By Chris Robe, UFF (United Faculty of Florida) and Florida Atlantic University

Ever since Florida became ground zero for the attacks against public higher education roughly five years ago, many misconceptions circulate regarding how academic freedom functions down here and the ways in which it is being compromised.

A recent job candidate confided to a search committee member during a campus visit: “My advisor suggested I scrap my talk regarding gender and sexuality since he heard that you aren’t allowed to discuss such topics down here.” This is not the first time we have heard such rumors, which show how effective our state propaganda is regarding how “woke” research and teaching are being eliminated. The state of Florida has engaged in psychological warfare to give the illusion that all topics related to gender, race, LGBTQ+ issues, and anything else that challenges a Eurocentric outlook have been scrubbed away from curricula and marginalized in terms of research. This is not true, which is not to say that certain disciplines and faculty holding more precarious employment are not being disproportionately targeted. Sociology has become the primary target regarding the state’s attack against diversity, equity, and inclusion.

For example, a new textbook has recently been issued for introduction to sociology courses that removes units on global inequality, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and social stratification — core aspects that define much of the discipline of sociology.  

How could this happen?

The Board of Governors decided that all current sociology textbooks violate state law that bans discussions of race, gender, sexuality, and oppression in general from all introductory courses, not simply sociology. A state working group composed of four members from the Board of Governors and four sociologists from Florida International University, Florida State University, Daytona State College, and Florida Southwestern College was formed. They were charged with creating a state-sanctioned sociology textbook.

A month after the group’s creation, the sociologist from Florida Southwestern was removed from the working group since he wanted to include a unit focusing on gender. Florida Education Czar Anastasios Kamoutsas publicly berated the faculty member on social media, a tactic typical of Far-Right ideologues who use their public display of outrage and centralized power to serve as a warning to all others not to question their dogma. He further recommended that the faculty member be disciplined by the college’s president.

You might wonder why any sociologist would want to serve on such a committee. They must know that their presence on such a committee would lend it a certain legitimacy that it would otherwise lack. The sociologist from FSU serving on the committee stated, “This was the most unpleasant task I’ve ever had to take on in my entire career.” But the rationale the member offers for participating is revealing in displaying the bind that all faculty find themselves during an authoritarian moment:

As she saw it, either sociologists sat at the table to help create a new textbook, or colleges and universities across the state would be forced to remove Introduction to Sociology as a core course offered to incoming students. Carr said that scenario could lead to the overall implosion of the discipline in Florida and resulting job losses for professors and graduate students.

This is the power of pre-compliance, the modus operandi that dictates much of how colleges and universities operate within our swampy state. Those from the outside the state may wonder how faculty and administrators can believe in laws and actions that directly undercut the core tenants of higher education: academic freedom, due process, free inquiry, and faculty governance. The short answer is: they don’t.

The way to censor higher education is not to instill a belief in the legitimacy of a Far-Right outlook, but instead to foster actions that comply with that outlook. Attitudes don’t matter. The French theorist Louis Althusser long ago realized this when suggesting that ideologies are more based on practices than beliefs. He paraphrases the Catholic philosopher Blaise Pascal, “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.”

But instead of religious dogma, we are now confronted with a political dogma that aids and abets white supremacy, misogyny, and a general disdain for anyone who doesn’t align with an ethno-nationalist outlook. The idea behind this tactic is the long game: force people to contort their actions to a belief system that they initially don’t believe in for so long and so intensely that eventually their beliefs will eventually warp into alliance as well.

I will walk you through a typical experience of how pre-compliance works. Say some subject matter on your syllabus is targeted or a job search ad is flagged for language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. You will not receive an email or any written form of communication from your Chair or Dean, since they realize that such artifacts could be used as future evidence against them, a smoking gun pinpointing an exact moment where the university is sacrificing academic freedom for political theater.

Instead, you will be summoned to the administrator’s office. (If you are fortunate enough to have a union, you will have someone accompany you to such a meeting. This action alone, having a witness to the encounter, is sometimes enough to deter an administrator from following through.) The administrator will tell you in all confidentiality that they disagree with such a policy, that they find it abhorrent. But then they will quickly try to commiserate with you, say that you both need to come up with a mutual solution, that they don’t want to put the institution at risk. This, of course, overlooks how the institution is already at risk by sacrificing its core ideals in the hope of obtaining future state funds by complying.

You may or may not come to an agreement with the administrator, since you are now operating in the land of shadows. Because the administrator never issued an official directive for you to change your syllabus or the job search ad, you can simply reject it. You can’t be charged with insubordination since you weren’t given any directive to follow. Usually, the administrator says they are only making a “recommendation.” This is in part because the administrator has not received an official directive from those above them either.

If you ask the administrator to point you towards documentation that justifies them in making such a recommendation, none is to be found. Instead, the administrator’s action is based off a loose and overly broad interpretation of a state law that is intentionally ambiguous. Many of the state laws in Florida directly contradict one another. For example, a law on “viewpoint diversity” – a conservative talking point that is less about a diversity of ideas than about allowing Far-Right ideas to take root in the classroom – directly contradicts other state laws that ban discussing race, gender, and sexuality from classrooms. But most faculty and administrators understand that what might appear as contradictions on paper are really there to sow uncertainty among educators and place them in the hopeless situation of constantly breaking state law no matter how compliant they might try to be.

After meeting with the administrator, the issue will be sent to their superior, who also might contact the faculty member for a meeting. Or it might simply disappear into the void until you discover that, unbeknownst to you, your syllabus or job search ad appears online with alterations you did not make. Because of such an outcome, you might be even less inclined to resist any future “recommendations,” since you know the outcome will be the same.

This is how practices gradually morph into beliefs through rationalizations and excuses, mea culpas and commiseration. Many of those issuing such pre-compliance “recommendations” suffer from a certain amount of delusion and egotism. They believe that if they are not there to ward off the worst of the changes to higher education, that if they weren’t present in their current role, someone worse might come along. But this overlooks a key reality: they are fostering a system that will increasingly push them out of their roles for a true believer to eventually take their place.

All of us working in public higher education in Florida are ensnared in this insidious system. It is the way we go about working within it is what truly matters. For those who feel secure enough – those with tenure, for example – we need to speak publicly against such actions. We need to call them out and not normalize them. In addition, we need to force the administration not to act in collusion with reactionary forces, believing they can stay under the radar. A wait-and-see attitude allows reactionaries and their beliefs a firmer grip day-by-day to warp higher education into their vision, where only the entitled are allow to attend and learn, and where authoritarian control builds strength and smothers knowledge in pursuit of unilateral power.