A tidal wave of state legislation to diminish diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts intended to help recruit and retain underrepresented students in higher education has resulted in only a handful of laws to date, according to a Chronicle analysis.
Of the 38 bills in 21 states that The Chronicle is tracking, five have been signed into law and one awaits the governor’s signature. With many state legislative sessions done for the year, 26 bills have so far failed somewhere along the legislative process, although they could return in future sessions.
But critics of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, who argue that such programs are costly to taxpayers, discriminatory, and infringe on academic freedom, claimed major victories in Florida and Texas, where DEI offices at public colleges could soon close.
Many of the anti-DEI bills around the country took their cues from model state legislation proposed in January by the conservative Goldwater and Manhattan Institutes, which argued in favor of dismantling what they call the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy at public colleges by banning DEI offices, staff, and programs, diversity statements, mandatory diversity training, and preferences in hiring or admission based on characteristics such as race and gender. The authors of the model legislation said that typical DEI training “rejects the basic American premise that everyone should be treated equally” and that DEI “has morphed into a state-subsidized ideology of grievance, racial division, and anti-Americanism.”
Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and one of the authors of the model legislation, expressed wonder at how quickly state legislators have taken up the legislation to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education. “Going from zero to that in less than a half a year, I think it can’t be understated how important it is,” Shapiro said.
Defenders of DEI programs crowded into state capitols across the country over the past several months — including as recently as this week in Ohio — to protest the bills. Some waited hours to testify that DEI offices provide vital support to underrepresented students, including students of color, first-generation college students, and students with disabilities. They warned that states that eliminate DEI activities will lose students, employees, and grants, even as many colleges are struggling to recruit and retain students.
Politicians have turned DEI into a buzzword, said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors. “They mischaracterize what DEI does in order to rile up a base that is fueled by fear,” Mulvey said. It is a cynical effort, she said, “to create a boogeyman for political purposes.”
The bills to restrict DEI vary across states. In Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, declared in January that it’s where “woke goes to die,” public colleges will be forbidden, as of July 1, from spending federal or state funds on programs or activities that advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, this week signed into law Senate Bill 17, effective next year, which will ban diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff, diversity statements, mandatory diversity training, and giving preference to candidates based on characteristics including race and sex. In North Dakota, a law banning diversity statements and certain kinds of mandatory diversity training will take effect on August 1, while in Tennessee a law banning mandatory implicit bias training took effect in May.
In at least two other states, battles over DEI in higher ed are still raging. In Ohio, state senators voted Thursday to approve a state budget bill that included provisions from Senate Bill 83, which targets diversity efforts. In Wisconsin, Robin J. Vos, speaker of the State Assembly, threatened to cut $32 million in funding to the University of Wisconsin system over two years, about what the system would spend on diversity, equity, and inclusion measures.
“I hope we have the ability to eliminate that spending,” Vos told the Associated Press. “The university should have already chosen to redirect it to something that is more productive and more-broadly supported.”
On Wednesday, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said he would refuse to sign a budget with such a cut to the university system, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
Even states that haven’t adopted legislation to restrict DEI have felt the impact of the rhetoric. This week, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville announced it would close its diversity, equity, and inclusion division and reallocate those staff and resources to other offices.
Charles F. Robinson, the university’s chancellor, said in an email to the campus that the goal of the “realignment” of university resources was for the departments to work together to “expand programs around access, opportunity, and developing a culture of belonging for all students and employees.”
Public colleges in Florida, Oklahoma, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Mississippi have all been asked to provide an accounting of their spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And several state universities and university systems stopped the use of diversity statements even without legislation in place, including those in Idaho, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin. Diversity statements, which ask job applicants and employees seeking promotions to describe how they have contributed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in their research, teaching, or service, are controversial even within academe, with critics arguing that they serve as political or ideological litmus tests or that they violate the First Amendment.
Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, expects the challenges to diversity officers’ work to continue. “We don’t anticipate that the attacks are going to slow down,” Russell said. She urges those who support diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, including those in the corporate and nonprofit sectors, to come forward and join the fight. “We know that they care about this work, and now is not the time to sit on the sidelines.”
Politicians have turned DEI into a buzzword. “They mischaracterize what DEI does in order to rile up a base that is fueled by fear.”
Critics of the legislation expect legal challenges to be filed. Many argue that the new laws are intentionally vaguely worded so as to create a chilling effect.
In Florida, for example, Senate Bill 266, effective July 1, says that public colleges “may not expend any state or federal funds to promote, support, or maintain any programs or campus activities that … advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
And in some states, the anti-DEI legislation has come alongside measures to weaken tenure, contributing to an atmosphere where faculty members feel that their jobs are vulnerable, no matter their status.
Professors in Florida, Texas, and even states without new laws, have said they are thinking twice about what they will teach because they fear drawing unwanted attention to themselves or their institutions.
While Florida’s Senate Bill 266 states that general-education core courses “may not distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics … or is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities,” Texas’ Senate Bill 17 specifies that its restrictions do not apply to classroom instruction, research, or creative work.
Still, Pat Heintzelman, president of the Texas Faculty Association, has decided to scratch William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor from her syllabus because she is worried that a student or a student’s parent might object to how the authors write about race. “I don’t know anybody that’s trying to indoctrinate students,” Heintzelman said. “We’re trying to teach students how to think for themselves, how to think critically.”
Anna L. Peterson, a religion professor at the University of Florida at Gainesville, refuses to change what she’s teaching but also recognizes that some of her colleagues — including many without tenure — don’t feel that they have that luxury. “That’s how authoritarianism works, in part through the creation of fear and anticipatory obedience,” said Peterson. As a result, she said, “you win a lot of your goals without having to legally enforce them.”
Many college leaders have been notably quiet — at least in public — in the face of anti-DEI legislation, to the great frustration of some faculty members, although some leaders may have lobbied behind the scenes. Ohio State University’s Board of Trustees’ statement against Senate Bill 83 was a notable exception, and in Utah the sponsor of a bill that would have eliminated DEI offices and staff at public colleges replaced it with a study bill after criticism, including from higher-ed leaders in the state. Some college leaders in states that have not seen anti-DEI legislation have also spoken up.
On college campuses in Texas and Florida, faculty members said administrators have given little to no direction on how the laws will be carried out. Peterson, for example, said she receives emails all the time with guidance and resources on how to deal with artificial intelligence. But on Florida’s new laws, she is still waiting.
Alice Min, a student at the University of Texas at Austin’s Law School, has been working with Texas Students for DEI because she found her school’s work on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging valuable. When she first arrived at the law school last year, she didn’t understand a lot of things that were second nature to her many classmates who had parents or other family members who were lawyers, such as how to study for a law-school exam and how to network.
While the law school offered large workshops on such topics for everyone, the DEI office provided smaller workshops for underrepresented students, Min said. “It’s not preferential treatment,” she said. “It’s a chance for people who don’t have this general knowledge and wealth and connections, who don’t have nepotism, to potentially be on an even playing field.”
She appreciated having a place where students of color can talk to others who can relate to their struggles. “It’s also just nice to know that people do care and want you to feel like you belong,” Min said.
Now that she expects the office to close, Min said she wishes she had used it more often when she had the chance.
Andrea Marquez teaches management in the business college of the University of Texas at San Antonio. She never thought of critical race theory as connected to her work in the classroom.
But in the spring of 2022, Marquez, an assistant professor, realized that might not be how state lawmakers saw it. At a meeting in response to faculty members’ concerns about the lieutenant governor’s goal of ending tenure, she realized just how expansively and imprecisely politicians were applying the term “critical race theory.” “Oh, wow,” she thought, some of the topics she discusses in class “could potentially ruffle feathers if you wanted to interpret it through this ‘You’re teaching CRT’ lens.” The realization gave her pause.
