The University of Florida broke ground Wednesday for the future home of the Republican-created Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, announcing a $5.5 million gift from billionaire Ken Griffin, a top donor to conservative causes, that will fund new scholarships and graduate fellowships.
Gov. Ron DeSantis called the new school, which has been operating for years from other buildings on campus, “the premier place for the study of Western civilization and the foundations of the United States of America.” The governor criticized what he said were failures by academics to focus education on Western values.
“We saw what I think a lot of people have now seen over the years, some of the missteps of modern academia, turning your back on the core pillars of Western civilization, the foundational principles that made the United States what it's been,” DeSantis said. “And it's almost as if the core classical learning and studying citizenship and studying the foundations in many places just become a lost art.”
The chairman of the UF Board of Trustees, Mori Hosseini, said the donation marks a milestone for the school, and said Griffin’s team vetted the program before committing the money.
“This gift was not one of those ‘just write a check and give it to us,’” he said. “They put us through the test. They asked us to show them: ‘Why should they give us a gift? They looked at it, they studied it, and they decided we were worth it.”
The Hamilton School’s future home is UF’s former infirmary, a brick building now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It closed in 2023 after UF opened a new student health facility near the football practice fields. Hosseini said the university will preserve the historic structure while transforming the inside into a new space for the Hamilton School.
UF’s new interim president, Donald Landry, called the school and its focus a “remedy for what ails the academic enterprise of this nation.”
Also attending the ground breaking was the school’s newly hired director, Florida Supreme Court Justice Charles Canady, and his wife, Rep. Jennifer Canady, R-Lakeland, who is in line to become state House speaker in 2028.
James Hankins, a visiting professor at the Hamilton School who spent four decades teaching at Harvard University, described the program as part of a broader movement in classical and civic education. He compared his experience at Harvard to what he sees in Gainesville.
“In the 40 years I've spent on the faculty of Harvard University, I've had a front row seat to watch the tragedy of American Educational decline,” Hankins said. “We have gradually been abandoning our commitment to teach the Western tradition, ancient Greece and Rome, the Christian Middle Ages, the Renaissance and modern European history.”
Hankins said he now directs students interested in those subjects to UF.
“I recently had a few high school students visit me in my office at Harvard who asked me where they should go to study American and Western history,” he said. “I told them, If you want a brand name with a price to match, go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Stanford. If you want an education, go to the University of Florida.”
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