It's been awhile since I've discussed how bad things are here in Florida so let's check in on what damage Ron DeSantis is dropping on our citizenry lately.
Let's look at DeSantis' push of an "intellectual freedom survey" that doesn't really do a thing for freedom (via USA Today/Tallahassee Democrat (paywall)):
The questionnaire to survey students and faculty was required by a bill (HB 233) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law last June.
The bill was promoted as a way to safeguard open inquiry and intellectual diversity on state campuses. Opponents of the survey filed a federal suit in Tallahassee over it...
The email that went out reads as follows:
Dear Employee:
You are invited to participate in a survey on Intellectual Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity. This survey is designed to assess the extent to which you feel free to express your beliefs and viewpoints on campus. This survey is being conducted by the Florida Board of Governors as part of implementation of House Bill 233, which passed during the 2021 legislative session.
Please follow this link (or copy and paste the link into your web browser) to complete the brief survey, which should take 5-10 minutes: [The link to the survey was here]
Your participation in this survey is completely voluntary. You are free to not answer any question or withdraw from the survey at any time. No personally identifiable information will be associated with your responses. This survey is anonymous, and responses will only be reported at the group level, not at the individual level.
Should you have any questions, please contact the Florida Board of Governors.
Thank you for your time and consideration...
So why are people opposed to this seemingly harmless survey (from another USA Today/Tallahassee Democrat article by James Call in October 2021)?
The United Faculty of Florida, the labor union representing faculty and graduate assistants at the state's public and private colleges and universities, argues in federal court that the measure will gather those facts and data in an unconstitutional manner.
In papers filed Aug. 4 (2021) in Tallahassee, UFF lists numerous violations of free speech protections and rights of assembly in just the law’s anti-shielding provision. A student who finds they have been shielded from what they perceived is speech that is offensive to others may file suit to “vindicate” their rights.
“We cannot imagine a scenario where the survey will go well,” said J. Andrew Gothard, the UFF president. The state has submitted a motion to dismiss the suit, and UFF has filed a rebuttal...
This survey and the bill supporting it raises more conflict over "offensive" speech than it claims to prevent. For example a Proud Boy / Oath Keeper student on a college campus could claim his "speech" about Replacement Theory was wrongly suppressed, and file suit to have his racist Anti-Semitic hate speech shoved down the throats of everyone offended by it.
DeSantis' office may claim the survey is "voluntary" and unenforceable, and the Governor's office already has the ability to cut funding to any universities giving DeSantis the power to punish those schools he feels are not performing how he sees fit:
The survey provisions neither explain nor put any limitations on how the governor, Florida Legislature or boards might use the results of the survey... Remarks by Gov. DeSantis in support of HB 233 indicate that results will be used to cut funding from public colleges and universities if survey results suggest that a given school has not done enough to foster "intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity..."
If anybody lived through the era of Loyalty Oaths and political witch hunts (called the Johns Committee) here in Florida, welcome to the sequel.
I know a number of academic librarians at the state universities, and I sent out a message this week inquiring if they'd received those surveys as they are faculty (I also asked if I could see one, but no one shared). Some replied back that they got the 2021 survey which they agreed was meager but filled with "leading questions" (questions phrased in such a way that a biased response in the positive was the only way to answer it and still feel clean). They haven't gotten this year's survey but they've heard it's going to be more detailed. My fellow librarians are being told by the teachers' unions not to answer the surveys at all, but you know political pressure will come down if no one does fill them.
And that's what DeSantis is doing to higher education. Wanna see what he's doing to our K-12 schools? (via Ana Ceballos and Sommer Brugal at the Tampa Bay Times (paywall)):
Several South Florida high school educators are alarmed that a new state civics initiative designed to prepare students to be “virtuous citizens” is infused with a Christian and conservative ideology after a three-day training session in Broward County last week.
Teachers who spoke to the Times/Herald said they don’t object to the state’s new standards for civics, but they do take issue with how the state wants them to be taught.