She thought about her sections of management strategy, a course required for most business majors. Marquez follows a case-study model, and she uses one case that concerns a Black entrepreneur in the legal-cannabis industry. The case includes a section about how he has tried to reverse one of the impacts of the war on drugs by fostering more opportunities in the industry for people of color.
Marquez considered swapping out the case study. That’s not a simple switch, she says — her course includes just four of them, and together they must cover all the right material. She also thought it was important that the cases feature a diverse set of business leaders in terms of gender and race.
She decided to keep the case in her course. This spring, she ended up describing her internal debate about it to her students, “just to maybe provoke a little thought about a slippery slope.”
So, Marquez stuck to her guns. But her second-guessing reflects a shift happening at public colleges all over Texas and elsewhere. As a number of conservative state legislatures consider restrictions on teaching about race, some faculty members are increasingly nervous.
Sowing confusion and fear among faculty members about what they can and cannot teach may be the underlying and main goal of the curricular legislation as a package.
The Texas Senate passed a bill this spring that would prohibit professors from compelling or trying to compel students “to adopt a belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief.” The Legislature adjourned before the House could take up the proposal, but it could be revived in a future session. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, recently signed into law a bill that prohibits general-education courses from being “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States,” among other things.
Critics of these bills say that they are intentionally vague and misleading in order to encourage self-censorship and self-policing among professors and administrators.
“Sowing confusion and fear among faculty members about what they can and cannot teach,” says the American Association of University Professors’ recently released preliminary report on academic freedom in Florida, “may be the underlying and main goal of the curricular legislation as a package.”
The bills are also part of a broader array of legislation that has unnerved many professors. Lawmakers’ concurrent efforts to end tenure and eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion — or DEI — programs have made it harder for faculty to believe that adhering to the letter of the law will be enough to keep them out of trouble.
That’s left many feeling vulnerable and worried. When The Chronicle asked instructors to share their experiences in an online form, some were uncomfortable speaking about the situation, or would do so only if they were not named. Most instructors don’t have tenure, and some face additional scrutiny because of their gender identity, their race, or the courses they teach. Many of the professors who did talk shared stories of colleagues self-censoring or otherwise getting the message they should pre-emptively change their teaching if it touched on race. University leaders in states where lawmakers have challenged DEI programs and tenure, meanwhile, have been largely silent. For professors trying to figure out what, if anything, to do at this intense and uncertain moment, it can be difficult to know where to turn for guidance.
One of the people trying to help professors navigate the confusion is Nicholas R. Seabrook, chair of the political-science department at the University of North Florida and a public critic of DeSantis’s higher-education policies. “A lot of these bills have been phrased in a way that’s purposefully vague,” Seabrook says. “It places faculty in a tough position, where you have this kind of broad, sweeping language without a lot of specifics.” Those specifics, he adds, are likely to become clearer with time and through legal challenges.
Adding to the swirl of uncertainty in Florida is the Individual Freedom Act, also known as the Stop WOKE Act, which sets forth strict limits on what professors can say about race in the classroom. DeSantis signed the act into law in 2022, but it remains blocked from enforcement in public higher education after a federal judge declared it “positively dystopian.”
DeSantis in 2021 signed a law allowing students to record classroom lectures as evidence of faculty members’ political bias, and a second law signed in April establishes a post-tenure review process in Florida. It all amounts, Seabrook says, to a climate of “hostility” toward higher education in his state — one that’s led faculty members to continually question whether they’re abiding by the law.
Seabrook says he’s told faculty members in his department that they shouldn’t fear breaking the law when they teach. “These bills seem to be taking on a caricature,” he says, of liberal professors indoctrinating students. “If you’re not doing that, if you’re teaching these concepts in a way that is appropriate, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.”
You have academic freedom; it’s your right as a faculty member to teach your classes as you see fit based on your expertise.
Yet Seabrook has witnessed a pre-emptive defense among his colleagues to what the AAUP has called a systematic effort by lawmakers “to dictate and enforce conformity” with their agenda. One professor came to Seabrook this past academic year, concerned that the phrase “critical race theory” appeared in her syllabus for a course outside of the general-education curriculum. The theory, which is rooted in legal scholarship and explores the effects of systemic racism, is a key part of the academic literature in that scholar’s area of expertise. She told Seabrook she felt she’d be doing her students a disservice if she did not expose them to it as one of multiple perspectives in the area. Did Seabrook think she should remove the phrase from the syllabus?
He assured the faculty member that she would have his support as chair, and that he believed she would also have the university’s backing. “You have academic freedom; it’s your right as a faculty member to teach your classes as you see fit based on your expertise,” Seabrook says he counseled. But he also injected a note of caution: “You should exercise your best judgment in terms of how you should approach not just what’s in your syllabus, but also what you say in the classroom.”
The faculty member tried to strike a balance: removing the syllabus reference to critical race theory, and continuing to discuss it in class, while also making it especially clear to students “that this was not being presented as something they had to believe, that they would not be required to say that critical race theory was accurate or was the only perspective that we can use to understand this,” according to Seabrook. Others in his department, he says, have been even less willing to talk in class about topics like critical race theory.
Some faculty members who teach about race feel they’re under an extra layer of scrutiny. Among them is David A. Canton, an associate professor of history at the University of Florida and the director of its African American-studies program. “As a professor, you start doing double takes: Am I making sure that I’m showing students multiple perspectives?” Canton says.
This fall, when he teaches his “Why Sports Matter” class, which focuses on race and politics in American sport, Canton won’t change any of his readings or assignments. He knows he incorporates differing viewpoints into his classes — students have said they don’t know where he stands politically. Still, he thinks, he can’t be too careful.
Paul Ortiz has seen the same kind of self-policing that Seabrook describes, and borrows a phrase from political theory to describe it: “anticipatory obedience.”
“The state doesn’t even have to ban anything, frankly, because people are afraid and they’re not going to step out of line because they’re afraid of the consequences,” he says.
Some department chairs in Florida, he says, have told their faculty members not to assign anything with the word “race” in the syllabus. Those instructors then seek help from Ortiz, a professor of history at the University of Florida and immediate past president of the flagship’s chapter of the statewide union.
The state doesn’t even have to ban anything, frankly, because people are afraid and they’re not going to step out of line.
In cases like those, Ortiz tries to remind the chairs of their union-protected right to academic freedom, a right he says generations of academics fought for today’s scholars to exercise. “The union,” he says, “is one of the last lines of defense against the rise of fascism.”
A Black STEM professor at a public university in Florida says he doesn’t think the law will affect his work; he sees his teaching and scholarship as defensible and grounded in data. Still, he asked not to be named for fear of professional repercussions. The professor says he’s observed a lot of “self-censorship” among his colleagues. He’s known professors who have, for instance, decided to remove discussion of the discriminatory practice of redlining from their syllabus or make readings about it optional. “People who don’t want to have a spotlight on their classroom, or a spotlight on the kinds of things that they talk about and teach, they just avoid all of that,” he says. “If you just want to avoid controversy, you say, ‘You know what? I’m just going to go back to the textbook and use the slides that the publisher sent, and everything will be fine.’”
Sarah L. Eddy worries that the barrage of bills aimed at higher ed could cause professors to shift not only what they teach, but how — by frightening them away from using teaching strategies that are designed to combat inequities. Eddy, an associate professor in the biology department and the STEM Transformation Institute at Florida International University, studies inclusive teaching approaches in STEM: methods like adding structure to a course, including content that affirms the identities of marginalized students in STEM, or using an exercise where students choose values they care about from a list and write about their importance, which can help reduce stereotype threat. Evidence suggests such practices benefit students, especially those from underrepresented groups, and more STEM professors have recently begun adopting them. But Eddy fears that trend may reverse.
STEM professors new to inclusive teaching may feel it’s risky, Eddy says. Add in the confusion over what is even within and outside the bounds of new legislation, they say, and the easiest move is to “pull back.”
