compelling beliefs? (indoctrinating students, pt. 2)
Real America pit stop #5, a true story about how students were forced to freely learn what they chose to know (and the great Florida higher education gaslight)
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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 is the last in 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 high school curriculum through a new college placement test; legislative overreach into the colleges through mandated revisions to the required course descriptions; and a look at the indoctrination/gag order complex. This one also fits into my Real America Pit Stop series with a second look at what happens in a college classroom.
Florida faculty are being told to sign off on state-mandated changes to their curriculum documents and pretend to approve of patriotism centers installed on campus; the state is working to decertifying unions wherever it can; legislation is already in place to weaken tenure and shared governance. All of this has happened fairly quickly in part because the public doesn’t know enough about higher education to defend it against the far right’s false narratives.
Those of us who work in the college classroom need to push back with true stories about what really happens there. As I wrote in the first half of this story about the fake news accusation of liberal indoctrination at colleges, academics need to make a public case not only for the value of what they are teaching, but also for the fact that exposing students to some unsavory chapters in the nation’s history and exploring some marginalized perspectives do not equate to indoctrinating students.
“to mean and accomplish the very opposite”
A disturbing thing happened at my college about 18 months ago that ties into the issue of state incursion on academic freedom and the related issue of faculty willingness to discuss their work.
On January 18, 2023, the Florida Department of Education posted a story with this dramatic headline: “FLORIDA COLLEGE SYSTEM PRESIDENTS REJECT ‘WOKE’ DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION (DEI), CRITICAL RACE THEORY IDEOLOGIES AND EMBRACE ACADEMIC FREEDOM.” For beleaguered libertarians who just want to be left alone, their long national nightmare was over—academic freedom had been embraced by creating a nebulous list of things no one would ever have to hear about again.
Earlier that day, a statement was signed by all 28 Florida College System presidents. In the statement, which was apparently altered to align even more closely with DeSantis’s requirements not long before it was delivered, the college presidents effectively pledged fealty to the governor’s sworn removal of DEI initiatives and concepts such as critical race theory and intersectionality. The FLDOE’s celebratory description of the event describes a unified statement from the colleges “that rejects the progressivist higher education indoctrination agenda, and commits to removing all woke positions and ideologies.” As it happened, the president of my own college was the one to read it aloud during the Board of Education meeting.
The FCS Presidents’ statement said that, while DEI initiatives originally did “increase diversity of thought as well as the enrollment and the success of underrepresented populations,” recently they “have come to mean and accomplish the very opposite and seek to push ideologies such as critical race theory and its related tenets.” The following part of the statement appears in essentially the same language in SB266 as a way to seize control of numerous components of the college system:
our institutions will not fund or support any institutional practice, policy, or academic requirement that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality, or the idea that systems of oppression should be the primary lens through which teaching and learning are analyzed and/or improved upon
Claiming that DEI programs are the real source of prejudice and inequality in our education system, the statement includes a pledge to ferret out such “discrimination” and threats of “reprisal” and being “canceled” by the first of the month.
The Florida DOE’s commentary about the importance of the statement is also problematic:
This statement makes clear that Florida’s 28 state colleges stand squarely in the camp of educational freedom and democratic citizenship. (FDOE Press Office)
I understand that the word “camp” is part of a common figure of speech. But it’s also in keeping with the militarized theme of this whole right wing takeover of the education system that has already been described in terms of a “siege on the institutions” and getting “over the walls.” I also dislike how the DOE discusses the “colleges” as monolithic entities—but subsuming all the faculty who constitute the state college system under this extremely controversial pledge is consistent with the manufactured consent campaign that runs throughout these far right attacks. Finally, the emphasis on “democratic patriotism” is concerning as the state requires greater and greater adherence to a limited view of American history that whitewashes the past, especially slavery and the cause of the war that ended it. So think re-education camp, not summer camp.