“It was very skewed,” said Barbara Segal, a 12th-grade government teacher at Fort Lauderdale High School. “There was a very strong Christian fundamentalist way toward analyzing different quotes and different documents. That was concerning.”
The civics training, which is part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative, underscores the tension that has been building around education, making classrooms into battlegrounds for politically contentious issues. In Florida, DeSantis and the Republican-led Legislature have pushed policies that limit what schools can teach about race, gender identity and certain aspects of history...
Those dynamics came into full view last week, when trainers told Broward teachers the nation’s founders did not desire a strict separation of state and church, downplayed the role the colonies and later the United States had in the history of slavery in America and pushed a judicial theory, favored by legal conservatives like DeSantis, that requires people to interpret the Constitution as the framers intended it, not as a living, evolving document, according to three educators who attended the training...
Just to point out how wrong DeSantis' trainers are: They are ignoring the Founders' "No Religious Test" provision written into the Constitution itself; they are ignoring how slavery dominated our political debates in the 1800s to where we had a freaking CIVIL WAR about it; and they are pushing an "Originalist" interpretation of the Constitution that ignores the reality it can be amended and evolve under the guidance of current and future generations. Back to the article:
The civics training is the latest effort in a long line of education policies that aims to fight what DeSantis and conservative education reformers say are “woke ideologies” in public schools.
It also provides a snapshot of how national groups, including Hillsdale College, a politically influential private Christian college in southern Michigan, are working with the DeSantis administration to reshape education in the state. The goal is to put a greater emphasis on civics than on socially divisive issues such as race and gender identity, which DeSantis has said is an effort to reorient teaching away from “indoctrination and back towards education.” But to several educators who went through the state’s training, it felt like a broader effort to impose a conservative view on historical events...
This is essentially the next stage in DeSantis' and the Far Right Conservatives ongoing war on Facts. It doesn't help that their main source of "historical facts" happens to be a Hillsdale College accused of racism and religious extremism (via at Kathryn Joyce at Salon.com):
In an era of book bans, crusades against teaching about racism, and ever-widening proposals to punish teachers and librarians, Hillsdale is not just a central player, but a ready-made solution for conservatives who seek to reclaim an educational system they believe was ceded decades ago to liberal interests. The college has become a leading force in promoting a conservative and overtly Christian reading of American history and the U.S. Constitution. It opposes progressive education reforms in general and contemporary scholarship on inequality in particular. It has featured lectures describing the Jan. 6 insurrection as a hoax and Vladimir Putin as a "hero to populist conservatives around the world."
Quick interruption: THIS COLLEGE IS PROMOTING A WARMONGERING, SEXIST/RACIST SON OF A BITCH IN PUTIN. They are on the side of an Imperialist Russia monster responsible for war, famine, rape, and death.
And as Republicans move into a new phase of their long-game efforts to privatize public education, Hillsdale has become a key resource. Across the nation, conservative officials from state leaders to insurgent school board members are clamoring to implement Hillsdale's proudly anti-woke lesson plans, including the "patriotic education" premises of its recently released 1776 Curriculum, or add to its growing network of affiliated classical charter schools...
These linked trends amount to a vision of things to come if Republicans win their current war on public education. And war is how they see it. As one Republican leader promised at Hillsdale last spring, if conservatives can "get education right," they'll "win" the country "back." Or as Hillsdale's president himself likes to say, "Teaching is our trade; also, I confess, it's our weapon."
This isn't about education, this isn't about the facts, this isn't about civics or accuracy in history. This is about war that the Far Right are waging against the rest of the world that doesn't believe the same bullshit they believe. It's about promoting a mythology of "racial harmony" where things would be so much better if Whites kept their privilege, (White) Men were allowed to be manly, the feminists stayed in the kitchen, everyone knew their place and it would all be 1850 again.
DeSantis has been screaming about "Critical Race Theory" and "Wokeism" but he's using that as an excuse to indoctrinate the next generation into religious/racist ignorant extremism.
Our schools are now battlegrounds, and the Republicans want scorched earth to be our national legacy.
Don't let them win.
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