The laws — or even the possibility of them — also pose a professional threat. Eddy, who is nonbinary and queer, is leaving FIU for a new job at the University of Minnesota, a plan they put in motion because of the so-called Don’t Say Gay legislation, which DeSantis signed in March 2022. The law affects them both personally and in their research, which includes work on how sex and gender are taught in biology.
I don’t know what types of activities I might be asked to stop doing. It’s heartbreaking and terrifying.
Kerry Sinanan, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, is leaving her institution — and the country — partly as a result of recent legislation. “Texas has made it impossible for scholars like me to stay,” says Sinanan, a scholar of trans-Atlantic slavery who was raised in Trinidad and is of East Indian heritage. She was on track to apply for tenure this fall, but wasn’t sure whether she’d be approved in the current political climate, or what restrictions she might face in her scholarship. “I don’t know what types of activities I might be asked to stop doing,” Sinanan says. “It’s heartbreaking and terrifying.”
So Sinanan, who holds Canadian citizenship, will join the University of Winnipeg this fall as an assistant professor. Before she does, though, she’s teaching a summer course at San Antonio in trans-Atlantic literature. And she won’t be changing a thing. That’s because she doesn’t believe that making concessions would ensure her safety. “Anybody who thinks that they can modify what they’re doing and be safe is deeply mistaken, because authoritarianism is never about creating conditions for anybody to be safe,” she says. “It’s about making everybody feel insecure.”
Despite the risks, some professors are determined to stay the course. Shanna L. Peeples teaches doctoral candidates in education, primarily teachers and administrators in K-12 school districts, at West Texas A&M University. She had a singular mind-set in teaching her “Race, Equity, and Leadership in Rural Schools” course this spring: “If this is the last time I teach this, I’m going to make sure that I absolutely bring my best.” For her, that meant equipping her students — many of whom were dealing with resistance from parents and community members in their districts — with tools to have a “productive, good-faith conversation about equity.”
In her own classroom, Peeples prioritized dialogue, too. “Listening to student voice is key, because then it isn’t on you to bring it up,” she says of discussing controversial subjects. “It’s only on you to make a space for it and hold that space.”
Sharon D. Wright Austin, a professor of political science at the University of Florida, will begin teaching a course days after the new Florida law goes into effect July 1.
“The Politics of Race at UF,” which she’ll teach during an online six-week summer session, fulfills diversity- and writing-related requirements that are part of the university’s general-education program. Wright Austin created the course and taught it for the first time in the fall of 2021; this will be her fourth time teaching it. But she said she and her colleagues have yet to get an explanation of which courses violate the law, or whether courses, like hers, that fulfill university-level general-education requirements instead of those for the statewide core will be subject to the state law.
Several readings in the class focus on critical race theory and intersectionality, and Wright Austin teaches about campus incidents that have affected Black, Asian American, and Hispanic/Latino students at Florida. “That is definitely something in which I could possibly be breaking the law,” Wright Austin says. “I don’t know if I am or not, but I’m not changing my class, because I don’t think that I should have to.”
Wright Austin is sticking with the syllabus. Her students will watch a recorded lecture about free-speech and political-correctness controversies on campus, then read summaries of Senate Bill 266, which DeSantis signed in May, and the Stop WOKE Act. They’ll be asked to write a one-page response to a prompt asking whether the two laws are “necessary to prevent the ‘indoctrination’ of college students,” and then respond to two of their peers’ posts on a class discussion board.
As a tenured professor, Wright Austin, who is Black, feels an obligation to teach about race. “For someone with my particular background, who grew up in the South with the kind of environment that I grew up in and that my parents grew up in,” she says, “I would feel like I’m selling out my community if I didn’t talk about race.”
How Wright Austin can and can’t talk about race remains to be seen: Even in Florida, where the target on diversity, equity, and inclusion-related work has been codified into law, there are multiple levels of interpretation — and possibly, of enforcement — between the precise wording of the law and how it plays out in a university classroom.
But the timing of the new law that strips DEI funding and restricts how race is taught in general education underscores that this conservative vision of academe is unlikely to be abandoned anytime soon: A week after signing it, DeSantis announced he was running for president.
When George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, in May 2020, dozens of college leaders issued carefully crafted statements decrying racism and pledging to double down on efforts to make sure everyone on their campuses felt valued and included. The statements were followed by focus groups and task forces and promises to work for systemic change.
Three years later, those commitments are being tested as lawmakers in 20 states try to chip away at or, in some cases, take a sledgehammer to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. This time, most of those leaders have stayed silent. Required diversity statements are being quietly dropped, a few DEI offices rebranded as offices of belonging or community engagement. As the clock ticks on legislative sessions that will expire soon, it’s hard to know how many college leaders who support diversity efforts are trying to influence lawmakers behind the scenes and how many are holding their breath, afraid to risk a political backlash by speaking out.
In either case, faculty, staff, and students who have been fighting to preserve diversity programs are getting increasingly frustrated by the silence.
Nowhere has that tension been more apparent than in Florida, where anti-DEI legislation has been signed into law, and Texas, where legislation that’s working its way toward final approval would ban such offices in public colleges and eliminate DEI training and statements used for hiring and promotion.
In February the University of Texas system issued its only public reaction to the proposed law. The statement, by Kevin P. Eltife, chairman of the Board of Regents, said he welcomed the lawmakers’ scrutiny and all new DEI efforts would be paused. He added that the system was asking all of its campuses to report on their DEI activities so the board could review them.
“To be clear, we welcome, celebrate, and strive for diversity on our campuses in our student and our faculty population,” his statement said. “I also think it’s fair to say that in recent times certain DEI efforts have strayed from the original intent to now imposing requirements and actions that, rightfully so, has raised the concerns of our policymakers about those efforts on campuses across our entire state.”
When DEI activities were suspended, “I was deeply disappointed,” said Karma R. Chávez, a professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies at UT’s flagship campus, in Austin, and a leader in the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “Caving before you’re asked to cave is a bad strategy.” Chávez added that “as a faculty member of color who teaches in ethnic and gender studies, every colleague I’ve spoken to has expressed dismay that they don’t feel the upper administration has their backs.”
College presidents may feel they’re in a no-win situation, where silence is interpreted as complicity and speaking out risks firing or funding cuts, said Michael S. Harris, a professor of education policy and leadership at Southern Methodist University.
Even if they’ve kept their lips sealed publicly, UT administrators have probably been communicating privately with lawmakers, “to either mitigate some of the problems the bills have caused or to stop them altogether,” he said. Still, “it’s problematic that university leaders haven’t pushed back” against two separate bills that would ban diversity offices and would eliminate or restrict tenure for newly hired professors, depending on which versions of the bills survive, Harris said. In order for either to become law, House and Senate members would first have to agree on which versions of the bills they can live with, or come up with a compromise. The legislative session ends on Monday, but a special session could be called.
“It really feels like there’s been a calculation that if we say something, it’ll be worse, so we won’t say anything,” Harris said. “That may be smart in the sense of getting the least-damaging legislation, but gosh, if I were a student or faculty out there protesting, I’d want someone backing me up.”
‘Hyper-Scrutiny’
As of Thursday, 35 bills that would dismantle campus DEI efforts had been introduced in 20 states. Three of those bills had been signed into law, and four have received final legislative approval. Twelve others were considered but failed to pass before the end of the session, leaving 16 that could be considered in the coming weeks.
Some campus leaders, of course, have spoken out, especially at private colleges and in states where diversity efforts aren’t under attack. Christina H. Paxson, president of Brown University, wrote in an opinion essay in The New York Times that state laws that limit the teaching of certain subjects are as dangerous and misguided as the blacklisting campaigns of McCarthyism or efforts to outlaw the teaching of evolution.
