a word from one of the woke professors indoctrinating Florida students (pt. 1)

Real America pit stop #4, wherein a libtard forces students to freely learn what they want to know and writes another installment on Florida higher education

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This story connects with the book I’m writing on far right revisions of the American narrative, where a few chapters look at the reinsertion of white supremacy in the schools under a “Western Civilization” mandate. This post continues a series on what’s happening to Florida higher education under Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke.” Previous stories include a look at the proposed new mission statement for New College of Florida; the effort to re-Westernize the American school curriculum through a new college placement test; and legislative overreach into the colleges through mandated revisions to the required course descriptions with the pretense of faculty support. This also fits into my Real America Pit Stop series, though in this case the pit stop is my own classroom.

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This week the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released a 148-page white paper on the far right’s war against colleges and faculty. In the report titled Manufacturing Backlash: Right-Wing Think Tanks and Legislative Attacks on Higher Education, 2021–2023, Isaac Kamola explains how a small but growing clutch of organizations has effectively disinformed the public narrative about education as part of a larger pushback against social justice initiatives. Among the numerous organizations to watch are The Claremont Institute, The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal; some of the bad actors I’ve been writing about are aligned with these “institutes,” “think tanks,” and “centers.” What we’re seeing today is only the current chapter in a much longer project to discredit public schools and colleges, methodically making way for white Christian nationalist ideology within the existing institutions and an expanding network of unregulated substitutions.

The far-right attack on American education has been working against the K-12 system for a long time. A book referenced in a previous story, Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains, provides a necessary education in how a coalition of libertarians and far right operatives have been thwarting school reforms since Brown v. Board. Currently, Christoper Rufo is among the most ubiquitous faces of the movement to sow distrust in public schools. The general aim is to siphon funds from neighborhood schools into charters and privates and replace the more balanced school curricula developed since the civil rights movement with the spurious old “Western Civilization” model.

Pair all of this with Trump’s “Agenda47” promise that he will be “closing up the Department of Education in Washington D.C. and sending . . . it all back to the States” if re-elected, and we could be contending with much more of the problem I’m calling “local liberty.” That phrase could have some immediate appeal to reasonable people—but only in the way the sleazy coinage “parental rights” appealed to people for a minute until they understood the agenda driving it. If policies become entirely local, students will be governed by the prejudices of Moms For Liberty school board members who attend trainings on pushing the far right agenda. But that’s what those who have taken the moniker of “patriot” do: demanding the unregulated liberty and the protected right to discriminate against minorities is a celebrated American tradition dating back to English colonists seeking out the religious freedom to persecute people as severely as they wanted. Make America Great Again, right?

Turning to the college system, one of the far right’s primary weapons for sowing distrust is the bogeyman of liberal “indoctrination.” Because the term is now so frequently and intentionally misapplied, for clarity I include the Brittanica definition here: “to teach (someone) to fully accept the ideas, opinions, and beliefs of a particular group and to not consider other ideas, opinions, and beliefs.” I emphasize the second half of this definition because it’s essential to help the public gain confidence identifying far-right gag orders, bans, and curriculum restrictions as steps in the indoctrination process. Faculty choices to cover legitimate academic material in college classes are not the same thing; and, as I show in the second part of this story, student choices to learn about the targeted ideas are even further from faculty-driven indoctrination.

Fearmongering about a runaway progressive agenda controlled by a cynical, morally bankrupt tenured faculty class is not new, but it has taken on greater significance as a strategy for grabbing power since the rise of Donald Trump and the seating of unsavory Republican governors like Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Bill Lee. If the public is convinced that faculty classrooms are Commie Clone factories, then the state looks like a hero when it begins to eliminate tenure and unions and take control over curriculum and hiring. Each of these projects is now underway in Florida.

Of course there is a confluence of liberal attitudes and colleges; conservatives are not imagining that. Survey data show, on average, more highly educated Americans are also more politically liberal, with even more significant differences at post-graduate levels. College administrators and faculty are somewhat more likely to be liberal in part because of the high education levels required for these positions. But if students leave college with a slightly more liberal set of ideas than they had upon entering, that is not the fault or the design of college faculty; when that happens, it is rather the result of education itself (which is exactly why the far right want to limit the curriculum), combined with a certain amount of selection bias in terms of who makes the choice to pursue college. In fact, multiple studies over the last ten years demonstrate that “liberal indoctrination” at colleges is hardly even a thing. And at the level projected by the far right? It’s a myth.

