Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is drawing from the authoritarian playbook of the neo-fascist Republican Party in his broad-scale attacks on academic freedom. He recently signed a bill passed by the Florida legislature that mandates a survey of the political beliefs of public college and university professors to “assess the status of intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity.” Contrary to the propaganda of the bill’s sponsors, and of DeSantis himself, this bill has nothing to do with academic freedom. Instead, it’s a political maneuver designed to intimidate faculty by monitoring faculty viewpoints, even encouraging students to record faculty lectures for the purpose of highlighting statements that the corporate-funded reactionaries in Tallahassee can use to their political advantage.
As a Professor for 30 years at Florida International University, I am open about my views and encourage my students to be open about their opinions. We engage in healthy discussion and exchange of ideas that goes beyond what the corporate media and the political establishment typically sanction as part of “acceptable” debate. For authoritarians like DeSantis, and for Republicans in the Florida legislature who voted for this bill, academia at its most progressive represents a threat to their unfettered power and influence. That’s why conservatives and corporations have waged a thirty-year war to dramatically lower the public funding of universities, which now depend on private funding and student tuition to replace what used to be public sources of funding. When I was first hired at FIU in 1991, the university got just under 70% of funding from the state of Florida. Now it’s closer to 20%. Over the past decade, states have cut back their spending on higher education by over $9 billion. Ten years ago, students paid for one-third of their education costs. Now they pay for one-half. The result has been a corporatization of the university that has resulted in fewer professors being hired, a dramatic increase in adjunct professors who are super-exploited, and a much greater reliance on corporate sponsorships and grants. That has worked to make academia more conservative (not more progressive, let alone “radical” as DeSantis and other reactionaries would have people believe).
Yet even after decades of assault on public institutions and the public sphere in general, that apparently is not enough for the power-brokers in Tallahassee and the entire infrastructure of the Republican Party, who want to intimidate professors in higher education, and silence critical voices in K-12 classrooms. In addition to the mandated survey to track the ideological views of professors, DeSantis has given Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran the authority to police against the teaching of “critical race theory,” which DeSantis and other Republican authoritarians are using as a bogeyman to stifle the ability of social studies and civic education teachers to speak honestly about racism in U.S. history. DeSantis has proclaimed a ban on “critical race theory” being taught in Florida’s public schools. Contrary to this propaganda from DeSantis and his fellow Republicans, led by Mein Fuhrer Donald Trump, that “critical race theory” is about teaching “students to hate their country,” there is no such thing as a coherent program of “critical race theory.” The use of the term has been weaponized by Republicans to create a nefarious enemy whose invented characteristics can then be used to discredit political movements such as Black Lives Matter. More broadly, the Republican attack on “critical race theory” is really a weapon to stifle attempts by various academics, activists and social justice movements to raise awareness and to try to correct the status quo biases in U.S. history books. These include racist stereotypes, the exclusion of the history and experiences of racial minorities, and misinformation or outright falsehood regarding racism in U.S. history. U.S. history texts are much more likely to whitewash, ignore or misrepresent the histories of minorities, working class people and the poor. Efforts to correct the one-sided status quo bias have been occurring, but only sporadically and unevenly, and in the midst of attacks on public schools and universities designed to squelch these movements. What Republicans want to do is to prevent any corrections to the traditional narrative.
What should the left do about this? We need to take this threat from the right seriously, and to fight back politically. That means educating our own students about the political history of the corporatization of higher education. Most people think that public spending on university education has gone up, which is directly opposite of the actual trend. We also need to educate students and the public about attacks on public education at the K-12 level, and how this represents a long-standing assault on the public sphere, which is being eviscerated by the use of public tax dollars to fund private, for-profit institutions. We need to speak truth to power in the classroom where possible, while acknowledging that not all teachers have the same ability to speak out, due to limitations on job security, lack of tenure, etc. Those of us that do should use our voices to provide students with the broadest possible resources to think for themselves as “critical citizens.” This means equipping them with the tools to understand who has power, who doesn’t and exposing the agendas of the political and corporate class who dominate politics in the real world, as opposed to the caricatured fantasyland conjured up by DeSantis and his corporate backers.
View From Left Field 