One reason other college leaders may have kept quiet is that DEI elicits strong reactions among alumni, politicians, and their own students and faculty members during these highly polarized times. A Chronicle survey and interviews of college presidents found that many censor themselves even on topics they consider central to their mission and values, including DEI, racial justice, and gender and sexual identity.
Sameeha Rizvi, a senior who’s been active in student government and multicultural programs on the Austin campus, understands the political pressures. “UT-Austin faces hyper-scrutiny from the Texas GOP. We’re relentlessly targeted from politicians trying to impose certain ideological agendas on our campus,” she said. “However, our administration’s silence feels like a punch in the gut to those of us who are organizing against this anti-DEI, anti-truth legislation. Whatever the university might be doing behind closed doors — I’m not seeing the impact.”
Our administration’s silence feels like a punch in the gut to those of us who are organizing against this anti-DEI, anti-truth legislation.
As someone who lives with Type 1 diabetes, she appreciates the support of the university’s Disability Cultural Center and the efforts of the DEI staff, especially at the height of the pandemic, to promote flexible attendance policies for students struggling with health complications.
Izabella De La Garza, who graduated this month, said that as a Latina from San Antonio, she felt culture shock at first on the Austin campus. The Multicultural Engagement Center, a physical place that offers support services, cultural-immersion activities, and a spot for students and employees to hang out, always felt like home, she said. Now, with bills approved by both the House and the Senate that would ban diversity centers, its fate is uncertain.
“I found so much solace and support in the MEC, and the idea of other students’ not having that is very scary,” she said. “I can’t grasp in my mind why someone would be scared of it.”
Erin McElroy, a tenure-track assistant professor of American studies who’s been teaching on the Austin campus for two years, said the attacks on diversity and tenure in Texas had made it easier to accept a new job at a “Research 1 public university on the West Coast where tenure isn’t threatened.”
As a feminist scholar who integrates issues of race and gender into teaching American history, McElroy had hoped that the talk of eliminating DEI was just “political posturing” by conservative politicians. But as the bills inched closer to passage, the public silence of university administrators was disappointing, McElroy said. Texas, it appeared, might soon be going the way of another Southern state that has targeted DEI.
Taking a Stand
In Florida, legislation that Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed into law this month bans public colleges from spending state or federal funding on DEI unless it’s required by federal law. The colleges will also be banned from offering general-education courses that “distort significant historical events,” teach “identity politics,” or are “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.”
The AAUP issued a preliminary report on Wednesday that accused college leaders of complicity in the avalanche of attacks on higher education in Florida. “Academic administrators throughout Florida’s public university and college systems, from the highest to the lowest levels, not only have failed to contest these attacks but have too frequently been complicit in and, in some cases, explicitly supported them,” the report said. “While some individuals are leaving as a matter of conscience, those who remain face the prospect of serving as pawns in DeSantis’s corrupt patronage system.”
Caving before you’re asked to cave is a bad strategy.
While some may genuinely fear retaliatory budget cuts, “the approach of many of the administrators appears more cowardly than cautious,” the AAUP said.
In January the 28 state- and community-college presidents who make up the Florida College System Council of Presidents released a statement that many read as an endorsement of the governor’s conservative agenda. It vowed “to ensure that all initiatives, instruction, and activities do not promote any ideology that suppresses intellectual and academic freedom, freedom of expression, viewpoint diversity, and the pursuit of truth in teaching and learning.”
The statement said the presidents would not fund or support “any practice, policy, or academic requirement that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality, or the idea that systems of oppression should be the primary lens through which teaching and learning are analyzed and/or improved upon.” Documents obtained by The Chronicle suggest that much of the wording came from a top administrator in the Florida Department of Education, not the presidents.
Elsewhere in Florida, students who support diversity efforts demanded that university leaders back them up. In March, Florida State University students shouting “FSU — take a stand!” protested outside an administration building after they were locked out.
Alex C. Lange, an assistant professor of higher education at Colorado State University at Fort Collins, said college leaders in Florida had missed an opportunity to alert their alumni about the possible impact of the anti-DEI legislation. As a graduate of Florida Atlantic University, Lange would be concerned to learn that future students might not have the support and guidance of a staff member in a fledgling LGBT center who had made such a difference in Lange’s own college experience.
Calling Out the Problems
In a few cases, college leaders did in fact take a stand, and did so publicly. Ohio State University’s Board of Trustees released a statement on May 16 forcefully objecting to Ohio’s Senate Bill 83, which has been approved by the Senate and was pending in the House as of Thursday. Along with banning many diversity initiatives, it would require annual faculty performance reviews, create new graduation requirements, and mandate the specific language colleges must use in their mission statements.
“We acknowledge the issues raised by this proposal but believe there are alternative solutions that will not undermine the shared-governance model of universities, risk weakened academic rigor, or impose extensive and expensive new reporting mandates,” the statement said.
“We share the General Assembly’s commitment to free speech, open dialogue, and the importance of diverse views,” it continued. “The university is already taking steps to again emphasize that all viewpoints are welcome and respected on our campuses.” In an apparent spirit of compromise, the university updated its hiring practices to stop requiring diversity statements, “except when mandated by federal law, research contracts, and licensure or accreditation.”
Ohio State faculty leaders, who have met frequently with trustees to stress the importance of shared governance, welcomed the board’s willingness to call out the problems in the bill, given that all of the members were appointed by a Republican governor. “We appreciated the fairly robust defense of some of our rights and know that there are political risks involved,” said Caroline T. Clark, chair of the University Senate and a professor of teaching and learning.
In Utah, where the state’s top higher-education leaders spoke out against a bill that would ban diversity offices, a conservative lawmaker quickly withdrew the measure, saying he realized it was too harsh. It’s not clear whether pushback from the state’s higher-education leaders, including Dave R. Woolstenhulme, commissioner of the Utah System of Higher Education, had played any role in that decision.
As diversity, equity, and inclusion officers’ work, and the progress they’ve made in recent years, are under attack, higher-education leaders aren’t speaking out to defend “their espoused values and mission,” Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, wrote in an email.
“As the recent spate of legislative attacks has shown,” she wrote, “their efforts are having their intended chilling effect — silencing the voices of leaders who, just three years ago, were acknowledging the necessity of higher-education institutions to address racial inequities during the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.”
In recent months, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has laid out a comprehensive vision that would place public higher education under extraordinary state control. A bill introduced this week would write that vision into law.
House Bill 999 takes up almost every bullet-pointed goal that DeSantis included for public higher education in a press release last month. It would prohibit public colleges from funding any projects that “espouse diversity, equity, and inclusion or Critical Race Theory rhetoric,” no matter the funding source; allow boards of trustees to conduct a post-tenure review of faculty members at any time for cause; and put faculty hiring into the hands of trustees. It also has new specifics DeSantis hadn’t proposed, such as a ban on gender studies as a major or minor.
“This bill will be a gut punch to anyone who cares about public education in a democracy or academic freedom or the fact that our system of higher education is the envy of the world,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors. “Because higher ed in America is organized around the fact that research and teaching and decisions involving research and teaching are best made by experts and scholars in the field.”
“We need to protest, we need to vote, we need to make our voices heard,” Mulvey added, acknowledging a student protest on Thursday. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The future of higher education is at stake. If it works in Florida, you know it’ll spread to other red states.”
In a news conference in January, DeSantis said his proposals would help Florida “continue to lead in the area of higher education,” and the governor has expressed a desire to rein in public spending on campus initiatives related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Neither DeSantis nor Robert Alexander “Alex” Andrade, HB 999’s sponsor, returned requests for comment.
The bill is very early in the legislative process. Andrade, a Republican representative in the Florida House who has filed other bills closely aligned with DeSantis’s agenda, filed HB 999 on Tuesday, and the legislative session doesn’t start until March 7. HB 999 may yet change before it passes, if it passes at all, but at least one politics expert in Florida saw it as a sign of what’s to come.
