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.
