Let’s be clear: Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, who wants to be president, isn’t just banning rainbows from elementary school classrooms, ostensibly to protect little kids from homosexual influences.
He’s also meddling in what can be taught in Florida public universities, determined to hide the uncomfortable aspects of America’s history from the college-age offspring of his state’s conservative white snowflakes.
A couple years ago, I wrote in an essay (read it here) that college education is designed to teach people how to think, give them communication and language skills, knowledge in specific subject areas, and instill intellectual discipline. Essential to this is academic freedom; i.e., professors, not politicians, decide what is taught and discussed in college classrooms.
Also keep in mind that college students are adults, and politicians have no business treating them like first-graders.
None of this will stop the Ron DeSantises of the world; only voters can do that. Like most Republicans, he has no respect for learning (even though he graduated from Yale and Harvard Law School), is anti-intellectual, and a cultural warrior. Some people call him a fascist.
A Florida college instructor, writing under a pseudonym, wrote here that she’s not going to knuckle under to DeSantis’s censorship of college-level education, and will continue teaching about “race, class, whiteness, sexuality, politics, family and body image … homophobia and police brutality, and other topics that are ‘uncomfortable'” in her classes, and if that gets her terminated, “opposing — and actively resisting — this law is worth getting fired over.”
She worries, though, over her stance bringing her colleagues under scrutiny and subjecting her university, or “humanities in general,” to budget cuts.
In 1942 a Munich professor and five students calling themselves the White Rose Society distributed pamphlets opposing the Hitler regime. They were hunted down by the Gestapo, caught, sentenced to death in show trials, and executed by guillotine (read details here). They are now considered anti-Nazi martyrs.
So far as we know, the Florida college instructor and essayist isn’t in physical danger if DeSantis and his thought police find out who she is. But that doesn’t mean she’s immune to unpleasant consequences. DeSantis has already targeted college tenure (see story here), and loss of tenure, job and livelihood, and destruction of a decades-long career are no small consequences. Even if he’s not chopping off heads, it still feels like repression, and the principles at stake are the same.
This is a danger to our society and must be opposed. There are brave people who will step forward to oppose it, and we should support them any way we can. Above all, by letting them know others agree with them and appreciate their efforts and sacrifices. We also must get the word out about what DeSantis is doing in Florida, because this man must never be president.
I have another suggestion, too: Yale and Harvard should consider rescinding his degrees, because his attacks on higher education and academic freedom contradict everything he was taught in those institutions, and violate everything they stand for: Academic freedom, intellectual curiosity, unfettered pursuit of knowledge and truth, and freedom of thought and speech.
A person who takes a hatchet to the basic purposes of college education should not be allowed to call himself a college graduate, when his behavior demonstrates he learned nothing in college.