A conversation with Toby Miller, Chris Robé, Jordan Scott, Nicole Erin Morse, Robin Goodman, and Katie Rainwater. Edited by Mike Budd and Helena Worthen
The U.S. right wing, now in power at the federal level and in many states, tries to overwhelm opposition, taking over even our most basic democratic institutions. Higher education is a primary target. Religious nationalists, anti-intellectual bigots and oligarchs seek to censor, intimidate and control U.S. universities and colleges following a playbook from Hungary and other authoritarian regimes.
Obedient university trustees and careerist managers have mostly abandoned their responsibilities and failed to defend the institutions and the principles written into governing documents. This leaves faculty, students, other campus workers and the community to do what our bosses can’t or won’t do.
What follows is a wide-ranging discussion lightly edited from the April 25, 2025 episode of Toby Miller’s Cultural Studies podcast. In it, organizers from United Faculty of Florida (UFF) take us into the concrete day to day dilemmas of faculty who care about their students’ learning and the integrity of critical research. At the same time, their supervisors repeatedly demand that they do things that violate the core values of academic freedom.
Here is what the fightback looks like on a classroom, department, publication and institutional level – the venues in which academic freedom and worker solidarity are actually exercised. Among the key insights here: Union organizing brings faculty, students and others together across disciplinary and other boundaries to build solidarity through interdisciplinary research and collective action. Union organizing helps create new, more egalitarian formations of knowledge, the construction of which is feared by authoritarians, who demand hierarchy.
These are not details that you will see in mainstream news. You typically hear about these attacks in terms of new laws that are being challenged in court because their language is deliberately vague and confusing, and their constitutionality is dubious. The courts are an important place to block bad law. Some of the worst of these laws, including SB 256, a frontal attack on the ability of Florida’s public sector unions to represent workers, were quickly challenged in federal courts and are slowly working their ways through the appeals process. But the leaders who talk on this podcast know that the courts will not save them or their institutions and every person has a role to play in fighting back. So does collective action through their union. UFF represents some 25,000 full time college and university faculty, graduate assistants and other higher education workers in Florida. Faculty, students and others are organizing to build solidarity and membership and coalitions, to make and sustain the communities that our large and bureaucratic institutions so often lack, and to make real the principles of democratic access and quality, of the public good.
Our universities work only because we do.
INTRODUCTIONS AND TOP CONCERNS
Toby Miller
Hi everybody. Welcome to the Cultural Studies podcast. My name is Toby Miller, and my guests today are Chris Robé, Jordan Scott, Katie Rainwater, Nicole Erin Morse and Robin Goodman. These people have been busy in the resistance to the right-wing attacks on higher ed in Florida. They are also contributors to a book about this fight. Robin and Jordan are the editors. The title is Florida U: Higher Education as Authoritarianism’s Testing Ground. We will hear more about the book in this podcast. But let’s start with what’s on your mind right now.
Chris Robé
I’m a Professor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. I just came from a unionization drive so my mind space has been occupied with capacity building both internally to our university and reaching out to other unions and other organizations across South Florida.
Jordan Scott
I’m a doctoral candidate in Sociology at Florida State University, and also the regional vice president of the Florida AFL-CIO. Currently, I’m working on my dissertation on SB256, passed in 2023 in Florida, creating laws which make it more difficult to build and maintain public sector unions and public sector collective bargaining in Florida.
Katie Rainwater
I’m a contingent faculty member at Florida International University in Miami. I teach sociology. Our university just signed a cooperation agreement with ICE. Our faculty has been very involved in protest and in trying to get our administration to end the cooperation agreement. Like Jordan, I’m just wrapping up a paper on SB 256. I’m considering the implications for public sector unions and how unions can respond and organize to continue to survive amidst all the state repression.
Toby Miller
ICE refers to the entity known as immigration and customs enforcement, and it’s been responsible for some of the horrific violence, interpersonal, verbal and physical done to everybody, from US citizens through to immigrants in the recent past.