“My hope is that we get at least some of the more alarming things that are in these bills toned down a little bit, but, at the same time, I think there’s definitely a lot of momentum among Florida Republicans to do something here,” said Nicholas R. Seabrook, a professor of political science at the University of North Florida who has been critical of DeSantis’s posture on higher ed. “We’re definitely going to see something come out of this legislative session.”
Although he expects legal challenges to HB 999 if it passes, Seabrook also thought it could better pass legal muster than last year’s “Stop WOKE” Act, which has its higher-ed portions under injunction. HB 999 takes aim at funding for programs, curriculum, and hiring, issues in which the state “legitimately has a greater role,” Seabrook said.
Among the specifics of the bill: It directs trustees to remove from their universities majors and minors “in Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor of these belief systems.” It’s not clear whether any public Florida university has a critical race theory or intersectionality major or minor, but a majority of the 12 institutions offer gender studies as either a major or a minor or both.
(Critical race theory refers to a set of ideas that arose from legal scholars decades ago that, among other things, positions racism as a structural force. Intersectionality is a theory that refers to “the idea that forms of prejudice overlap.” Both resist simple definition.)
HB 999 would make boards of trustees responsible for hiring faculty members, and while it would allow boards to delegate that task to the college president, it prohibits the president from further delegating hiring to, say, faculty members. It clarifies that while “diversity” programs are banned, that doesn’t include support for “military veterans, Pell Grant recipients, first generation college students, nontraditional students, ‘2+2’ transfer students from the Florida College System, students from low-income families, or students with unique abilities.”
The bill would create new rules around general-education courses. For example, they may not teach “American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” It continues: “Whenever applicable,” gen-ed courses are to “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization and include studies of this nation’s historical documents, including the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments thereto, and the Federalist Papers.”
But teaching history well does include some realities that are contrary to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, according to James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, who has written books about 20th-century African American history. Inviting students to wrestle with colonialism and slavery in early American history is both truthful and helps with “students learning how to think historically and students learning how no ideas exist outside of context. Their ideas, their parents’ ideas, their teachers’ ideas, no ideas exist outside of a context,” Grossman said.
There are some parts of HB 999 that Seabrook, the University of North Florida professor, agrees with. The bill adds language to Florida law about how a part of public universities’ mission is to prepare students “for citizenship of the constitutional republic.” He also thinks colleges could do more to foster intellectual diversity on campus, but HB 999 is not the way to go about it.
“It’s identifying that there’s perhaps a problem with academia leaning one way on the ideological spectrum, and then you see what they’re doing at New College,” he said. “They’re just replacing it with an even worse model that goes in the opposite direction.”
The University of Wisconsin system on Monday will release a free-speech survey that was delayed last spring over political and procedural concerns.
The survey, like similar ones that have been administered in Florida and North Carolina, will ask thousands of students across the system’s 13 campuses for their perspectives on “campus free expression, viewpoint diversity, and self-censorship,” according to its description. Originally scheduled for April, the survey was quickly walked back after some campus leaders expressed worry about its subject matter, and after the interim chancellor of one of the system’s campuses resigned in protest.
The survey’s subject matter, and concerns that its results could be misused by Republican legislators, prompted multiple student-government leaders in the system, and the state chapter of the American Association of University Professors, to call for its delay or cancellation. Chronicle reporting in the spring indicated the survey may not have been approved by institutional review boards on all of the system’s campuses. And James P. Henderson, in a remarkable show of dissent from system leadership, cited the handling of the survey as a major reason for his sudden resignation as interim chancellor of the Whitewater campus, saying he and his fellow chancellors had not been given adequate input into it.
The survey has evolved since the controversies of the spring, Jay O. Rothman, president of the system, said in an interview with The Chronicle on Friday. Rothman, who took office on June 1, said he fully supported the survey and “the opportunities around freedom of expression and civil dialogue are one of the reasons I took this job.” The survey, he added, incorporates feedback from campus chancellors, shared-governance leaders, and an advisory board.
The survey will provide system leaders with statistically reliable information about what’s happening on its campuses, Rothman said. “We are trying to learn,” he said. “We want to know what the climate is, and then we can react to, What are some things that we can do to enhance the climate?”
Rothman on Friday announced several other projects aimed at promoting civil dialogue, including the creation of the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Civil Dialogue, which will coordinate efforts and may offer joint programs among research and policy centers across the system to bolster civil dialogue. The system will also convene a series of “peer-to-peer conversations on challenging topics,” in which Rothman will participate, and will sponsor the Wisconsin Civic Games for middle- and high-school students.
Little Evidence
The Wisconsin survey will join similar efforts in Florida and North Carolina to gauge students’ views on free speech and other hot-button topics. Florida last year enacted a law requiring an annual survey of public-university students and employees to assess the climate of intellectual diversity on their campuses. Only 2.4 percent of the more than 364,000 students who were sent the survey in April filled it out, however, and the response rate among faculty and staff members was 9.4 percent.
United Faculty of Florida, the union representing professors, had encouraged students, instructors, and staff members to ignore the survey, saying it was not being administered in good faith and constituted an attempt by Republican legislators to bolster the claim that conservative students feel unwelcome in college classrooms. (A Republican state representative who sponsored the law mandating the survey told the Tallahassee Democrat that he had done so to allow future legislatures to “use that data as the basis to make a policy decision.”)
They also found that most students’ ideological views hadn’t changed during their time in college. Respondents, particularly those who identified as conservative, were more likely to self-censor due to concern about how their peers would react than how their professors would.
The questions in both surveys are similar to those that will appear in Wisconsin. Students will be asked whether they have felt pressured by professors to agree with a specific political or ideological opinion discussed in class; how open they are to considering viewpoints that differ from their own on subjects like abortion, gun control, immigration, police misconduct, and transgender issues; and whether controversial speakers on campus should be disinvited or protested against.
The survey also will pose hypothetical scenarios — for example, an instructor criticizing an elected official on a personal Twitter account, or a group of students posting on social media that a student of a certain race or ethnicity isn’t welcome on campus — and ask whether students believe those scenarios would be protected under the First Amendment. Respondents will be asked what political party and ideologies they most identify with, though the survey notes that “you are not required to respond to any question you would rather not answer.”
The survey will be conducted by the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service, a unit of the system, and the research team consists of four professors in the system. It will be sent to a random sample of students on each campus, with the goal of yielding about 500 responses per campus, and those who complete it will each receive a $10 electronic gift card. It will close on December 14, and results are slated to be reported early next year. A system spokesperson said that the data may be weighted based on response rates.
Political Ties
Funding for the survey comes from the Menard Center for the Study of Institutions and Innovation, and its political ties were a concern for some critics. While nonpartisan, the center is named for the Menard family, owners of the home-improvement store chain Menards, who donated $2.36 million in 2019 to expand it; John R. Menard Jr., the founder of Menards, has a long record of donating to conservative political candidates and organizations. And the Menard Center, which is based on the system’s Stout campus, was founded in 2017 with a donation from the Charles Koch Foundation.
Even before it was officially delayed, the Wisconsin survey had come in for questioning, according to emails, text messages, and other materials obtained by The Chronicle through open-records requests. After being proposed in January, it was called off and restarted once, in March, because of chancellors’ objections. “Nobody is interested in doing this,” Rebecca M. Blank, then chancellor of the system’s flagship Madison campus, wrote to colleagues at the time. “So we’re off the hook on this.”
But a day later, in the same email chain, Blank wrote that careful study of free-speech issues was warranted. “I do think we will be under some pressure … from System, from the Legislature, etc. … to be able to say we are DOING SOMETHING on this topic,” she wrote. “So being proactive in this is important. Far better that we have some plans in place than that we have to scramble and create something later this coming fall.”
