Florida’s “anti-woke” power grabs in K-12 and public universities should be opposed—but not by defending progressive illiberalism - Cathy Young for The Bulwark
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The “War on Woke” waged by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continues with a new bill introduced in the Florida House of Representatives last week, House Bill 999, based on proposals introduced by DeSantis at the end of January. While DeSantis’s office said the proposal would elevate “intellectual freedom,” such language can be seen as Orwellian considering that the bill restricts or bans the teaching of a number of ideas and concepts at public colleges and universities in the Sunshine State.
This comes on the heels of an ongoing controversy about Florida’s decision to nix a proposed AP curriculum in African American studies (and a subsequent College Board announcement of a revised curriculum, apparently in response to criticism from Florida officials).
And conflicts continue over moves by trustees DeSantis appointed in January, including anti-woke crusader Christopher Rufo, to give a struggling liberal arts school in Sarasota a conservative makeover.
And before that there were DeSantis’s controversial education laws enacted last year, the Stop WOKE Act (parts of which a federal judge declared unconstitutional) and the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law (which puts limits on classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity).
Add to this battles over purging books with controversial race and gender themes from school libraries, and the alarm among those on the left and in the center about creeping Republican right-wing illiberalism which is likely to be replicated in other “red states”—and on the federal level if DeSantis wins the presidency in 2024—becomes entirely understandable.
But Democrats and dissident conservatives attempting to describe and respond to this worrisome trend often resort to badly flawed narratives that distort the overall picture in several ways.
First, these narratives sometimes exaggerate the right-wing depredations they critique—for instance, by equating the rejection of the African American studies AP curriculum with an outright ban on teaching African American history.
Second, they tend to discount the very real problem of left-wing illiberalism and ideological diktat in education, dismissing all complaints about it as either astroturfed right-wing disinformation or misguided centrist panic that plays into the hands of the right. To acknowledge that at least in some cases DeSantis and his imitators are responding to real problems and tapping into valid concerns may complicate the narrative, but it doesn’t mean that the “anti-woke” right is fighting the good fight. It just means that the political fights over these issues often pit the proverbial two wrongs against each other—and that the sane middle desperately needs alternatives.
Florida’s HB 999 is an almost perfect case in point, since it’s practically an anti-woke higher education wish list. There is, perhaps most notably, a ban on “any major or minor in Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor of these belief systems” at any public college or university. General education core courses at state schools may not “include a curriculum that teaches identity politics, such as Critical Race Theory, or defines American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” There is a ban on the funding of extracurricular programs and activities that espouse “diversity, equity, and inclusion or Critical Race Theory rhetoric” or other concepts flagged as problematic by an earlier Florida law and associated with social justice ideology (e.g., that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously” or “bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex”). The bill also shifts the power to hire professors to school boards of trustees and allows trustees to periodically review faculty members’ tenure.
If all of this looks blatantly unconstitutional, not to mention an unabashed assault on academic freedom, that’s because it is. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which has long defended academic freedom and has sometimes taken potshots from the left for supposedly focusing too much on threats to freedom from progressive activists and safe-space seekers, has issued a scathing critique of HB 999 which mostly points out the obvious—for instance, that its prohibitions on certain kinds of teaching are not only ideologically restrictive but dangerously vague. “Critical Race Theory” and “identity politics” are not defined; college administrators and political appointees are left to decide what kind instruction may “suppress or distort significant historical events”; another, even hazier prohibition applies to “unproven, theoretical, or exploratory content” in general education courses—that is, in introductory or widely required classes. (FIRE is already involved in a legal challenge in federal court to DeSantis’s 2022 Stop WOKE Act.)
FIRE attorney Adam Steinbaugh, who wrote the critique of HB 999 for the FIRE website, told me in a telephone interview over the weekend that among other things, the bill would “give a really wide berth to limit the content of general education courses.” Even the teaching of evolution in introductory biology could come under assault on the grounds that it’s a “theory.” The proposal, says Steinbaugh, is likely to have a chilling effect even before it becomes law and takes effect:
It takes a long time for faculty and universities to plan courses, which means that [if] you know that the law may take effect in July and you start planning a class for this coming fall, you start making some decisions now if you expect that this is going to pass in its current form.
The other aspect of this is that because it’s vague, if you’re a faculty member or even an administrator at a university, you’re going to have to guess what the lawmakers mean by this. And if your funding is on the line, you are going to take the most institutionally protective stance that you can take—which means that you’re going to take the most chilling interpretation of the law and apply that, just to be safe.
Attorney and writer Wendy Kaminer, a former American Civil Liberties Union board member who has for years been a strong critic of what she sees as the progressive abandonment of free speech principles, is equally harsh about the right-wing pushback in Florida and other red states. The new Florida legislation and the earlier Stop WOKE bill, she told me by telephone, represent nothing less than “a state-imposed orthodoxy on education, and especially on higher education. It’s saying that there is no such thing as academic freedom, that professors are simply employees of the state and they have to parrot whatever the state tells them to parrot.”
But Kaminer (who is a FIRE advisory board member but stressed that she was speaking only in her capacity as an individual) also pointed to an irony that she believes a lot of progressives miss: The conservative backlash operates by using “theories that were developed on the left” and have been widely applied through college speech codes over the past thirty years or so—theories about the harms of speech that is viewed as traumatic to the listener and the right of listeners to be safe from hurtful or offensive expression.
“You see a very similar hostility to free speech coming from both the ‘woke’ and the ‘anti-woke,’” says Kaminer. However, she adds, while progressives have largely censured speech that they regard as harmful—essentially, as a form of assaultive conduct—using “cultural power” and institutional power, the right, with its current strength in state legislatures, is currently doing it “by force of law.”