Nicole Erin Morse
I’m Nicole Morse and I use they/them pronouns. I was a faculty member at Florida Atlantic University, or FAU, where I directed the Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. I ended up leaving Florida in response to the crackdown on academic freedom, and I am now at another public institution, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This enables me to see how radically different the University of Maryland system is in its response to federal crackdowns on higher ed in comparison to how university administrators in Florida responded to DeSantis. It’s like night and day. For example, the emails we’re getting tell us to not stop any of our DEI activities. They say we value inclusivity, we value diversity. Utterly different than the experience I had in Florida in 2023 when our administrators immediately decided to create blacklists and turn over our names and emails to the government.
This tells me that a state system doesn’t have to immediately comply.
Robin Goodman
I’m Robin Goodman. I’m a professor of English at Florida State University, as well as the president of our chapter of the faculty union, the United Faculty of Florida (UFF). What’s on my mind? A week ago, there was a mass shooting at Florida State, and it’s really hard to get my head out of that event. I’m a plaintiff in a lawsuit with the ACLU that has pushed back against some of the censorship policies that the legislature has passed. Nicole is also involved in that, and Katie is also a plaintiff.
AN OVERVIEW OF THE SITUATION IN FLORIDA
Robin Goodman
For those people who are listening, who, might fortunately not be in Florida and might not understand what we’re going through. let’s start with an overview.
There have been a number of legislative initiatives against higher education in Florida since 2023. We have a Republican Governor, Ron DeSantis, and a Republican legislature. DeSantis was entertaining presidential ambitions at the time. First, they passed a bill claiming there were uncomfortable ideas that we were shielding our students from. This law supposedly prevented us from teaching these ideas. Second, our students were authorized to record us without our consent if they were gathering evidence in a case against us that we were teaching these ideas. Finally, there was an “intellectual diversity” survey administered yearly to all faculty, students and staff across the state. These seem like really disparate items, but they kind of all work together. We sued and lost, but we lost without prejudice.
Then they were emboldened. The Legislature passed a bill that required post tenure review every five years. One consequence of this was that the distinction that we’ve been drawing between contingent faculty and tenured faculty has become smaller. The bill also banned arbitration, so the university managers get the last say in any kind of labor dispute. Then they censored the first two years of general education courses. Gen Ed courses are required not to “distort” history, and they can’t have anything about identity politics or structural inequalities, or any reference to the fact that United States institutions are practicing or founded on inequalities.
Now we’re having to certify that we’ve reviewed all the materials for our syllabus before the semester starts. Key terms like “distortion” were not clearly defined, including what a distortion looks like, and whose account of history is not distorted.
At the same time, the same bill promoted or funded institutions like the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida that was going to promote intellectual diversity, which, again, nobody knows what that is. At Florida State, there’s also an institute that accomplishes the same goal with a different strategy. So instead of being an independent body, it handles hires within departments and has veto power over hires. Faculty have not liked working with it, because, basically, it wants to hire right wing people, and that’s kind of a requirement for the job. But departments want to have a full review with national searches. They want to have governance over hires instead of looking for litmus tests about their politics. There was a guns on campus piece of it that got dropped this year.
Now there’s a Florida DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] that is reviewing all of our research and teaching. There are six people working in the DOGE. We learned, when we were talking to the administrators last week, that DOGE is very efficient, so we’re sending them hundreds and thousands of pages of documents. So I don’t know how that’s going to work. It’s not only reviewing universities, it’s reviewing all state agencies in Florida, these six people, for what they’re calling waste, which is usually related to DEI. But it’s not clear what they’re looking for or how they’re going to use the data.
We’re happy to see that DeSantis seems to be losing his power over the legislature. Maybe some of this stuff will become less intense for us, but it’s been a hard three years. It seems almost like weekly that there’s a new thing that we are asked to comply with. We have had to find ways to resist.
Jordan Scott
The three major types of unions on university and college campuses are the faculty unions, the graduate student unions, and then the staff unions. In Florida, most of the graduate student unions and faculty unions are part of the United Faculty of Florida (UFF). Adela [Ghadimi, Executive Director of UFF] has a wonderful chapter in our book on Florida where she goes into how they’ve been remarkably successful at maintaining the faculty and graduate assistant chapters, not without difficulty. The difficulty comes in the time and the money you have to spend to maintain those chapters.
