A University of Florida spokeswoman wrote in an email that UF’s faculty turnover rate is still below the 10.57 percent national average. (The source she cited, CUPA-HR, said on its website that in 2022–23, overall turnover for full-time faculty was 7 percent for those on the tenure track and 11 percent for non–tenure track.) And in posts on X criticizing the New York Times story, UF president Ben Sasse—a former Republican U.S. senator—wrote, “Over the last seven years, with the exception of one year during COVID, UF has annually hired far more faculty than have left.”
A Florida State University spokeswoman wrote in an email that “we’ve seen a slight, but not dramatic, rise in faculty departures, and perhaps not greater than expected in these post-pandemic times. However, the university’s number of new hires is well above the number of replacements for those who have departed.” She added that FSU has found “that faculty leave for multiple and complex reasons rather than a single issue. We do not have a breakdown of their reasons.”
A UNC system spokesman wrote in an email that faculty turnover in that system—counting “voluntary separation” but not retirements and other kinds of departures—was 3.9 percent in both fiscal years 2022 and 2023. He said the system doesn’t have data on why faculty members left or where they went.
Experts say it’s simply too soon to know how relatively recent state politics—such as Ron DeSantis’s reign as Florida’s governor and laws passed in 2023—are influencing faculty members’ decisions to leave or stay, or whether professors are leaving for universities in bluer states or quitting academe entirely.
“Faculty members are not tagged like migrating geese,” said Brendan Cantwell, a Michigan State University professor of higher, adult and lifelong education.