Commissioner Nikki Fried: Fire UF Board of Trustees Chairman Over New Allegations of Political Interference

Tallahassee, Fla. — Today, Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, an independently elected member of the Florida Cabinet, issued the following statement on the news that faculty at the University of Florida (UF) were pressured to destroy COVID-19 data and were prohibited from criticizing the Governor of Florida or UF’s pandemic policies:

“As a three-time graduate and former student body president at the University of Florida, I’ve been deeply disappointed in the consistent pattern of inappropriate and unethical political interference that’s occurring at the highest levels of UF. Today’s news that UF faculty were pressured to destroy COVID-19 data and were prohibited from criticizing Governor DeSantis or the state’s pandemic policies is completely beyond the pale.

“It’s clear that the Chairman of the UF Board of Trustees, Mori Hosseini, needs to be removed from his position. Under his leadership, UF has fallen from a world-class learning institution to a school that censors its faculty — and the truth — to further the radical political agenda of the Governor and his appointees on the UF Board of Trustees. UF’s motto is ‘The welfare of the state depends upon the morals of its citizens’ — it’s time that University officials start acting like it.”

Commissioner Fried led an open letter to UF leadership on academic freedom after reports emerged that the school was preventing faculty members from testifying in a voting rights lawsuit against the state. UF has also recently been criticized for fast-tracking the hiring of Dr. Joseph Ladapo as he was controversially appointed to be Florida’s surgeon general by Governor DeSantis for his anti-science and anti-vaccine views.

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