Some scholars, mostly conservative- and libertarian-leaning, have long expressed concerns about the potential threat to free expression from “hostile environment” harassment law—a particularly salient concern in academia, where “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” may include constitutionally protected and educationally essential speech or content. These aren’t just paranoid fantasies: There have been actual instances of sexual harassment charges based on, for example, a professor’s classroom discussion of the issue of false accusations of sexual harassment and rape, or a student’s statement of his religious objections to same-sex relationships in a response to a professor’s mass email.
In some ways, red-state “anti-woke” bills are broader and cruder in their attempts at speech regulation: No campus policy against “discriminatory speech” has ever tried to kill entire academic programs and majors the way HB 999 would kill critical race scholarship and gender studies. (Here, DeSantis is taking a page from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the proud champion of “illiberal democracy” and the darling of American “national conservatives,” who signed a decree effectively banning gender studies programs in Hungarian universities five years ago.)
And yet at least on one point, DeSantis’s “anti-woke” effort puts him essentially on the same side as FIRE: the opposition to mandatory “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) statements required from faculty and administrators as a condition of hiring or continued employment. According to recent surveys, about a fifth of academic job postings and a fifth of tenure-track positions require DEI statements; large and/or elite institutions are especially likely to have such requirements, and many other schools are considering adding them. As FIRE points out, DEI statements are, in many cases, not simply about a commitment to treat all students fairly: They require professors to embrace a particular, ideologically driven vision of “diversity” and “equity” and accept specific assertions about the pervasiveness of racism, sexism, and other “systems of oppression” in American society. It’s not only compelled speech but viewpoint discrimination, says Steinbaugh: “If you solicit statements about diversity from faculty members, that can be used as a litmus test and it can be used as a way to screen out members who don’t necessarily toe the line on what their would-be or actual colleagues believe.”
The controversy over the Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum in African American studies is even more complicated, since K-12 education does not have the same constitutional speech protections as higher education: While viewpoint diversity is a central purpose of college and university education, the law recognizes that K-12 public education has the legitimate function of inculcating values befitting responsible democratic citizenship. (Of course, just what those specific values should be in a diverse society is one of the bones of contention.)
In a Politico column, Joshua Zeitz argues that while works on “intersectionality, reparations and the carceral state” are indeed political and polarizing, they don’t amount to “indoctrination” because reading texts doesn’t mean agreeing with them any more than reading Ross Douthat’s New York Times column means becoming a Republican.
But the issue isn’t exposing students to polemical texts; it’s offering them an ideologically skewed and limited reading selection (Ta-Nehisi Coates but not McWhorter, for example) and presenting it as the full range of reflection on the African American story and experience.
“The people opposed to the new version are thrown by their sense that the hard-left take on race issues is truth rather than an opinion,” McWhorter told me by email earlier this month:
On the other hand, the New College of Florida controversy continues to make the DeSantis administration look like the bully in the room, with the recently installed pro-DeSantis majority on the board of trustees swooping in with promises to overhaul the financially struggling school and turn it into a new Hillsdale College—Hillsdale being not only a Christian school but also one with famously right-wing politics.
On February 1, New College president Patricia Okker—who had initially appeared to be on friendly terms with the new trustees but went on to criticize their “hostile takeover” rhetoric toward the school—was summarily dismissed from her post following a vote by the trustees. Her replacement: close DeSantis ally Richard Corcoran, a former Florida House speaker and former Florida Education Commissioner, who is active in a Hillsdale College-affiliated charter school initiative. Oh, and he was hired as interim president of New College at more than twice Okker’s compensation, which doesn’t exactly scream good-faith reform.
Meanwhile, new trustee Eddie Speir, a Christian private academy director, had wanted to go beyond removing Okker: in a blogpost before his first board of trustees meeting, he had suggested “terminating all contracts for faculty, staff and administration and immediately rehiring those faculty, staff and administration who fit in the new financial and business model.”
An added wrinkle in this saga is that the school really isn’t the caricature of academic wokeness run amok that Chris Rufo and others from Team DeSantis have made it out to be. For instance, while independent study projects make up a large portion of its curriculum, these projects seem, for the most part, solidly grounded in traditional academic subjects.
Dueling Illiberalisms
So there we have it: It’s the “Flight 93 election,” academia edition. The argument on the right is that things are so bad, only red-state politicians can save the academy, and they must save it by banning “woke” ideas and axing “woke” programs. You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.
Kaminer, who has watched decades of social and institutional censorship campaigns from the left, sees a profound irony in the current “power plays on the right”:
They’re saying, This is so crucial, so important, so essential for the preservation of American culture or American democracy that we cannot afford to give the people who oppose us the rights that we want to enjoy. And that’s what the left has been saying for years: We can’t afford to let them speak because their speech is a form of discrimination, and we can’t afford to let that continue.
One may debate just how bad things have gotten in the academy.
But in any case, the notion that political pressures on the right can “fix” the damage from political pressures on the left is deeply misguided. The most likely result of these interventions in Florida—and similar legislation now being proposed in other states following Florida’s example—will be further polarization and wagon-circling. The left will brush aside critiques of speech suppression by institutional power and cultural diktat, arguing that only censorship by the government matters. The right will defend political interventions as the only way to curb the progressive stewards of culture and academe. This particular culture war may turn into a race to the bottom between the “red” and the “blue”: legally and institutionally coercive crusades to squash “wokeness” on the “red” side, knee-jerk defenses of “woke” institutional and cultural coercion on the “blue” side.
Are there enough people of goodwill to work across partisan divides to defend free expression, promote open debate, and counter the illiberal drift in academic and cultural institutions through speech, advocacy, reform, legal challenges, and other hard work? The survival of an open society may depend on the answer.
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