DeSantis’ tech bros take aim at Florida’s universities

UNITED STATES

Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, has ordered an audit of the state’s public universities to ensure their courses are not “ideological”.

The audit, or “deep dive”, will be carried out by one of several newly created agency-specific teams modelled on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

DOGE is presently investigating federal departments and has cancelled billions of dollars’ worth of contracts and fired tens of thousands of federal government workers.

DeSantis told a press conference recently that the team will report to Manny Diaz Jr, Florida’s education commissioner.

Diaz, who also spoke at the press conference, drew a direct line between the audit of university courses and Florida’s banning of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and officers, and the banning of the teaching of critical race theory in “culture wars” fought by DeSantis since taking office six years ago.

These programmes, Diaz asserted, “have no educational value”, as was the case, he added, for 57% of the universities’ general education courses, though he did not give specifics.

“The programmes at our higher education institutions should provide our students with a strong foundation rooted in the principles of our country, what it is founded upon, which leads students to a long-lasting career.

“While other states have pushed students into degrees, [including], as the governor often likes to mention, in ‘Zombie Studies’, Florida is focused on the workforce and the needs of our economies,” said Diaz.

AI-identified inefficiencies

As with the DOGE run by Musk at the federal level, Florida’s DOGE teams will use artificial intelligence to “identify and eliminate unnecessary spending, programmes, or contracts within the agency”, says DeSantis’ executive order establishing the state teams.

Mindful, perhaps, of the chaos that has ensued in Washington, including, as University World News has reported, the cancelling of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of contracts by DOGE in USAID and cuts and firings in other federal agencies, some of which had to be reversed and others blocked by various courts, DeSantis has not given the DOGE teams the authority to fire state workers or university staff or faculty.

Rather, they are to make recommendations to the appropriate state authority.

Referencing DeSantis’ statements about the need to be careful stewards of public funds and the need to cut waste and inefficiencies, Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic Party, said in response: “Ron DeSantis needs to shut his damn mouth.

“Republicans have been in total control of Florida’s state government for nearly 30 years, and he wants to talk about government waste?” she said in a press release, before pointing to the fact that DeSantis “illegally spent millions of taxpayer dollars” to campaign against state constitutional amendments that would have legalised marijuana and to protect access to abortion.

“Don’t lecture us on wasting taxpayer dollars,” said Fried.

Financial support for universities

In the 24 February press conference, DeSantis touted his and the legislature’s support for Florida’s public universities, noting that university presidents had recently been given “a pot of money” to recruit new faculty.

“If you have somebody that’s good, like at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], you can offer them money [that is, a signing bonus]; you can get them a position,” he said.

The governor, who has spent years bashing public universities for their perceived liberal bias and ideological conformity, then said: “We don’t let current faculty blackball [that is, reject] anyone because they don’t toe the ideological line.

“We want people that are going to bring different perspectives, particularly with how stale academia has gotten with just the intellectual vapidity you’ve seen, where they’re [the faculty] are basically parroting similar ideology.”

After noting that protests by what he called “left-wing students and faculty” against his recent appointment of Jeanette Nunez, Florida’s former Republican lieutenant governor, as interim president of Florida International University confirmed “that she was the right choice”, DeSantis said the “deep dive” into all facets of the “university operations and spending” will include “examining courses, programming, and staff at the institution”.

“There are certain subjects that … Look, if you want to study some of this, go to Cal Berkeley [University of California, Berkeley, which is well known for its left-wing politics], to some of these other places. We don’t really want to be doing some of this stuff in Florida,” said DeSantis.

By “stuff”, attendees at the press conference knew DeSantis meant diversity, equity and inclusion courses, critical race theory, feminist courses, Black history, and other identity courses, all of which he routinely lumps together under the rubric of “cultural Marxism”.

Likely legal challenges

The “deep dive” into the ideology of courses being taught on Florida’s public campuses is not unprecedented. Public universities were investigated during the McCarthy period in the 1950s for allowing the teaching of communism.

In the past few years, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, South Dakota, and several other states have passed laws banning the teaching of critical race theory and have given state authorities the power to investigate the ideological content in courses.

Under DeSantis, Florida has passed laws banning the teaching of critical race theory and others requiring professors and students to self-report their ideology.

In defending the state’s right to control what is said in its public lecture halls, Florida argued in court in November 2011 that “because university professors are public employees, they are simply the state’s mouthpieces in university classrooms” and, therefore, that the “state has an unfettered authority to limit what professors may say in class”.

Judge Mark E Walker of the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida was unmoved by this argument and put an injunction on the so-called ‘Stop Woke Act’.

Jared Norland, Florida advocacy director for UnidosUS, a Latino advocacy group, said the governor’s comment that “We don’t really want to be doing this stuff in Florida” takes aim at “diversity and ethnicity courses, such as those focusing on the Latino, Black, or women’s experience in America”.

Such an aim will almost certainly invite a court challenge because it runs counter to decades of Supreme Court decisions concerning academic freedom. For example, the 1957 case of Sweezy v New Hampshire (Sweezy), which held that professors could not be held in contempt by a state senate committee investigating courses for communist influence for refusing to answer questions about their political beliefs.

Professor Paul Sweezy was a Marxist economist teaching at the University of New Hampshire. In his concurring opinion, Associate Justice Frankfurter divided academic freedom into “the four essential freedoms of a university”. Among them, he listed: “To determine for itself on academic grounds . . . what may be taught” and “how it shall be taught.”

A decade later, Sweezy was confirmed in Keyishian v Board of Regents (Keyishian), in which the Supreme Court ruled that loyalty oaths like the one Harry Keysihian, a professor at the State University of New York in Buffalo, refused to sign, were unconstitutional.

The court asserted: “Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us, and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”

The judges who voted in the majority in Keyishian seemed to have anticipated criticisms like DeSantis’, which are aimed at the humanities and social sciences. After stating that no “field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made”, they state that this is particularly “true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes.

“Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study, and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilisation will stagnate and die.”

White-washing

Norland echoed Keyishian, which called the classroom “a marketplace of ideas”, when he pointed out the irony in the fact that DeSantis, who counts himself a strong supporter of the free marketplace, is using DOGE to rein in professors.

“Anyone who’s gone through a college programme knows that students are the ones who choose the courses they want to take. A professor cannot teach a course to a class of zero,” he said.

Norland also noted the irony of DeSantis wanting the free market to determine everything but not allowing “the student market [to] dictate what courses are appropriate or not appropriate or not worth attending”.

Instead, DeSantis is attacking liberal arts degrees and critical thinking, said Norland.

Norland is concerned about the impact the cuts he anticipates in Latino studies will have for Hispanic students, the majority of whom are first-generation college and university students.

Norland said these students are seeing their culture erased on their campuses. “It’s okay to talk about this, but not talk about that, with ‘that’ being the experience of Latinos (or Blacks or women),” he noted.

American culture writ large is that everything good in America was “made by some white guy somewhere, working hard in a garage. We ignore the contributions of other cultures,” he said.

“A lot of people say we don’t want to focus on race. But they do an awful lot of whitewashing not to focus on race,” Norland told University World News.

_{Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.}