During a 2020 meeting with then-President Donald Trump’s White House staff, Christopher Rufo, a conservative commentator known for his pugilistic social media presence, called for a ban on critical race theory in government.

The message landed.

Two days later, the White House instructed all federal agencies to begin to identify contracts or other spending related to any training on “’critical race theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or ... that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”

Four years later, with Trump returning to the Oval Office, Rufo will return to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the president-elect’s team, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday — this time, to discuss his mission to reform America’s higher education system. Their talks could reverberate across the nation’s colleges and universities.

Florida may offer the clearest example of Rufo’s vision.

“President Trump has the opportunity to do what we’ve done in Florida on a national scale,” Rufo said in a Fox News interview Tuesday.

Rufo has appeared next to Gov. Ron DeSantis at key moments in the governor’s foray into campus culture wars and helped catapult New College of Florida, where he sits on the board of trustees, into national headlines. He consulted on the state’s Stop WOKE Act and helped instigate the governor’s war with Disney, after leaking internal company training slides on systemic racism.

While he’s eager to take credit for Florida’s war on woke, his actual behind-the-scenes influence is more difficult to pin down.

Christopher Rufo’s spokesperson did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls requesting comment, nor did Trump’s campaign and personal staff. A New College spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

Rufo has never shied away from publicly stating his goals and tactics, and Tallahassee has often — by cause or coincidence — followed his drumbeat.

Taking a page from 1960s student activists’ “long march through the institutions,” Rufo has targeted America’s higher education system as a central focus in his quest to banish diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives from American institutions.

“It’s time to really put the hammer to these institutions and to start withdrawing potentially billions of dollars in funding until they follow the law,” Rufo told the Wall Street Journal.

Trump appears to be on board. His campaign platform included cutting” federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”

Rufo offered conditional support for Trump’s calls to close the Department of Education on his podcast.

There’s likely no better example of Rufo’s vision for academic reform than New College, where he was appointed to the board of trustees by DeSantis in early 2023.

Over the past two years the board has eliminated its office of diversity, equity and inclusion, abolished gender studies, and introduced what critics call a restrictive core curriculum centered around western values.

After losing a third of the school’s teaching staff, administrators brought on more ideologically aligned replacements, in some cases circumventing traditional academic hiring practices to do so.

New College administrators have wrangled control of the school’s endowment and singled out dissenting students for punishment.

They’ve also overseen a rapid increase in enrollment — bolstered by a new sports program and generous scholarships — and initiated a construction spree to revamp the aging campus.

Behind his public persona, Rufo’s personal involvement in crafting policy is unclear.

Rufo, who lives outside Seattle, usually video calls into New College trustee meetings and often stays out of weedy academic or budgetary discussions. He missed five out of six academic committee meetings in the past two years, and appears to have occasionally tweeted during board meetings.

Amy Reid, a former New College professor and trustee, said Rufo was largely “just phoning it in” during regular meetings. “His comments tended more to ad hominem attacks or sound bites than anything substantive.”

Rufo’s most concrete public action on the board in the past two years was to introduce a motion eliminating the school’s gender studies department, which Reid led.

“He is not against the reading of Marx, Nietzsche, and other figures of the left. He’s against indoctrination of any kind,” said trustee Mark Bauerlein, a former Emory professor who was appointed to the board by DeSantis.

Bauerlein couldn’t point to any particular initiative Rufo had spearheaded, noting that trustees are not allowed to plan and confer outside public meetings. But he said Rufo was not one to back down from challenging talks.

“Chris Rufo will talk to anybody, listen and debate,” Bauerlein said.

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