also threatened during a press conference to build a new state prison near the Disney World complex. On April 26, 2023, Disney filed suit against DeSantis and several others, accusing them of retaliating against protected speech. DeSantis's attorneys filed a motion to dismiss Disney's lawsuit on June 26, claiming that the governor and state legislators have "legislative immunity". The lawsuit was dismissed on January 31, 2024, with Disney vowing to appeal. On March 27, 2024, Disney settled its pending state court lawsuits with DeSantis. Per the agreement, Disney put the appeal of its federal lawsuit on hold while a new development agreement with Florida was negotiated.
Read also: Maximize Savings on McGraw Hill Education
In April 2021, DeSantis signed into law the Combating Public Disorder Act he had been advocating. In June 2019, DeSantis signed an anti-"sanctuary city" bill into law. In September 2022, after similar actions by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, an agent of DeSantis recruited 50 newly arrived asylum seekers, mostly from Venezuela, in San Antonio, Texas, and flew them via two chartered planes to the Crestview, Florida airport, where they did not debark, then proceeded to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.
DeSantis supported programs dedicated to environmental conservation and protection from flooding in Florida. DeSantis refused to accept $346 million from the Inflation Reduction Act for rebates to homeowners who want to retrofit their houses, make it more energy efficient, $3 million to fight pollution, and a program to help low-income people buy solar panels, as well as $24 million from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for improving sewage systems in rural areas. The rebates were requested by Florida energy office and the legislature, but DeSantis vetoed them. All other governors, including Republicans, accepted the money. The money could go to local cities and authorities, and three Florida cities received some funds. Rhode Island and Kentucky requested to take Florida's money for themselves. The program should help people lower their energy bills and weatherize their houses while creating jobs. During the 2025 legislative session, DeSantis and his former chief of staff, James Uthmeier, were involved in a controversy over the transfer of $10,000,000 from a Medicaid settlement to a political committee Uthmeier controlled.
Honorary Doctorate from Liberty University
In April, DeSantis received an honorary doctorate in humanities from Liberty University. During his address to graduating seniors on April 14 at Liberty University’s convocation, DeSantis shared the importance of fighting for truth in the midst of a “woke” culture, stating, "I am honored to be here, and I look forward to the battles ahead. I will fight the good fight. I will finish the race. I will keep the faith." Following his address, Provost and Chief Academic Officer Scott Hicks declared DeSantis an “honorary graduate” of the university.
Criticism of Ivy League Education
Despite his degrees from Yale and Harvard, DeSantis has been critical of his Ivy League education, particularly in his book, "The Courage to be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival." He wrote that having Yale and Harvard on his resumé has since served as a “Scarlet Letter” in his political career, since grassroots conservatives were “understandably skeptical” of those institutions. In his book he recalls “withstand[ing] seven years of indoctrination in the Ivy League,”
Presidential Aspirations
In 2020-23, media outlets saw DeSantis as a likely candidate for the 2024 presidential election, and notable people urged him to run. In April 2023 Trump led DeSantis in national polls for the Republican nomination, but DeSantis was performing better in battleground polling of the general election. In a straw poll at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference DeSantis came in second with 28%, to Trump's 59%. On May 24, 2023, DeSantis announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president of the United States, and he continued to serve as governor during the campaign.
DeSantis's policy paper, “Declaration of Economic Independence,” claims that the country has spent hundreds of billions propping up a broken university system that charges too much tuition and yields substandard results. In a video posted on X announcing his candidacy, he stated, “We chose facts over fear, education over indoctrination, law and order over rioting and disorder. We held the line when freedom hung in the balance.” Indeed, higher education reform will apparently play a big part in his presidential campaign.
tags: #ron #desantis #education #background