Blank may have been relieved to be “off the hook,” but other major stakeholders weren’t pleased with what at the time seemed to be the project’s cancellation. The director of the Menard Center, Timothy Shiell, who described himself to The Chronicle in the spring as “a liberal professor being funded by a conservative donor to run a nonpartisan center,” ascribed the decision to political optics in an email to a colleague. “By all appearances,” wrote Shiell, a professor of philosophy on the Stout campus, “the chancellors feared the results would be bad and the Legislature would pounce on it. God forbid we permit routine research on an issue of state, national, and even international importance.”
Shiell said in an April interview with The Chronicle that he had wanted to collect data on students’ views of free speech for several years. While there’s no evidence that politicians were involved in the survey’s conception, Republican leaders in the state government took great interest in its fate and progress. Among them was State Rep. Dave Murphy, who is chair of the Assembly’s Committee on Colleges and Universities. Murphy wrote in an email to Michael J. Falbo, who served as interim president from March to the beginning of Rothman’s term, on June 1, that he was “deeply disturbed” by news that the survey was being canceled. “The members of my committee,” Murphy added, “would find the results of such a survey invaluable.”
Murphy sent that email on March 30, and he copied Robin J. Vos, the powerful Republican speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly. Emails obtained by The Chronicle indicate that Murphy and Vos, along with a Republican state senator and two system regents, contacted Falbo to ask that he reconsider his decision.
The next day, Falbo sent a copy of the planned survey to the chancellors, noting that he didn’t “find anything objectionable” in it, and met with them via Microsoft Teams to discuss it. Later that evening, the survey’s advisory board got emails saying the project was back on. (An attempt to contact Falbo on Friday was not immediately successful.)
That didn’t sit well with Henderson, the Whitewater chancellor, who handed in his resignation on April 3. During the meeting between Falbo and the chancellors, “the overwhelming response was negative,” Henderson wrote to Edmund Manydeeds III, president of the system’s Board of Regents. At the end of the meeting, Henderson wrote, Falbo “dismissed our comments and said he was proceeding. And then a pandering email came out stating system support for the survey.”
In a text to Renée M. Wachter, chancellor of the Superior campus, the day after his resignation, Henderson wrote: “I just was blown away when Mike told me we would be ‘ordered’ to administer that survey,” referring to Falbo. Wachter responded sympathetically, deeming the survey “a no-win situation.” Henderson lamented that people at the system level were “trying to force a political position on the campuses.”
On April 7 the system announced it would delay the survey a second time, after days of internal deliberations among members of the research team. In one such message, on April 5, Geoffrey Peterson, a professor of political science on the Eau Claire campus, said the survey had become a “political football,” and advocated for a pause. “The perception that members of the Legislature strong-armed the system into distributing the survey, whether accurate or not, now defines the survey and clearly implies the survey is a partisan instrument,” Peterson wrote. “The truth is, the content of the survey is, for all intents and purposes, now irrelevant. What matters now is the perceptions that are rapidly forming about it, and those perceptions are diametrically opposed to the actual goals of the survey.”
April Blesche-Rechek, a professor of psychology at Eau Claire and a member of the research team, suggested in the same email thread that concerns about campuses engaging in political indoctrination could be overblown. “Plenty of parents worry that their college kids are pressured to conform to a radical left ideological viewpoint. The frequency with which this actually is felt by students to occur, as well as the contexts in which it occurs if it ever does, may prove those assumptions wrong,” she wrote.
For his part, Rothman on Friday said the only contact he’d had with state legislators about the survey was to inform them, at the start of his tenure, that the system would move forward with it.
“The survey results will tell us one thing, but if we can’t have open and honest and fair discussions about really difficult issues — whether that’s religion, whether that’s abortion, whatever it happens to be — that’s a real challenge to our democracy,” Rothman said. “If the universities can’t be models of that, I’m not sure who’s going to be.”
The story went like this: One day, a police officer stationed near the University of South Florida’s campus watched as a car zoomed through a stop sign and barreled across a busy highway. When he caught up to the car, he found the driver overcome with emotion, tears running down her face.
Why was she so upset?
In Smith’s telling, the woman was “practically hysterical” over what she was being taught at USF. She told the cop that the university “would destroy the things she had built her very life on.”
“This,” Smith observed, “could have cost her life or that of someone else.”
The story, on its face, is absurd. Even the most rousing of lectures is unlikely to provoke reckless driving. But it was persuasive to Smith, whose son was a student at USF, then a brand-new university. She and other parents were already incensed by what they considered the anti-religious teaching at the institution and its coziness with Communism. They brought those complaints to Florida lawmakers, helping thrust USF into an existential crisis over what could and should be taught at a state-supported university.
“The question is, are we to have academic freedom without responsibility, without restraint? If so then it is not true academic freedom. It is an imitation of it,” Smith wrote in a lengthy report documenting her views.
In a note to a Florida representative, she was more aggressive. “Do I want my sons and daughters indoctrinated in the belief that there exists no right or wrong, no morality or immorality, no God, that family life has failed, that premarital relations are good, that homo-sexuality is fine? And then told, in the name of academic freedom it’s none of your business? … Then I say the parents should have unlimited freedom, even if it means seeing the professors — flattened on the floor!”
State Archives of Florida
Jane Tarr Smith
Smith had dramatic flair. But the general thrust of her argument has pulsed like an electric current through the modern history of higher education: Out-of-control liberal professors infect impressionable young people with dangerous ideas, distorting their views of what the country has been, is, and should be. But other sensibilities — like those of parents, who pay tuition, or lawmakers, who hold purse strings — also matter when it comes to curricula at public institutions. Therefore, there must be constraints on what an instructor can teach, for the sake of the students and for the sake of America.
Over the past two years, that argument has been resurrected in the form of bills that restrict how faculty members (and schoolteachers) can teach race and racism. Critics of the measures, including free-speech organizations, contend that the legislation erects political barriers where there should be none, impeding faculty members’ ability to determine their course content as they see fit.
But supporters of the bills, including Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, argue they’re necessary curtailments of leftist indoctrination. Florida tax dollars will not go toward “teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other,” DeSantis said in a 2021 news release announcing one such bill.
By examining one historical precedent to such arguments — specifically the saga that engulfed Smith and the University of South Florida — we can see this moment with fresh eyes. Today, the professoriate is in some ways better positioned to fight back than it was in the mid-1900s. Many faculty members are doing just that. Yet these bills are being introduced during a bout of public distrust of professors and what they teach. And some colleges have urged their faculty members to err on the side of caution. The contours of academic freedom are, once again, hotly contested.
Amid those and other attacks, college leaders had to determine to what lengths they would go to protect academic freedom on their campuses. Until the mid-20th century, the “Gentleman Scientist Model” was in vogue, John K. Wilson writes in his dissertation, “A History of Academic Freedom in America.” Under that model, safeguarding academic freedom “depended upon the good faith of honorable administrators following unwritten academic norms.”
How a committee of Florida lawmakers waged a crusade against higher ed and upended the lives of people in it. Read more here.
“The academy did not fight McCarthyism,” Schrecker writes. “It contributed to it.”
In the wake of those purges, and after the failure of the higher-ed establishment to defend its faculty, many academics believed they needed to be more aggressive in protecting their rights. What Wilson calls the “Liberty Model” was born. That model, which arose over years of struggle and debate, represented “a much broader sense of academic freedom, in which professors were free to express their ideas on all political issues,” he writes, “even if it offended critics and embarrassed their institutions.”
Of course, there were always criticisms, especially from conservatives. In his 1951 book God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” William F. Buckley Jr. argued that “honest and discerning scholars” must “cease to manipulate the term academic freedom for their own ends.” Rather, it “must mean the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities and aims of the schools they oversee and support.” Or, put simply, those who pay should set the agenda. Those on the payroll should fall in line.
