Florida is Trying to Erase Progressive Ideas By Cutting Sociology

Trustees at Florida International University marked for removal 22 courses that are heavily focused on social sciences.Credit...Martina Tuaty for The New York Times

 

By Vimal Patel

 The New York Times

Several years ago, to attract more students, Jean Muteba Rahier spiced up the name of his introduction to the anthropology of religion course. He called it Myth, Ritual and Mysticism.

Now Dr. Rahier, a professor at Florida International University in Miami, believes the name was perhaps too provocative for higher education in the Sunshine State.

Dr. Rahier’s class, which was flagged as having “unproven, speculative or exploratory content,” was one of nearly two dozen courses university trustees voted in September to remove from a core set of classes that students must choose from to graduate.

The slashing of core classes across the state, which has often been based on course titles and descriptions, is meant to comply with a state law passed last year that curbed “identity politics” in the curriculum. The law also bars classes from the core that “distort significant historical events” or that include theories that “systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.” 

Florida has become a testing ground for a raft of conservative policies meant to limit or expunge what Republicans describe as “woke” indoctrination in the state’s schools and colleges. Faculty and student critics have said this latest effort infringes on university autonomy and could reduce students’ exposure to courses they believe are necessary for a well-rounded education. Academic freedom advocates worry it marks a new, more organized approach.

Rather than trying to regulate what a professor can and cannot say — a legally questionable tactic — the new strategy is taking aim at entire courses.

 

The state’s scrutiny of the curriculum in the public colleges could serve as a model for Republican efforts in other states, as colleges are bracing for the return to power of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has vowed “to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left.”

Already, lawmakers elsewhere have turned their attention to universities’ curriculums.

The Wyoming Senate this year passed a bill, rejected by the House, that would have defunded gender studies programs at the University of Wyoming. At Texas A&M University, the Board of Regents directed the president this month to eliminate “low-producing” programs, which included an L.G.B.T.Q. minor targeted by a lawmaker. At the University of North Texas, administrators removed terms like “race” and “gender” from some course titles, a move some faculty believe was in response to a state law banning diversity, equity and inclusion offices on campuses. 

The 22 courses that trustees marked for removal at Florida International University are heavily focused on social sciences, including Introduction to East Asia, Intercultural/Interracial Communication and Labor and Globalization. More than two dozen other courses updated their descriptions to comply with the law. Similar efforts — though the exact number of courses affected wasn’t immediately clear — played out across the state’s public universities.

 

Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, said the effort was fluid and wouldn’t be final until the Board of Governors, which oversees the 12-school system, meets in January.

“When the state begins to regulate what we can teach at the level of the university,” said Katie Rainwater, whose class, Sociology of Gender, is marked for removal from the core curriculum, “then we have to question whether the university can serve its social function, which is to be a place of free inquiry.”

 

In an interview, Mr. Rodrigues, an ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis, rejected the academic freedom and autonomy concerns voiced by faculty members, arguing that the effort doesn’t specify what a professor should be teaching in class. 

“We’re a marketplace of ideas,” he said. “That’s what a university is. But the manager that runs the marketplace determines where within the marketplace the ideas will be housed.”

Mr. Rodrigues said he wanted to make general education “broad and foundational” and more standardized across the state, and doing so would make transferring credits for students coming from the state’s community colleges more seamless.

But Mr. Rodrigues also said that Florida was trying to address a concern among the public that higher education was “more about indoctrination than education,” citing a Gallup poll that found Americans’ confidence in higher education had plunged in recent years.

Scott Yenor, with the conservative Claremont Institute, has written that the core at many schools has become increasingly bloated, and argued that Florida is “bringing coherence and purpose to general education.” 

Earlier in the year, the Florida Board of Governors eliminated Principles of Sociology from the core requirements, alarming sociology professors. The state’s education commissioner, Manny Diaz Jr., said at the time that sociology had “been hijacked by left-wing activists” and no longer served its purpose as a general education course.

 

Professors said they had not been involved in the decisions, which have flouted the traditional process for making curricular changes, though university officials said they had been.

The courses can still be taken as electives. But faculty worry that enrollments could plunge, financially hurting the departments that house them.

“They’re starving undergraduate enrollment in our courses,” said Dr. Rainwater, the sociology professor. “The worry is they’ll then be able to take away whole programs and justify it by saying courses aren’t filling up.”

Dr. Rahier’s anthropology course, which he began teaching in the 1990s, would regularly attract more than 100 students, he said. 

“You have bureaucrats who are trying to interpret the laws,” he said of university staff and trustees. “They had a problem with the terms supernatural, mysticism and even myth. In anthropology of religion, we talk about religious myth because there’s no religion without myth. They have a nonspecialist’s understanding of the terms they’re judging.”

The slashing of general education in Florida suggests a broader shift — from local school board battles and speech crackdowns to a more technocratic push to transform education.

PEN America, a free-expression group, said efforts to target professors’ speech have declined in recent years. Bills it describes as “educational gag orders” — government mandates on teaching and learning — reached a peak in 2022, when 144 were introduced, compared with only 56 this year.

Some of the conservative efforts have faced legal problems. In Florida, a federal judge declared unconstitutional parts of the state’s Stop WOKE act, which prohibited schools from instruction that could make students feel uncomfortable about a historical event because of their race.

Adam Kissel, a conservative and former Education Department official, has argued for a different approach. 

“A public college cannot and should not control the viewpoints expressed in the classroom,” he wrote. “Instead, a public college or a state legislature should assert its prerogative over the content of the curriculum at various levels.”

In an interview, Mr. Kissel further made a distinction between “viewpoint discrimination versus content accountability.” With the former, “the courts will slap you down every time.” The latter? “As a matter of curriculum, that’s within the authority of different levels of leadership to responsibly demand.”

But some professors detect a subtler form of ideas policing by the government.

Tania Cepero López, a faculty union leader, isn’t a caricature of a leftist university professor. An English instructor at Florida International University, she has voted for Republicans and is married to a conservative Republican.

She said she had not changed anything about her classes, but she said she knows many faculty members who had changed course descriptions and lesson plans to avoid attracting attention.

She has watched in horror in recent years, she said, as she saw the same government interference into education in the United States that she experienced in her native Cuba.

“These decisions are coming from the state, from people who are not teaching, who are not in the classrooms, who don’t know who our students are,” she said. “That’s how indoctrination happens. That’s how censorship happens.”