A lot of the decertifications of union chapters resulting from SB 256 are the staff unions with low membership. Florida had 12 staff unions under the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees that were decertified. And that’s really concerning. These unions represented staff that support everybody on campus. With decertification, these workers are losing their union protections, their contractual protections. When Florida State University had a mass shooting last week, these were the people who had to show up for work. The students and the faculty got told, hey, take the time that you need. But the staff were told, you gotta show up.
And so building those bridges is extremely important. At Florida A&M University, a historically Black college in Tallahassee, their staff union was decertified. But they are rebuilding through the Communications Workers of America. So we’re really proud to be working with them and building those bridges there.
DO WE HAVE TO COLLUDE WITH OUR OWN OPPRESSION?
Nicole Morse
I want to emphasize that a lot of the authoritarianism that we’re seeing is both material and rhetorical. The messaging that courses are being canceled, that there’s no more DEI, that things are being eliminated, that messaging is very loud in order to produce an effect of both self censorship and conviction that all of this is true. But no. The messaging is false. The course is still being taught every semester. It fills. Students love it.
It’s no longer a general education course. That’s the place where the government was able to intervene and transform the curriculum, but from what you hear from people like Governor Ron DeSantis, like President Trump, when they say, we have ended DEI, they want people to receive that information in such a way that it will then cause them to self-censor, to silence, to avoid these topics. They’re not actually effectively ending people’s interest in diversity, people’s commitment to studying race, gender, sexuality, etc.
I think it’s really important to balance our rightful concern about the real material impacts of these authoritarian attacks with a recognition that they will do as much as they can purely through rhetorical tricks. They’re relying on us to do the rest of the work, to say, oh well, now I’m going to change my research agenda. Now I’m not going to propose that class I wanted to propose.
Toby Miller
This is the problem of colluding with one’s own oppression, right? Which I’ve certainly done in my life. But it’s also a balance about how to survive or not. This isn’t just happening in the United States, it’s happening in China and Hong Kong.
Sometimes for this podcast, people ask me not to ask anything political. In one case, somebody’s job had formally been disestablished by the government of the U.S. state that she works in, but the university was managing to keep her on. In the end, we decided not to record at all, but just to gossip offline because of the risks that she was confronting. I want to have some sympathy with colluding with your own oppression when under that sort of risk.
Chris Robé
This legislation is deeply ambiguous and unclear and contradictory. And it’s intentional. Psychological warfare is the most impactful part of it, to create confusion, ferment it, and then try to get ahead of it, even though there’s no ahead to get in front of. I don’t think they know what they’re doing. They want to see how we’re reacting and freaking out since general middle class norms typically found in academia are ill-equipped to counter these attacks. We don’t want a confrontation, right? We don’t want to push back. We don’t believe in power. We believe in talking things through, right? All these missteps that we consistently make as academics dealing with an actual attack.
Katie Rainwater
This idea of colluding with one’s own oppression is something that I think about a lot. In a piece that I just wrapped up for another forthcoming volume, on contingent faculty and academic freedom, I discuss a couple of recent instances at my university. The first is that, as at other Florida universities, many of our courses at Florida International University (FIU) were removed from the general education curriculum.
The way that the administration is trying to do this is to get faculty to remove the courses ourselves.
RESISTING BY MAKING THE SYSTEM WORK THE WAY IT SHOULD
Katie Rainwater
The State Board of Governors, mostly appointed by Governor DeSantis, made phone calls with administrators. Administrators then talked to department chairs and asked them, when you’re submitting your courses for general ed this year, Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity and Sociology of Gender, those have too much prohibited content, so just don’t submit these courses, right?
But what ended up happening was, within my department, Sociology, we said we didn’t want to cut the courses ourselves. Then we as a group of Sociology faculty who teach the General Ed courses wrote to the Faculty Senate requesting that those courses not be removed from General Ed. At a big Faculty Senate meeting, students came out, faculty came out, and the Faculty Senate just decided not to remove the courses. So the full list of courses for General Education was submitted to the administration, with Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity and Sociology of Gender still on it, and then the administration ended up removing them before they submitted them to the Board of Trustees.
