Students from at least nine universities across Florida walked out of class on Thursday in protest of Ron DeSantis’s relentless barrage of attacks on the state’s higher education system.

The walkouts, organized by the Dream Defenders and Stand for Freedom, come in response to DeSantis’s crackdown on all things “Woke” in state education, including banning AP African American Studies, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, any curriculum dealing with Critical Race Theory and so-called “divisive concepts” such as intersectionality.

More than 200 students attended the walk out rally at the University of South Florida Tampa campus. including 21 year old Jonathan Chavez, president of the USF College Democrats.

“We, as free-willed adult citizens, refuse to be indoctrinated by the will of the governor,” Chavez told the walk out crowd. “The overwhelming majority of Florida students support our schools the way they are, not the way the governor wants to make them.”

Several speakers at the walk out expressed outrage over DeSantis’s reshaping of New College of Florida, a small progressive public liberal arts school in Sarasota, into a model “anti-woke” conservative institution. Last month, he removed seven of the school’s thirteen trustees and replaced them with right wing ideologies including moral panic propagandist Christopher Rufo. The new Board promptly fired the New College president replacing her with former education commissioner and career politician Richard Corcoran. The Board later approved a $400,000 pay raise for Corcoran.

“DeSantis has displayed a pattern of behavior in which he hijacks school systems, marginalizes and dehumanizes the LGBTQ community, and portrays an abject disregard of the rights of students,” the Stand for Freedom movement pledge states. “This is our education that is being tarnished and our schools being discredited.” “This is our fight for freedom.”