BY THOMAS A. BRESLIN

Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and his allies have used conflict-of-interest policies meant to keep China from poaching American intellectual property to muzzle Florida’s public college and university professors. So doing, they’ve managed to deny the public access to the expertise of public university and college faculty members, threatened public health, put at risk the accreditation of the University of Florida and tens of millions of dollars of federal student aid.

As if that were not enough, in spring 2020 DeSantis and his minions passed a law, HB 233, allegedly to promote intellectual diversity in Florida’s public higher education. The law, however, monitors political thinking in public universities and colleges and opens the classrooms of Florida to monitoring by the Chinese government which has made it a crime for anyone anywhere to criticize Chinese policies, and has shown that it will punish faculty members in foreign institutions for criticizing China.

The federal government has long worried about Chinese exaction or theft of intellectual property. China’s requirements that American firms seeking access to its market partner with and share intellectual property with local firms have aggravated US–China relations. Although China pays far more for US intellectual property than any other country, its payments are hundreds of millions of dollars short of what they should be. However, extensive and aggressive federal investigations have revealed few intellectual property thieves among hundreds of thousands of Chinese Americans or Chinese citizens in America.

Indeed, China has been failing to acquire the know how needed to advance its ambitious plans to become a world-leader in technology. Ninety percent of the high-achieving undergraduate students it paid to educate and allowed to go to the US or Europe for graduate or post-doctoral education were not returning. So, in 2008 it launched the Thousand Talent Program to lure back foreign-trained talent.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s anti-China rhetoric on trade inspired lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to look more closely at record-breaking levels of Chinese investment in the US, especially in US high-tech start-up firms.

The Trump administration aggressively investigated the Chinese government’s programs to acquire intellectual property from the US. Concerns about intellectual property theft were extended to Chinese researchers working on projects of military or intelligence value in American universities or companies. In June 2018, the Trump administration restricted visas for Chinese graduate students in sensitive areas to one year, with a chance to renew them. In August, the National Institutes of Health sent a letter to the 10,000 institutions it funded warning of “threats to the integrity of US biomedical research.”

In April 2019, the New York Times reported that 55 institutions were investigating federal findings that some researchers were sharing with China intellectual property and confidential information pilfered from grant applications, or had not disclosed ties to foreign sources, or were running “shadow laboratories” in China while conducting federally funded research in the US. By mid-2019, the FBI was actively investigating nearly 1,000 attempted thefts of US intellectual property, with nearly all involving China. The FBI was especially interested in scientists and engineers working on federal contracts or grants who were also employed by a Chinese government agency or contractor or linked to a foreign “Talent/Scholarship” program.

The Trump administration mandated institutional reporting of foreign source funding, expanded grant disclosure requirements and restrictions against participation by researchers funded by or tied to foreign “Talent/Scholarship” programs. Institutional and individual penalties for non-compliance were severe, including debarment from participating in federally funded grant or contract-based research.

In late 2019, Moffit Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida dismissed six scientists for failing to disclose their participation in China’s Thousand Talents Program. Three University of Florida faculty members resigned, and one was dismissed after NIH notified UF of questionable foreign meddling in grant research and funding. UF had received over 190 million dollars from NIH in the previous year.

In January 2020, the Florida legislature launched an investigation. Responding to concern expressed by Florida’s junior US Senator Rick Scott, UF President Kent Fuchs wrote that in 2019 UF had put in place a new international risk assessment process to screen activities with foreign institutions and developed an electronic system to monitor the disclosure of outside activities and interests. He added that UF did not approve of participation in foreign talents programs and faculty members failing to disclose their participation in such were subject to discipline, “including termination for cause.”

In the 2020 legislative session the governor and his allies advanced their domestic political philosophy by establishing quietly at Florida International University in Miami the “Adam Smith Center for the Study of Economic Freedom.” The center would promote deregulation of the economy, part of a larger antigovernment political agenda associated with the Trump and DeSantis base. The director of the new center is a Harvard PhD in Government and a former Trump White House and National Endowment for the Humanities official. The details of his appointment are obscure.

While DeSantis and his allies were planning their next moves, the Chinese government was reacting to massive pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong and criticism from academics elsewhere. In 2020, it enacted a new national security law that made it illegal for anyone, anywhere in the world to criticize its handling of the situation in Hong Kong, and conceivably anything else about China.