Judd Legum’s May 16th story, “The Myth of ‘Woke’ Indoctrination at America’s Public Universities,” quotes a perp-line of right wingers who buy into the myth of indoctrination entirely or do their best to spread what they know is a lie. Here are a few of his examples. Joe Rogan said on his podcast, "I think we’re sending our kids to cult camps. I think [students] get indoctrinated." Elon Musk said during a Bill Maher interview (culture warriors BOGO), "The amount of indoctrination that’s happening in schools and universities is, I think, far beyond what parents realize.” Conservative commentator and NYT darling David Brooks said, "ideological activism is replacing intellectual inquiry as the primary mission of universities." As Legum notes,

These claims are never backed by data. They are based on anecdotes or a general impression. But, despite a lack of factual evidence, the idea that universities have gone "woke" and are indoctrinating students with far-left ideologies has gained widespread acceptance. 

Legum cites a recent study of 5.5 million college course syllabi collected from 4,000 colleges. The study, conducted by the nonprofit OpenSyllabus, mined syllabi for “woke” concepts faculty are accused of forcing onto their students, such as critical race theory, transgender, and structural racism. Larger terms such as race and gender have consistently appeared in about 2.8% and 4.7% of syllabi, respectively, over the last 15 years. But these more specific so-called “indoctrination” vehicles the far right claim have taken over the curriculum with inaccurate theories were found in less than 1% of syllabi.

That data speaks for itself, but this is only one measure of content. Because materials and concepts enter a course through a variety of channels, the presence of a word in the syllabus provides a fairly limited understanding. So here I do think it’s fair and important to qualify the reach of the OpenSyllabus study, even at the risk of appearing to lend credence to the far right’s petty alarum. Ultimately, I think what I can share about how college classrooms work is going to balance the narrative.

Though there is a tendency to dismiss anecdotal evidence, here I want to add the nuance of one professor’s personal experience into this conversation about what’s being taught in the college classroom. I’ve been working for a long time at a state college where the job is to teach students. In twenty years, I’ve taught at least 250 writing and literature classes to a diverse array of people ranging in age from 15 to 65. That’s thousands of Florida students, each of whose names I have learned, each of whom I have encouraged to select and design their own research and essay topics. I know a lot more about Florida college students than Ron DeSantis and I’m sure almost anyone currently doing his bidding in the Florida legislature.

Often syllabi provide a general description of a course’s purpose and structure without including details of the reading material or specific topics to be covered that term. Some syllabi may not include the terms targeted by conservatives, but in fact the course may cover what are effectively the same concepts.

In my own classes that fall under the state’s general course title “writing about texts,” we examine social conditions through critical frameworks that include environmental justice, food justice, media representation, equity studies, and other approaches that might upset an audience primed to accept the far-right’s “liberal indoctrination” narrative and reject the historical or factual bases of the material. I don’t include the term critical race theory in the syllabus because I’m not intentionally teaching “CRT as CRT.” The title of an article I’ve assigned several times captures the concept well without the more technical term that may not always be a perfect fit for what we’re reading anyway: I help students identify “a continuing legacy” in which historical state-sponsored discrimination and restriction of minorities and immigrants created conditions that produce today’s observable inequities. So this is exactly what characters like DeSantis and Rufo are trying to censor, though the key terms are not used in the syllabus.

A second point is about indoctrination. At no time do students need to tell me they “believe in” the authors’ arguments or that they have forsworn other ideas. This is not Vacation Bible School. They need to show me that they understand the arguments; in fact, disagreeing with a reading assignment and analyzing the reasons for that could earn a high grade. It’s a class.

In well-meaning liberal media pushback against the far right’s manufactured “CRT crisis,” I’ve heard a lot of speakers say that no one is teaching CRT anyway. I agree it’s not widespread, but there is surely more classroom engagement with CRT, and things like it, than a syllabus crawler turns up. And we should not be afraid to admit that. In fact, we need to show the public the relevance of the materials we teach and defend the hell out of them. Instead of standing sometimes too smugly behind the First Amendment, academics need to be making a public case for the value of what they are teaching and for the fact that engagement with potentially controversial analysis does not mean students are being indoctrinated. If we deny that we are engaging with these particular ways of understanding American society, we lend some weight to the idea that it’s illegitimate or dangerous.