Sounding an alarm about what was to come from DeSantis, especially as we saw our chief administrator stepping forward to cooperate, I wrote to my department colleagues on our shared discussion forum that night. Here’s the portion of my comment responding to the myth of indoctrination:
We can also take exception to the assumption or specter, in the college presidents' statement read aloud by John Avendano, that teaching about critical race theory and intersectionality "compels belief" in those ideas. As professors, we already know we can't make anyone believe something. But qualified faculty are free to choose what their students should demonstrate they can understand. Our learning outcomes never say "students will believe" this or that. But when facts are presented with clarity and evidence, then people know about them.
Two days later, the AAUP’s fiery response held the FSC presidents culpable for cooperating with DeSantis’s “blatant violation of academic freedom” and for potential harms to the common good by violating several of higher education’s central operational tenets:
In a democracy, higher education is a common good which requires that instructors have full freedom in their teaching to select materials and determine the approach to the subject. Instead, the FCS presidents, while giving lip service to academic freedom, have announced their intention to censor teaching and learning by expunging ideas they want to suppress. By dictating course content, they are also usurping the primary responsibility for the curriculum traditionally accorded the faculty under principles of shared governance.
The First Amendment protects not only faculty freedom to discuss what they think is important, but also students’ access to educational materials and experiences. Eighteen months later, we are all—teachers, but more importantly students—still under threat of losing access to essential content; administrators continue to publicly cooperate with DeSantis’s hostile and in some cases unconstitutional anti-education measures; and liars continue spreading the myth of a coordinated liberal faculty indoctrination program.
In a routine Q&A session several weeks after the FCS presidents’ joint statement, my college president told a story about how he had been picked to read it at the last minute and decided he might as well go ahead since someone else would do it anyway. After excusing his own public role in this, he began to dismiss the problem itself. He looked around a room full of staff (and the regrettably small number of faculty who bothered to attend) and reassured us that no one is really teaching critical race theory anyway, so the whole effort to ban it in colleges won’t really change what we do. I’ve heard other people say this kind of thing in response to the manufactured CRT crisis. Nevertheless, I felt it was a poor response that diminished the importance of academic freedom. Some people do use CRT or closely allied concepts as an interpretive framework in their classes, and others might want to in the future.
This way of addressing threats to academic freedom expects faculty to pretend there’s nothing much at stake instead of mobilizing to defend their profession. Additionally, there was assurance that the governor was targeting the higher profile universities in the system and this stuff wouldn’t reach into our state college—that was proven incorrect within months. I am describing off-the-cuff remarks made when I questioned him a few weeks later, but there was never a satisfactory follow-up discussion with faculty about this, and I am deeply concerned about the level of support we can expect in the future.
c’ase study, c’est moi
While administrators need to publicly protect academic freedom as much as they can, I think faculty also need to change their approach as we weather this crisis. There is too often a tendency for faculty to say that their teaching is protected speech and therefore does not need to be explained to the public. I don’t think that attitude is going to work right now. It doesn’t respect the vast majority of the public who may not know what happens in the tax-funded classrooms of a particular discipline, and leaving the question unanswered allows con men like Christopher Rufo to whip up the lynch mob of ill-informed “moms” and “patriots.”
I am aware that some of the material I have my students reading is right in these crosshairs. So, rather than hit the lights and have students dive under their desks when joyful warriors goose-step down the halls of academia looking to blow up good things, here I want to present some anecdotal evidence of how it works in at least one writing class. As I shared in the previous post, my experience includes teaching at least 250 courses over the last 20 years at an open-access college. I have found that most students appreciate learning about both historical and current causes of the social conditions they observe, especially the blatant inequities and issues that directly impact their lives.
I’ll quickly describe an assignment from my second semester of college writing and research skills, where students are choosing to research and make presentations about DeSantis’ legislative efforts to undermine and control public education as well as about the controversial subjects that are targeted by the same legislation.