In the midst of this ideological tug-of-war, the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee was born. A late-stage Southern offshoot of McCarthyism, the committee was set up in 1956 to investigate “all organizations whose principles or activities … would constitute violence, or a violation of the laws of the state.” Lawmakers initially had integration in mind, but the committee soon became a roving attack dog that hunted for evidence of Communism and homosexuality in state institutions, including Florida’s public universities.
The Johns Committee thought decency was particularly imperiled at the University of South Florida. Lawmakers trained their eyes on the campus in 1962. A group of parents organized by Smith informed the committee of its concern that professors were introducing vulgar or sacrilegious materials or touting Communism and socialism in the classroom. At the heart of their complaint was the belief that academic freedom for professors had gone too far, infringing on the rights of students to learn freely, and that it now threatened democracy.
“Should the moral laws of our universe be repealed by the professors in their demand for academic freedom?” Smith wrote in her report. “They may call it academic freedom. Others call it national suicide!”
For the Johns Committee, too, academic freedom’s ripeness for abuse was concerning. Lawmakers conducted hearings on campus of students, professors, administrators, and the university president. Though the committee’s chief counsel, Mark Hawes, acknowledged that academic freedom is “a fundamental principle … that education rests on,” legislators nevertheless disparaged certain reading materials, like a short story by J.D. Salinger. They asked how far academic freedom extended, particularly when it came to Communism. “Would it include the bringing of a member of the Communist Party here to speak on the subject of Communism, or democracy, or the isms, generally?” Hawes asked the dean of student affairs. (That’s “a very leading question,” the dean replied.)
The committee’s eventual conclusion was scathing. Yes, academic freedom had been “the very backbone” of any educational institution, Hawes told the 1963 Legislature, according to one archived rendering of his speech. However, the term was now being used to mean that educators could “run these schools without restraint of policy at all from the people or their elected representatives.”
That sort of academic freedom covers the right “to teach as they please in a state-supported school in regard to religion,” Hawes continued, clearly indignant. “… It includes the right to teach there is no right and no wrong. It includes the right to take this ordinary, everyday filth, which I call intellectual garbage, off the newsstands and put it in the classroom as required text.”
The committee did not stop at a public harangue. In 1965 it proposed an “academic freedom bill” that regulated campus speakers as well as professors’ speech and actions. According to a copy of the bill in the state’s records, it would have, among other things, required the state’s Board of Education to adopt regulations banning any higher-education employee or organization from advocating, “by word or deed,” the willful disobedience of state or national laws.
But by the time the bill was on the table, Floridians had been grappling with what it would mean for politicians to regulate professors’ speech and course content. As one USF dean observed, the Johns Committee ordeal had provoked a fundamental question: “Does the state wish to develop distinguished universities where all aspects of the truth may be pursued without fear or favor? Or does it wish to develop a group of glorified finishing schools in which scholars are unable to pursue their honest lines of inquiry or to stimulate students into creative and unfettered thinking?”
Many citizens agreed with Allen and rallied to his defense. “I just want to be counted on the record as deploring this present ‘witch hunt’ on the campus,” one woman wrote to the university. Wrote another, to Allen: “I wish to assure you that as the mother of one of your students I heartily concur with the teaching methods and materials used by the professors.” Some Floridians worried that should their state not protect academic freedom, some gifted professors would resign, and others would be discouraged from accepting jobs at Florida institutions.
Florida faculty members also made the case for academic freedom publicly, arguing it was necessary to society even though, as one professor acknowledged, it could be uncomfortable. “Nothing grows without the signs of cracking, without the snap of bark, without unlovely skin peeling,” wrote the University of Florida historian C.K. Yearley in an open letter to Florida citizens and parents, published in the press.
Yearley continued: “You have an option, of course. You can cease to grow. I will not cease to grow with you. I will move on. And others will follow and you will have great husks of brick and steel and concrete. You may derive some satisfaction from that. But you will in the estimate of thinking men have nothing but a great investment in husks.”
The academic-freedom bill died a quick death. Nearly nine years after its inception, the committee folded, too. But not before leaving a score of college employees without their jobs after they were accused of homosexual conduct. Virtually no one rallied to those employees’ defense. In that way, said Wilson in an email, the Johns Committee period reflects the “darker side of the history of academic freedom in America” — one of “straight white male professors leaving behind disempowered groups in order to carve out a narrow idea of academic freedom that would protect themselves.” Yet when the committee expanded its attack and waged a campaign against the fundamental principles of higher education, that proved to be too drastic. The committee, which suffered from several scandals, eventually lost the support of the public. USF, though weary from the fight, was still standing.
It’s possible to see today’s bills that restrict instruction about race and racism as an extension of that same impulse. It’s no coincidence, said Jeremy C. Young, senior manager for free expression and education at PEN America, that the bills arose after the murder of George Floyd and the publication of The New York Times’s 1619 Project, at a moment when the country seemed poised for a racial reckoning.
Regardless of what motivated the bills, they have proved popular among conservative state lawmakers, if not as popular with the public. According to PEN America, nearly 200 such bills, which the organization calls “educational gag orders,” were filed across the country in 2021 and 2022. Nineteen have become law, seven of which apply to higher education. This year, there has been “an increase in the complexity and scale of legislation, as lawmakers have sought to assert political control over everything from classroom speech to library content, from teachers’ professional training to field trips and extracurricular activities,” the organization wrote in a recent report.
Each historical moment has its own context, its own actors. But the rhetorical parallels between the Johns Committee period and today “are just stunning,” Young said. “Here we are fighting this battle,” he said, “and it’s a battle that’s been fought many, many times before.”
“We believe in academic freedom,” Patrick said. “But everyone has guidelines in life. Everyone has barriers.” He then said he planned to propose ending tenure for all new hires and threatened to rescind tenure for faculty members who teach critical race theory.
There are notable differences between the eras. During the McCarthy fervor, individual scholars were targeted, but the college classroom went untouched, though many academics began dropping controversial topics from their curricula, according to Schrecker, the historian of McCarthyism.
In the mid-20th century, skepticism about the value of academic freedom was broader, Wilson said in a phone interview. Now, it seems fewer people openly denounce the concept.
But there’s also a growing view among conservatives that universities are “captive to their enemies — not just containing radicals but being run by radicals,” Wilson said. “That’s language you didn’t hear in the ’50s and ’60s.” Which is not to say that criticism of faculty members as radicals has gone away. Nearly 80 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning respondents who said they think the higher-education system is headed in the wrong direction cited professors’ bringing their political and social views into the classroom as a major reason, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey.
Professors are also much more organized than they were during the 1950s and 1960s, and more likely to speak out — at least those with job security. The instruction bans have sparked a wave of faculty opposition, particularly in Florida. Florida International University’s faculty union launched a Freedom to Teach/Freedom to Learn campaign. It held a teach-in on academic freedom, has told professors they don’t need to change how they teach because of the law, and is attempting to build political connections with teachers across the state who face similar restrictions and are natural allies, said Eric Scarffe, vice president of the union.
HB 7, the Florida law, has also been challenged in court by professors, among other groups. The law says in part that students cannot be subjected to instruction that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels” them to believe certain “concepts,” including that the values of “objectivity” or “racial colorblindness” are “racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular race, color, national origin, or sex” to oppress other such groups. If a university is found to have committed a “substantiated violation” of HB 7, it will not receive performance funding the following fiscal year, according to a separate law passed by Florida lawmakers.
In defending the measure in court, lawyers representing the state argued that professors do not have an individual right to academic freedom. Rather, that right, to the extent it exists, belongs to universities and extends only to their autonomy from the judiciary, not from “the state that chartered it, governs it, and provides its funding,” reads the filing. The idea that individual professors “have a constitutional right to make their own decisions, free from interference by anyone, whether university administrators or the state itself, concerning what may be taught and how it shall be taught would be a recipe for educational chaos,” it says, “not excellence.”