I thought it was very important that the courses be removed this way, by the administration instead of faculty themselves removing them. Faculty have a very important role to play in educating the public about political interference in the university system. Political interference undermines what we do. It’s so important to have our universities be autonomous from the curricular control of state government, for universities to serve their proper role as places of knowledge production and dissemination in a democracy. Faculty can’t both insist on the importance of academic freedom and autonomy while also collaborating and inviting the state to alter our curriculum
After the administration removed our courses from the General Education curriculum, we organized this resolution in the Faculty Senate, which condemned the Board of Trustees for not serving the role that they’re supposed to serve. Because there are governing documents. According to the university’s governing documents the Board of Trustees are supposed to protect academic freedom.
Then one tenured faculty member proposed from the senate floor that the resolution language be changed to say something like “We’re willing to work with the B.O.T., but we’re just upset that this process is going on in an unlawful way.”
I found that very upsetting because among the tasks set out for the Faculty Senate in their governing documents is to create general education curricula within parameters set by the state. Another task is to protect academic freedom. I think that when these tasks for the Faculty Senate are in conflict, we need to insist on protecting academic freedom and not trying to abide by the parameters set by the state.
This was a tenured professor who wanted to work with the Board of Trustees to improve how the process of political interference was done.
Nicole Morse
I want to amplify what Katie said by pointing out that tenure, instead of creating a protection for people to take intellectual risks, to do challenging research, is too often becoming a discipline tactic of its own. People who are tenure track are so scared of not getting tenure that they hold back, and people who are tenured tend to also hold back because they don’t want to get targeted. Obviously, Robin and Chris here are huge exceptions to that rule. But there’s this way that tenure itself has been transformed from a way to protect academic integrity and academic freedom to a way to discipline faculty.
You know, when it comes to union organizing, contingent faculty like Katie are some of the hardest working and most dedicated union organizers. They’re out there. They’re doing the work because they recognize that their survival depends on collectivity. As Robin said earlier, the distinction that we’ve been drawing between contingent faculty and tenured faculty has become smaller. But too often, some of the more senior faculty who have tenure have bought into being part of the power structure in some ways. How do you create class traitors?
In fighting against the attempt to remove my course on “Gender and Climate Change” from the curriculum, initially I was asked, as Katie said, to remove it myself. And I said, I don’t want to. And then I was able to consult with Chris and our other union co president. I was able to consult with union staff, so that over four weeks of meetings, phone calls and email exchanges, I kept saying, you know, of course, I want to comply with any directive. If you are directing me to remove the class, I will. And then they would say, oh, no, we’re not directing you to do anything. We just wondered do you want to remove the class? And I would say, no, I don’t want to remove the class, but if you’re directing me to do so, I will. It was top down pressure that just kind of trickled layer by layer until it got to the least powerful people who then had the entire apparatus of the university bearing down on them.
I would say the reason that I was able to survive the final two-hour meeting with administrators was because I had a union rep with me, and she took 10 pages of notes, and the administrators in that meeting commented, wow, you’re really writing a lot down. Do you really need to write all this down? And she was like, yes, I do. My role here is to document.
I just want to uplift the power of the Union, and this is why they want to attack unions.
Chris Robé
Like Katie at FIU, we also had all these General Education things come up, and pulled off our curriculum [at FAU]. Unlike hers, it didn’t even go through our Faculty Senate for approval. It was already a done deal, but they wanted us to ratify it [in our Faculty Senate], and that’s where we pushed back, saying no, we’re not ratifying this. To get to the psychological warfare question, those in defense of ratifying it were basically saying, well, it’s a done deal anyway. They’re going to do it above us. The [State University System] Board of Governors is going to do it.
And I’m like, No, we can’t. We can’t be complicit in this. We need to put the blame where it belongs. Because if we ratify this, there’s the justification. Where was the objection? Our Faculty Senate, rather than voting on it, which seemed like it was going to be a no vote, just tabled it consistently. That shows the weakness there of what was going on in faculty governance. What made me really want to be a part of this book, other than really good people being a part of it, is that we need to collectively organize, whether it be through unions, individually, collections, doing a podcast like this, anything. Power wants us isolated and siloed and wants us to think we’re not on the same side with each other. So whatever venues you can [build] that bring people together is enabling.