To be sure that students don’t feel forced to parrot my “woke” perspective for a good grade (one of the indoctrination red flags), I ask them to choose research topics from a list much longer than the number of students in a class. Only about a quarter of the topics focus on the new state legislation discussed in the reports named above, so no student ever need select one of those. Here are the legislation and policy related topics offered in the two classes with this assignment last semester. In both classes, four of seven topics were selected, a significant indicator of student interest in this material. Similar percentages have been selected over the last two years.
banning Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Florida public schools and colleges
removal of books from K-12 classrooms
HB7 in Florida: "Individual Freedom Act" (also called the "Stop W.O.K.E. Act") -- origins; federal court injunction; passage and recent restriction of this law
DEI/DEIB in schools--what it means, why it’s being threatened with removal, what has happened in Florida schools
teaching African-American History: AP class controversy; K-12 Florida History Standards controversy
"classical education" curriculum and required "Western Civilization" courses in colleges & high schools; local classical education charter schools (how does this relate to issues of diversity and various cultural groups living in the U.S.?)
controversy over Florida SB 266—including removal of sociology from the general education core of Florida state schools
From an additional long list, others have selected topics such as anti-Asian sentiment and crime since the Coronavirus pandemic; myths and facts about immigrants and crime or the economy; the “Great Replacement” theory; the special status of Puerto Rico in the United States; controversies over bilingual education in American public schools; the rise of white supremacist groups and activity; anti-semitic and anti-Islamic attitudes; histories of the Filipino, Hispanic, Albanian, or Muslim community in Jacksonville; and examples of systemic racism like unequal access to healthcare and urban environmental pollution. Any topic a student is uncomfortable researching can be avoided because of the number of choices available, and students are also invited to email me with a proposed topic. If no one selects a topic, it does not become part of the class discussion because this a process in which students manage the research process themselves, show the class their own selection of four sources on the topic, and explain what they think it all means.
Another important aspect of the assignment is that I do not restrict or pre-select the sources that come into the classroom. If someone selects the K-12 book ban topic, for all I know that student or their parents are members of the local Moms For Liberty chapter and will make a case for why it’s a necessary public safety measure. But I trust their peers to think about what they are hearing. Part of the assignment—a responsible information literacy assignment designed for the classroom—requires that the origins and purpose of each source are explained in writing. I want the student to tell us who wrote each article and why.
Some students verbalize the connection between these options and their personal identities when they present topics such as the removal of books featuring LGBTQ family members from middle school classrooms, the whitewashing of African American history and enslavement, or the struggles encountered by Jamaicans who emigrated to England after it was opened up to citizens from colonized nations. The point is, these topics that so many right wing privilege-keepers complain could make some students feel uncomfortable also really matter to other students who have already been so successfully marginalized that such legislation and district policies could be allowed to pass.
Allowing my students to learn about important and often personal topics is not some kind of liberal indoctrination, but I do relish empowering young people to teach their classmates about attempts to silence or minimize the present or past reality of their own community. When students are a voice, physically, audibly present in front of their peers, they become, as they should be, a force to be reckoned with.
In an earlier story I discussed the new Classic Learning Test that aims to re-center high school curricula and placement testing on the “classics” of Christian and Western culture (and nothing past 1960). My previous story revealed one way the AAUP’s warning about cooperating with DeSantis has come to fruition as we have now watched state-mandated language forcibly replace what qualified faculty had created. If this long chapter of the disinformation narrative is persuasive enough, the current generation of young adults and voters will have neither the knowledge nor the understanding that would motivate them to protect the important progress made in this country since the 1960s.
J’accuse.
"He looked around a room full of staff (and the regrettably small number of faculty who bothered to attend) and reassured us that no one is really teaching critical race theory anyway, so the whole effort to ban it in colleges won’t really change what we do. "
I see multiple problems with this. Just the first couple....
1. As you noted, some professors do teach the concepts as part of their disciplines.
2. Cowardly administrators allow outsiders with agendas to define what does and does not count as "CRT." I may not have my students read am article on CRT, but if I assign an eye-witness account of Tulsa in 1921, then BOOM, some RW bigot will scream CRT! and that lesson is gone. Stuffed down the memory hole.
Administrators are using a narrow definition of an idea to reassure faculty that they won't be attacked by those using a wide definition of the same idea. It doesn't work.