A University of Florida law student who posted that Jews must be “abolished by any means necessary” won an award for a paper in which he argued that the Constitution applies solely to white people.
The honor for an avowed white supremacist and antisemite has roiled the campus at the public university, in a state where a 2023 law prevents state funding for university programs that advocate for “diversity, equity and inclusion or promote or engage in political or social activism.”
Preston Damsky, 29, received the “book award” for a paper he wrote for a class last fall. In the paper, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for non-white citizens and orders to kill “criminal infiltrators at the border,” according to the New York Times.
The award for the paper was given to Damsky by Federal Judge John L. Badalamenti, a Trump administration appointee who taught Damsky’s class.
The law school’s interim dean, Merritt McAlister, initially defended Damsky’s accolade, invoking “institutional neutrality,”arguing n in an email to the law school community that professors must not engage in “viewpoint discrimination” and i according to the Times.
McAlister’s argument underscores a growing tension within academia as the Trump administration escalates its campaign against DEI with policies that have seen Holocaust remembrance pages stripped from government websites but allowed far-right sentiments to go unchecked.
After receiving the class award, Damsky, who told the Times that referring to him as a Nazi “would not be manifestly wrong,” doubled down on his incendiary messages. He opened an account on X in which he repeatedly posted antisemitic and white supremacist sentiments.
Carliss Chatman, a visiting law professor at the school during the spring semester, told the Times that she was struck by the response to Damsky’s essay in contrast to her experience at the school.
A class Chatman had proposed titled “Race, Entrepreneurship and Inequality” was renamed by the school’s administration to just “Entrepreneurship” before being added to the catalogue.
“I just find it fascinating that this student can write an article, a series of articles that are essentially manifestoes, and that’s free speech,” Chatman said. “But my class can’t be called ‘Race, Entrepreneurship and Inequality.’”