I had a bunch of junior faculty over last year, just for drinks and food, and found out this horrific thing. During their orientation, lawyers talked to them for two hours about what they couldn’t talk about. This was their new faculty orientation, the first two hours when they first got on campus. They revealed this to me hanging out that evening. I’ve been here a long time, and know some people up above in the administration, and I remember talking to them casually saying this can never happen again. They didn’t even seem to be aware that it happened.
Talk about psychological warfare. This is their intro to a new university. They don’t have tenure, and you have a lawyer reading them the riot act for two hours. And I would have never discovered that unless I’d talked to them informally at that get together.
Nicole Morse
Ultimately this is about power. Chris, thank you for naming that. Because it can be so tempting to try to construct some sort of coherent ideological principle behind all these attacks. We can get very caught up with identifying hypocrisy, but in fact, they’re going to use whatever technique or tactic will accrue more power.
This attack on universities in Florida has been going on for a long time. In Florida in 2019 there was a bill passed that said that teachers cannot criticize the State of Israel except under very specific circumstances. So every year I as an anti-Zionist Jew who sometimes teaches material that touches on Palestine, I would ask, what can I and can’t I say? And it would get referred to legal and legal would have no answer.
But then suddenly, as Chris says, when they want to scare people, the lawyers are available to talk about what people should and shouldn’t do. The Lavender Languages Institute that I direct, which focuses on LGBTQ linguistics, had been hosted at FAU for many years. Suddenly there was posed the question, could we continue to host it? The Chancellor of the Department of Education in Florida had seen it on our website and had raised some questions. For months, legal just simply couldn’t provide an answer. Ultimately, we had to move it out of the state of Florida. So action can happen quickly when that serves their end, and then action will be delayed when that serves their ends. Things will be stated clearly when that serves their ends, and they pass all these laws that are, you know, facially constitutional, because they say things like, there should be a diversity of perspectives. Who’s against that? But we know that what they actually mean is that you have to hire conservatives. These games that they’re playing are how they’re going to take over unless, as Chris said, we make sure that we’re not isolated and that we’re not in a position where we’re allowing ourselves to be fooled by these games.
PREVIOUS AUTHORITARIAN ATTACKS ON U.S. HIGHER EDUCATION
Jordan Scott
This idea that there is left-wing indoctrination, or left wing bias, particularly at Florida State University in Tallahassee, is absolutely absurd. What about right wing bias? We have at Florida State what’s called the DeVoe Moore Center, and I’ll tell you about DeVoe more. Devo Moore is the second richest person in Tallahassee. He is worth 500 million or something, and he donated $5 million (matched by the State to create a $10 million endowment) to Florida State University to essentially create a right wing think tank that’s in the Social Science Building. They churn out right wing propaganda. They send it out to the community and they work with the James Madison Institute, which is a statewide think tank. We talk about it in our book. The Koch brothers, a pair of billionaires, donated money to the Economics Department to hire conservative economists. And just recently, we had what was called the Institute of Politics, which was already mostly doing conservative stuff, but they decided that was too controversial to call the Institute of Politics. So they change the name to the Institute of Governance and Civics. They bring in speakers all the time, and they’re all right wing. They’re all right-wing speakers at our university. And then, not to mention that recently we had Charlie Kirk come. So this concept that we’re churning out, left wing indoctrination is absurd.
Chris Robé
Every crisis is an opportunity, right? I had a close friend who bought into the opposite side of things – who had an idealistic notion that the cuts were “objective”. Now her funding has been ripped away, and she pinpointed on Trump. But I argued that it’s always been ideological. It just seemed not to be so.
The fact that the crisis has happened to so many people is an opportunity to speak to them and reframe the ways in which they understand this stuff in really good ways. And this goes back to what Nicole is saying: building a community in any capacity whatsoever. We’ve been doing it through a cinema series here and reaching out to people. We showed the film Union here at FAU about the first Amazon labor union in Staten Island, NY which is not being distributed at all, and we organized around it, brought an organizer from Broward County who’s organizing warehouses and was fired at Amazon. We brought our own organizer in to speak about a unionization drive that we were doing, and now we’re working with that organizer from Broward on a wider event down in Broward, bringing all the unions together to do it right. So the urgency and the fear we’re all feeling can be really mobilizing to draw us together and start replenishing our sense of collective action, agency and resistance.