I imagine the distinction between presenting material and indoctrination is common sense to most readers. However, we need to remember that, just as I see here in the Eleventh Edition of the right wing handbook, merely acknowledging “woke” concepts has been reclassified as a type of indoctrination. (But searching the same handbook for a clear definition of “woke” just takes me in circles, alas.) Because it is their m.o. and their privilege to callously dismiss the lived experience of others, those on the far right reject the premise that intersectionality is a real phenomenon, or that affirmative action is a potentially ethical response to systems and institutions structured in ways that disadvantage minorities. Labeling these widely-accepted ways of analyzing society as indoctrination is tantamount to censorship, and hopefully the courts will defend the First Amendment rights of faculty and students. DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill introduced in March 2022 more directly prohibited a list of concepts under the “parental rights” flag and was significantly reduced in its reach by the courts earlier this year, but the law is still in place, and SB 266 has added a lot of content restrictions and requirements at the college level.

Beyond syllabus data and classroom narratives, other types of evidence that indoctrination is not a real problem have been gathered. More than a year before Legum’s recent article, Glenn Altschuler and David Wippman published an article inThe Hill entitled, “The Myth of ‘Woke’ Indoctrination of Students.” Unsurprisingly, several studies included there also reach conclusions that do not support the narrative of significant or coercive liberal indoctrination. A Washington Post study from 2020 surveying students at 100 campuses over a four-year period found little change in self-reported political leanings during college, with some movement happening in both directions and varying across majors.

Unfortunately, once the myth finds its target audience, the facts don’t get much more of their attention. While the threat that faculty could brainwash, coerce, or even calmly convince students of their own political views makes this coalition quite nervous, having people believe that it’s happening suits their purpose. Such allegations hold the door open to the discriminatory attitudes and regressive policies they aim to bring back—ending affirmative action, rolling back protections for the LGBTQ community, dismantling labor unions, and even destroying the schools where they claim this is happening.

It’s all planned to distract the public from who’s really trying to use the colleges—and the combination of government funds and private tuition dollars that support them—to seize control of the national narrative. As Alschuler and Wittman rightly observe, “The ‘patriotic education’ mandates pushed by anti-woke partisans, by contrast, are—practically by definition—indoctrination.” Their article links to a 2022 PEN America report that still bears reading, though the gag orders and compulsory patriotism lessons designed to replace so-called woke content have virtually metastasized in the intervening time.

PEN’s report ends with a warning about some of the nation’s most ignoble chapters:

The history of compulsory patriotism in the United States is not an attractive one. Most Americans look back on the Sedition Act, the Red Scare, the Smith Act, and McCarthyism as stains on the American character, not as something to emulate today. Unfortunately, in a misguided attempt to regulate what teachers can and cannot say about this country, state legislators now appear intent on repeating their predecessors’ mistakes. In doing so, supporters of these bills are in fact proposing a vision of patriotism that is not only unquestioning, but fragile. Each month, as more educational gag orders become law, we come closer to replicating the anti-democratic mistakes of our past.

Now many gag orders that were in the pipeline have become law. The previous story looked at my own experience with the replacement of faculty-produced college course descriptions with state-mandated descriptions. In a move that seems to mirror the legal requirement that an American-made American flag hang in every K-20 classroom in the state, the Florida DOE found places to add unnecessary patriotic language into the general education course outlines. This is only one part of a larger plan to rapidly replace the more globalized curriculum that has been developed by colleges for decades with the type of insularity, jingoism, xenophobia, and racism seen in early 20th-century high school textbooks. In the wild white west collectively envisioned by these re-education reformers, we shouldn’t expect minorities, women, immigrants, or any underserved populations to fare well.

I’ll stop here and post the second half of this story in a couple of days — there I take a more detailed look at how some of my class assignments help me center the discussion on what students are interested in learning within this politically charged landscape, along with a flashback to the alarming moment in January 2023 when the Florida state college presidents collectively voiced their intention to assist or at least comply with DeSantis’s fraudulent academic censorship agenda.

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