The Florida Effect
Political moves impacting college curricula are a grave threat to academic freedom.
In May, the American Association of University Professors’ Special Committee on Academic Freedom in Florida released a preliminary report concluding that academic freedom, tenure and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in U.S. history. Committee Co-Chair Afshan Jafar, the May Buckley Sadowski ’19 Professor of Sociology at Conn, explains what’s at stake.
After the Board of Trustees of New College of Florida (NCF) moved to eliminate gender studies from its offerings in August, NCF Trustee Christopher Rufo tweeted: “Governor [Ron] DeSantis was right: Florida voters should not be forced to subsidize ‘zombie studies’ degrees that do not meet a basic scholarly standard or conform to the mission of liberal arts education. I'm proud to have worked to abolish gender studies at New College. No apologies!”
Back in January of 2023, NCF’s Board of Trustees had welcomed several new members appointed by Gov. DeSantis. Many of these new appointees, including Mr. Rufo, openly acknowledged their agenda to change New College from a small, progressive, liberal arts honors college that espoused a unique approach to education (there are no letter grades at NCF and students work closely with professors on theses in their senior year) to a college with conservative values much like Hillsdale College, a private, conservative Christian college in Hillsdale, Michigan. The new appointees to the Board wasted no time.
When their first meeting rolled around on Jan. 26, 2023, the Board moved to fire the president of the college, Pat Okker, who was 18 months into her position. Subsequently, they also moved to eliminate the division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, fired the dean overseeing those programs, and started targeting other staff for layoffs. The initial round of terminations often centered on those who were known to be liberal or members of the LGBTQIA community. Now academic programs are on the chopping block and the trustees are starting with those that they find most “threatening” to conservative values.
In the meantime, more than 40% of faculty members have left NCF and more than 30 students have transferred to Hampshire College in Massachusetts (a college with values and culture similar to NCF’s pre-takeover).
Should the fate of this small public liberal arts institution in Florida concern us? Very much so.
I am co-chairing a special investigative committee put together by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a nonprofit association of academics from more than 500 U.S. campuses. Founded in 1915, the AAUP has helped develop the standards and procedures regarding academic freedom in American higher education. The task of this special committee is to look into the pattern of politically, racially and ideologically motivated attacks on public higher education in Florida. Our efforts thus far have led us to conclude that “academic freedom, tenure and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in U.S. history. Initiated and led by Governor [and Republican presidential candidate] Ron DeSantis and the Republican majority in Florida’s state legislature, this onslaught, if sustained, threatens the very survival of meaningful higher education in the state,” with catastrophic implications for the entire country.
Over the last couple of years, Florida (and, in its wake, several other states) has passed a plethora of legislation that monumentally impacts individual rights and freedoms. Those involving higher education and K-12 schools focus on severely limiting or outright banning DEI programs; limiting the teaching of race in K-12 and public higher education systems; preventing teachers and professors from challenging or restricting racist or hate speech in the name of “viewpoint diversity”; allowing students to secretly record their professors and turn in evidence of their “indoctrination”; preventing teachers and professors from teaching about structural forms of racism and employers from requiring diversity training (colloquially known as the Stop WOKE–Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees–Act); and prohibiting gender inclusive bathrooms and banning trans individuals from using bathrooms that match their gender identity, asserting that all schools must uphold the belief that “a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait” and “it is false” to use a pronoun other than what matches the sex on a person’s birth certificate.