Robin Goodman
Don’t forget the shooter, who was a white supremacist, involved in hate groups.
Jordan Scott
He got kicked out of a political discussion club, because their only rule was no Nazis. And he said too much Nazi stuff. So, you know, there you go.
Toby Miller
This is one of these moments of despair where there is the hope and the example of resistance and struggle by the unions, by contingent faculty and so on. And I’m trying from the outside now, to think about what this means in the broader context. I’m jetted back to California in the McCarthy era when faculty had to swear to loyalty tests. Famously, when the University of Sport Children, currently trending as the University of Southern California, had a bunch of architects and engineers who were in the pocket of developers, when UCLA had a bunch of architects and engineers who were on the left. The UCLA guys were all fired. They were all sacked because they didn’t sign a loyalty oath. That’s how bad things got.
But I also think about how part of the global success of US higher education comes from militarism, massive investment in higher education in the Second World War, and especially in the Cold War. I’m wondering how you guys would situate this in that long story of US university life.
Robin Goodman
Last week we learned that our administrators had received a letter from the Trump administration asking for advice about how the US could become a leader in science. This is after 100 days of the Trump administration defunding science and sending everything into chaos. Now Trump is worried.
I agree with you that there’s a sense that this is an effect of the end of the American empire and the end of the Cold War. The role of the university has become less clear among Americans, but also among politicians. They don’t know what they want from higher education. That’s an opportunity for us to say, what you really want from it is better citizens, better thinkers and people who can speak different languages and can go out and do things internationally. Mary Louise Pratt was here, 20 years ago, and said that her education was funded by the military. She became president of the Modern Language Association, because they wanted people who could speak languages to support the American empire. But there are no guarantees that the funding that they put into that is going to serve the purposes that they wanted. And in her case, it didn’t. In a lot of cases, it didn’t.
Toby Miller
It didn’t in area studies, which has been a quite important resistive node for us. The Ford Foundation’s Social Sciences Research Council and other federal agencies wanted to have skilled anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and humanists competent to disseminate and aid US imperialism. And now these social scientists are being attacked.
Katie Rainwater
Ellen Schrecker’s book The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s argues that at the beginning of the sixties U.S. universities had reached the peak of their prestige, with lavish funding for the United States to lead knowledge production and the post WWII order. But these universities also generated spaces of dissent. Then Reagan and his campaign cracked down in California, running on restoring law and order, especially on campuses.
One of the outcomes of the 1960s and the beautiful moment of people coming together for democratization of our universities and societies was this intense backlash and defunding of universities. That’s where we got the enormous growth of contingent faculty, and we’re still in that moment and its escalation.
We need to push back on more than half a century of right wing rhetoric about universities. It goes back a long way. If you look back at earlier university strategic plans in Florida, the Board of Governors is calling for the eradication of programs not contributing to “workforce development.” And more recently, that taxpayers shouldn’t pay for anyone’s Gender Studies degree.
The faculty and universities are important for all of us and for the public. To do this, we need a broader labor movement on campuses, to bring in campus workers wall-to-wall. So campus workers are not just pushing back on the defunding of our programs, but also creating a more expansive vision of the role universities and colleges should play in society and the obligations they have to their workers. A broader model of what people should be able to expect in society, like earning enough to live on.
Nicole Morse
Another reading recommendation from Ellen Schrecker is: No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. Something really telling in that tale is the way that administrators and teachers collaborated. The faculty were not prepared to see themselves as workers like other workers.
Elevating what Katie said about needing wall to wall unionization, where we recognize that faculty are not special, are not different, are not better than other workers. I remember when tenure was being attacked in Florida several years ago, when the first attacks came, the president of our union, who at the time was a contingent faculty member, recorded an explainer to try to help other workers understand what being contingent means, from his perspective as someone who didn’t have tenure. He supports tenure, not because he thinks some people should be more special than others, but because he thinks everyone should have job security.
Tenured and tenure track faculty have this opportunity to stop isolating ourselves as extra special workers who are different from everyone else, but through the labor movement and through our commitments to solidarity, to say, no, everyone should have the things that for a period of time only a certain group of faculty had.