A guide for faculty members and deans at Valencia College, also obtained by FIRE, notes that while the “use of double negatives in the wording” of one of the concepts makes it difficult to know what is banned, “a critique of colorblindness or insistence on identity consciousness could constitute discrimination” under the law.
In America, the desire for censorship in public education comes in waves. There are fevers, PEN America’s Young said, and then they break, typically not on their own. The McCarthy era, and the Johns Committee, was one such fever. To Young, this is another, and he’s not sure when it will subside.
For now at least, what curriculum is appropriate for college students, and who should decide, remains an active national argument. Sentences that Jane Tarr Smith, the concerned USF parent who died in 2002, wrote six decades ago still resonate:
“We know that as the student goes, so goes the nation,” she said. “Hence, our grave concern over the teachings they receive.”
The College of Saint Rose didn’t violate its own policies when it dismissed four tenured faculty members, according to a ruling Thursday by a New York appellate court. The unanimous decision overrules a lower court’s ruling last year that reinstated the four professors.
While the decision is specific to New York, one expert said, it does offer an example for other institutions trying to lay off tenured faculty members.
In the prior decision, a New York Supreme Court justice ruled that the private college in Albany had violated its own faculty manual by dismissing four longtime members of its music department. Saint Rose told the professors in December 2020 that they and about 30 other tenured faculty members would be laid off in 2021 as part of a cost-cutting plan that included eliminating 25 academic programs and $5.97 million in academic expenses. The college had retained less-senior faculty members, in what Justice Peter A. Lynch of the Albany County Supreme Court called a “select, narrow, and erroneous interpretation” of the faculty manual, seemingly “by design.”
It was a resounding, and rare, legal victory for tenured faculty members who get laid off. But it was also a short-lived one.
The state’s second-highest court found on Thursday, after a hearing last month, that Saint Rose had in fact not violated its faculty manual in terminating Yvonne Chavez Hansbrough, Robert S. Hansbrough, Bruce C. Roter, and the department chair, Sherwood W. Wise. The five-judge panel, whose decision was written by Justice Molly Reynolds Fitzgerald, noted that the manual stipulates only that the college should first consider “all reasonable alternatives before resorting to program reductions and any concomitant reductions in personnel.” Saint Rose had given the professors timely notice of their layoffs and allowed them to appeal through a faculty review committee, Fitzgerald said, writing that the decision “was supported by a rational basis, was not unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious or made in bad faith.” The court’s ruling also prevents the professors from suing the college for breach of contract.
The court’s decision to defer to Saint Rose’s interpretation of its faculty manual is consistent with precedent for the New York-specific legal proceeding under which the case was brought, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at the City University of New York’s Hunter College. “It becomes not about the sanctity of the manual, but rather how to interpret it and whose interpretation is the one that the court’s trying to look for,” Herbert said. Guided by the terms of that legal framework, called an Article 78 proceeding, the court must only determine whether an institution’s interpretation of its faculty manual was “arbitrary and capricious,” which he described as a “relatively low standard.”
If, for example, a similar case arose whose retrenchment policy is codified by a collective-bargaining agreement, an arbitrator would not grant that same deference but would instead interpret the case independently, based on testimony.
It’s definitely a blow for the rights of tenured professors.
The specificity of Article 78 proceedings, which are “highly deferential to the institution,” make it difficult to draw broader generalizations about the ruling’s implications for tenure, said Matthew W. Finkin, a professor of labor and employment law at the University of Illinois College of Law and a labor arbitrator. The New York judiciary, Finkin said, is “disconnected from the weight of judicial authority on the law of tenure.”
While Thursday’s ruling shouldn’t have broader repercussions outside of New York, Finkin said, it does offer an example for other institutions trying to lay off tenured faculty members. The ruling also places a burden on future plaintiffs to educate the court that, although the New York decision would support the institution, the decision is not more broadly supportable, Finkin said. “There’s case after case that says you have to read rules of academic tenure in light of their history, of what they’re intended to accomplish and how they’ve been read and understood generally among institutions that adhere to the tenure system,” he said. “This court refuses to do that. It just looks at the plain text of the rule.”
In a statement to The Chronicle, Jennifer Gish, associate vice president for marketing and communications, said the college had “followed a process in the academic program reductions, and that process was affirmed by the courts. Those decisions were difficult, and the contributions of the faculty impacted will not be forgotten.” Gish added that the details of when the faculty members’ employment would officially end are still being worked out, and that “our focus is on the students and maintaining continuity of instruction and their academic success.”
The professors’ lawyer, Meredith Moriarty, said she was disappointed by the precedent the ruling set. “It’s definitely a blow for the rights of tenured professors,” Moriarty said. “I think it’s a blow for academic freedom, to be honest, because the opinion essentially states that courts have to give colleges complete deference in all their decisions in interpreting their own contracts.”
Roter, one of the professors, said in a statement to The Chronicle that he was “deeply disappointed” by Thursday’s ruling. “I believe this decision will have a chilling effect on higher education, especially regarding tenure and the enforceability of faculty manuals,” he wrote. “This decision puts one more nail in the coffin of tenure, a system which has enabled educators to speak and teach with academic freedom, unencumbered by the fear of termination.”
Roter and his colleagues can apply to appeal their case to the New York Court of Appeals, but they haven’t yet decided whether to do so, Moriarty said.
A Secret Counterproposal
Thursday’s ruling is likely to rankle faculty-rights and due-process advocates, including at the American Association of University Professors, which had already censured Saint Rose in 2016, a year after it cut 14 tenured appointments and 27 academic programs.
After the more recent cuts, Gregory F. Scholtz, director of the AAUP’s department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance, sent Saint Rose’s president, Marcia J. White, a letter of concern about the layoffs in the fall of 2021, saying the college had acted against the AAUP’s widely adopted Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure by not declaring financial exigency before laying off tenured faculty members. While Saint Rose’s faculty manual permits the college to terminate tenured faculty members because of “anticipated program reductions,” Scholtz wrote in the letter, “the AAUP does not regard the mere anticipation of program reductions as a legitimate basis” for laying off tenured faculty. (Scholtz was not available for comment on Thursday’s ruling.)
The process that led to the four music professors’ layoffs began when chairs in the college were asked to submit budget-reduction proposals. Wise, the music-department chair, submitted a plan that cut more than $500,000. But a joint working group of faculty members and administrators reviewing the proposals adopted a different plan, which Wise and his colleagues allege was influenced by a secret counterproposal they were unaware had been submitted. That proposal, the lawsuit says, was written by faculty members who taught in Saint Rose’s music-industry concentration. Their plan called for the entire music program — and the plaintiffs’ jobs — to be eliminated, and to spare the music-industry concentration and its faculty members.
With one exception, none of the music-industry professors who kept their jobs were as senior as any of the laid-off faculty members. The plaintiffs’ argument — that Saint Rose’s faculty manual requires the college to give preference to faculty members based first on tenure, then seniority, then rank — was accepted by the Albany judge but dismissed by the appellate court on Thursday.
The professors appealed their layoffs to an internal review committee, which ruled in their favor and recommended their reinstatement. But White — at the time the college’s interim president — rejected the appeal, prompting them to pursue legal action.
Meanwhile, the financial circumstances that led to the layoffs have become even more dire. The bond-rating agency Fitch Ratings this month revised Saint Rose’s outlook to negative, citing “sizable, multi-year declines in the College’s already limited student enrollment” that are expected to persist into this fall despite the “comprehensive programmatic and enrollment management overhaul” that was supposed to stabilize the institution’s enrollment. The rating agency noted that Saint Rose’s enrollment was hit especially hard during the pandemic, dropping 15 percent in the fall of 2020 and 18 percent more in the fall of 2021.
