to "promote and preserve the constitutional republic"

installment #3 on the ways Florida Higher Education is not safe

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This story connects with the book I’m trying to write on far right revisions of the American narrative, where a few chapters look more deeply at the reinsertion of white supremacy in the schools under the banner of a spurious “Western Civilization” curriculum. Two previous stories in the short series I’m sharing here on Substack include a look at the proposed new mission statement for New College of Florida and the effort to re-Westernize the American high school curriculum through a new college placement test.

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Two months ago, The Washington Post published an article showing some ways Florida governor DeSantis’s initiatives are losing support, even among Republicans. Some of the most openly hateful and divisive proposals that won’t make it into law targeted the LGBTQ+ community and attempted to legally ban the removal of Confederate monuments. The dampening and rejection of these hostile initiatives is good, but it’s important not to think things are okay over here. DeSantis’s attack on higher education continues nearly unfettered and includes a detailed collection of bills, policies, funding restrictions, and political appointments that collectively represent the greatest government incursion on academic freedom since the McCarthy era.

Deliver Us from Evil: SB 266

This post calls attention to a little-remarked part of what’s currently being imposed on public colleges across the state of Florida with the passage of SB 266, a bill that overreaches and undermines higher education in all sorts of ways while making the claim that it will help Florida colleges “promote and preserve the constitutional republic." SB 266 contains some alarming new restrictions on the faculty hiring and tenure processes transparently designed to consolidate power in the board of trustees appointed to each college by the governor, but here I am looking at the recent state-mandated revision of some important institutional documents commonly called “master course outlines.” There are a lot more details that could be provided here, but I’ll try to keep this reasonably short.

I know some of my readers are also public college employees and will be familiar with these documents, but I’ll briefly describe their function here for everyone. While professors—subject-matter and teaching experts who are vetted by their peers before being hired by the college—generally create their own syllabi, select their own reading material, and create their own assignments, each class is also supposed to be designed with respect to a master outline. This publicly-available document includes a brief description of the course, the topics covered, the planned learning outcomes (teaching and learning goals that can be content-based or skills-based), and some suggested books. Faculty committees write and revise these forms over time with required reviews every few years.

At Florida State College at Jacksonville, where I have been an English professor for 20 years, we recently completed a robust revision of all Gen Ed courses to consider whether the current outlines could be improved with more careful attention to the principles of diversity, inclusion, and equity in teaching and learning. The special-focus course review in 2022 was encouraged at all colleges accredited by SACS, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. I thought my department had done a pretty good job, adding suggestions to expand the voices and perspectives represented in our literature classes while encouraging faculty teaching composition to consider the accessibility, approachability, and relevance of their courses for our own extremely diverse state college student body.

But a few months after SB266 was passed at the end of 2023, Florida colleges received notice that the existing course descriptions must be replaced with boilerplate provided by the state. The state’s changes go into effect for all courses considered part of the General Education “core” by Fall 2024, with the rest of Gen Ed to follow in Fall 2025.

The replacement course descriptions were designed to support one of the most alarming legislative incursions into higher education anyone has seen. Some courses that could be developed in a wide variety of ways are now mandated to include materials from the “Western canon” and to train up proper citizens of the Republic with documents such as the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Again, these requirements have been added to courses that do not need to be so narrowly defined.

Various other elements of SB 266 lend support to the forced changes in course outlines. Section 1004.06 on “prohibited expenditures” states that Florida colleges, universities, and state-supported organizations “may not expend any state or federal funds to promote, support, or maintain any programs or campus activities” that "[a]dvocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or promote or engage in political or social activism” — definitions of all these terms, of course, rest with the state.

For my own part, I refused to sign the usurped course outlines under my purview. (As current chair of the faculty council, I was informally expected to be the signer.) In the month we were given to address this—a very short period to complete meaningful faculty committee work—I did everything I could to bring awareness of the problem to my colleagues, many of whom had not been following this stuff as closely as they should have, if at all. I also lobbied administration to spare faculty from putting their good names on these problematic forms. Eventually, after the deadline was extended, the college’s curriculum office agreed to submit the revised outlines without faculty signatures and clarify that changes to the content were state-mandated.

So we did not keep the state’s language out of our course outlines, but we also did not cooperate in the creation of a fictional history in which department faculty had written or approved of the new course descriptions. I am disappointed that other departments signed the forms and treated this like another routine administrative task, and I was also disappointed that the administrator who agreed to satisfy my department’s demands did not immediately extend the same offer to other departments that submitted their forms right away but that may have been glad to remove their names once the real issues were illuminated.

Aside from the problematic content of some of these new course descriptions, this was a state effort to create the illusion of consensus. The signatures can look like proof that even the subject-matter and teaching experts wanted these changes.

This appears to be a systematic plan. While the state was gathering faculty signatures on the outlines, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story about the University of Florida, where the highly problematic new Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education has been installed by the right wing FLDOE. Apparently the English Department chair was given the contents of a letter to recopy on department letterhead, sign, and submit to the college administration. The gist of the letter—which he did not submit or sign—was an assurance that the academic department was glad to have the new Hamilton Center on campus. He did not comply.

The same bill includes plans for “post-tenure review” of faculty and opens a pathway to eliminate the noncompliant, so refusing to sign things we did not write—which would have seemed like a no-brainer in pre-fascist America—could now become a problem.

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the noose tightens

The multi-pronged attack by DeSantis and friends removes and restricts a lot of important opportunities for students to learn accurate information and to be included and represented in their own education. One of their next steps closes the circle and connects to the ongoing manipulation of college placement testing and high school curricula. (My previous story discusses these plans to re-whiten and re-Westernize the American school curriculum.)

A change to educator training programs in Florida is being codified by another piece of DeSantis legislation. Forthcoming changes are mandated by HB 1291/SB 1372, a bill prohibiting the courses in training programs for teachers and school leaders “from distorting certain events and including certain curriculum and instruction” (that is the bill’s language). As an adjunct to the goals of SB 266, through SB 1372 Florida teacher and school leadership preparation programs are forbidden to present “systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege as inherent in US institutions.” One example that comes to mind of the kinds of factual information that could be forbidden is an understanding of how the federal government’s anti-Black redlining maps designed in the 1930s controlled mortgage lending practices to create both historical and ongoing housing inequity across the country. There is no way to challenge the fact that it happened, but teaching this in any honest way would violate the new Florida law against showing that systemic racism is inherent in US institutions.

This law will not have to create a new-old education landscape on its own. Since so many faculty have now been pushed to sign off on the state-mandated changes to course outlines based on the demands of SB 266, a fabricated sense of authority and consensus will easily travel down the educational ladder to those beginning their careers in the K-12 system as well as to those coming into new school leadership positions.

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the memory hole

It’s all part of a cynical cultural remaking: effecting changes in school curriculum and college placement testing and trying to prevent future educators and school leaders from having access to verboten information.

This is one of many ways the truth can be destroyed as the generals of the far right’s culture wars “lay siege to the institutions.” And it could eventually be done by the educators themselves—the unwitting enlisted—if all this new DeSantis-style legislation is not vehemently resisted by teachers, students, and parents currently engaged in the system. Rocking the boat is exhausting and carries personal risk. But we must recognize that the next wave of students and educators could be, by design, even less well equipped and with even fewer protections than we have now.

In Chapter 3 of Orwell’s 1984, Winston reflects on the process by which things he still remembers became, in time, eventually no longer true.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. Orwell, 1984

This is what it looks like to Make America Great Again.