Katie Rainwater
I want to amplify the importance of having wall-to-wall unions. Under SB 256, we lost staff unions, and we’ve also lost all seven of the adjunct faculty bargaining units that existed at six or seven community colleges and one university. So it’s really important in this moment for all workers at colleges and universities to come together with students and build coalitions.
FLORIDA U: A BOOK ABOUT RESISTANCE
Toby Miller
I’m excited about the book that you guys are involved in.
Robin Goodman
The idea of doing a book all started in a bar, as most good ideas do. Jordan was telling me about his dissertation, and I said, I’ve also written on some of the current legislation in Florida. And so we started to exchange ideas. I said, “We should do a book.” We have, as part of our union, networks throughout the state. We thought it would be interesting to think about how people in different disciplines are responding to the censorship and the anti-union legislation, and so we started to look at our union contacts. We didn’t always know what discipline they came from, because it doesn’t always come up when you’re doing union work, even though we share that we’re all academics. However, we got people from philosophy, anthropology, international affairs, all sorts of different disciplines.
Jordan Scott
The subtitle is higher education as authoritarianism testing ground. So it’s about these authoritarian changes that have been made in Florida, and how that’s been impacting higher education.
Chris Robé
All five of us here have worked with the Union. I’m into Cultural Studies, and I knew about what Stuart Hall was developing in the seventies analyzing Thatcherism for that moment of rising neoliberalism. I asked, how can we use these concepts to understand the current moment? What happens when we redeploy them in this present moment of the end or transformation of neoliberalism using concepts of hegemony and common sense?
Not just what they [the right] are doing wrong but what they’re doing right, and what are we doing wrong? With a more dynamic sense of the ways culture is playing into the political field. As many conservatives say, politics is downstream of culture — taking that seriously.
Nicole Morse
I am going to be writing my contribution with a graduate student of mine about our effort to keep a course called “Gender and Climate Change” in the curriculum for the Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic. It was a course that we created during the 2020 period of explosion of interest in DEI, which means diversity equity inclusion initiatives. Everyone was excited about DEI. It was hot, it was hip. There were proliferating committees. There was a call for more general education courses that addressed global citizenship and climate change. We have a faculty member in the Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at FAU who’s an expert on ecofeminism, internationally renowned. It seemed like the perfect fit. We proposed the course. It became very popular. It was always fully enrolled.
And then, in 2023, Fox News found out about it when the administration put the course and those of us involved with it on a short list of DEI professors. There was a long, drawn out fight to keep it in the curriculum. This will all be in the book.
Robin Goodman
The happy conclusion is I’m even more excited about our book than I was when we started.
Jordan Scott
We plan to have over 20 chapters.The writers are either educators at Florida’s institutions of higher learning or active participants in Florida’s faculty/graduate student union, the United Faculty of Florida (UFF and GAU), and affiliates, or both. The central concern is how disciplinary knowledge informs participation in pushing back against anti-university legislation, and so the volume is broadly interdisciplinary with authors from universities across the state of Florida and networked through union activism. Some contributors are plaintiffs or grievants in ongoing legal struggles. Areas of focus include and combine the following issues related to recent legislation, its implementation, proposed legislation, and ongoing litigation: university takeovers by ideologically-motivated and politically appointed trustees, privatization, post-tenure review, DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] funding, “intellectual diversity,” shielding, class recordings without consent, bans on intellectual partnerships with people from “countries of concern,” student protests and student organizational suspensions, secrecy in presidential searches, unions/collective bargaining/arbitration ban, race, LGBTQIA+, “gender ideology,” climate science suppression, guns on campus, censorship of curriculum through course reviews and cuts in general education, self-censorship, department closings, keyword searches, identity politics, “cultural Marxism,” critical theory, critical race theory, and distortion of historical truths.”
Toby Miller
Robin, anything else you’d like to close with?
Robin Goodman
We are continuing to fight. We’re going to continue to create solidarity and push back. The Republican Party seems to be fracturing in all sorts of ways, and although right now it’s kind of amusing, I hope we can take advantage of that.
Toby Miller
I think that the call for solidarity, especially across class, that you’ve made, is immensely significant and important, as well as defending the good principles of diversity, equity and inclusion.