The Association for Asian Studies and nearly two dozen other professional academic organizations warned that the new law was a threat to China scholars and their students everywhere now and far into the future. Separately, the AAS also warned China scholars that courses delivered by videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom might be hacked and they and their students made subject to retribution by the Chinese government for statements considered critical of the Chinese government. In early 2021, the AAS put out a statement criticizing the Chinese government for punishing a professor in the UK “for ostensibly ‘maliciously spread[ing] lies and disinformation’” about Chinese state policies in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The Chinese government has no tradition of academic freedom and has been pressing its nation’s universities to adhere even more closely to state policies and doctrine. Some well-established and highly regarded universities changed their charters to omit commitment to free speech and inquiry.

Oblivious or indifferent to these China developments, Governor DeSantis’s next step in changing public university and college programming came in 2021, when he signed into law HB 233, the so-called “Viewpoint Diversity” law. The law mandates an annual survey to assess intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity in Florida’s state colleges and universities.

Further, HB 233 permits students to record without instructor’s consent class lectures. That makes it possible for the Chinese government to monitor courses in Florida for criticism of China and to punish critics, making HB 233 a “Viewpoint Monitoring” law for Florida’s small cohort of Asia specialists and their students and, conceivably, a “Science and Technology Monitoring” law for professors and students who might otherwise by barred from the US by federal visa restrictions.

At UF, application of conflict-of-interest rules took a hard domestic political turn. A new policy required professors to ask for administrative permission to offer their expertise in outside cases. In July 2021, the Law School Dean invoked conflict of interest rules to prevent four law school professors from identifying themselves as UF faculty members if they signed “friend of the court” brief in a lawsuit challenging a felons voting law, “because it involved ‘an action against the state,’” the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times reported months later. “In August,” the Herald/Times continued, “university officials told a professor of pediatrics that he couldn’t work on two cases challenging the state’s ban on mask mandates because participating in lawsuits against Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration would ‘create a conflict’ for the university.”

In late September 2021, DeSantis, an opponent of mask and COVID-19 vaccine mandates, appointed as Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, a heart specialist on the UCLA medical school faculty who also opposed mask and vaccine mandates. The University of Florida, whose Board of Trustees includes three major DeSantis campaign donors, quickly appointed Ladapo to its medical school faculty and reversed the university’s anti-Covid measures. On September 23, The Gainesville Sun editorialized: “Ladapo’s appointment is further proof that UF administrators have become accomplices to DeSantis as he puts public health at risk through his COVID policies.” The Miami Herald later reported that on September 21 UF President Kent Fuchs had advised the UF Faculty Senate that open resistance to the governor’s actions “would fracture the relationship between the University and state government.” Any fracture risked the loss of special $50 million appropriation for UF recommended to the legislature by the Board of Governors.

Weeks later, however, administrators at the University of Florida sparked an explosion when they invoked conflict-of-interest rules to forbid three tenured UF political science professors from serving as expert witnesses in a lawsuit against Florida’s new restrictions on voting. The faculty members had previously been unhindered from serving as expert witnesses.

About this case and the prior cases of the law and medical school faculty, the Herald reported, “These actions show how the University of Florida has gradually moved toward suppressing the voices of its scholars who want to offer legal or subject-matter expertise in cases that challenge the policies advanced by the governor or the legislature.”

Feeling the heat from an outraged faculty union appealing to donors to withhold donations from the University for breaking with a tradition of academic freedom, from its accrediting agency promising to investigate whether academic freedom was at stake or undue political influence being exerted, and from newspaper editorialists around the state, President Fuchs told his administrators to rescind the ban on the three political scientists serving as expert witnesses and set up a task force to review the conflict-of-interest policy.

The three faculty members pressed on with a suit against UF, its administrators, and trustees in federal court, claiming infringement of their First Amendment right to free speech. Two UF law professors and the professor in the college of medicine noted above have since joined their suit.

The US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform intervened, warning President Fuchs that it would be investigating possible violation of UF professor’ First Amendment rights. According to the Tampa Bay Times the Democrat-led House Committee informed Fuchs it was probing the extent to which “federally funded universities use conflict of-interest policies to censor employees who oppose the interests of the political party in power.” The committee gave UF a Dec. 2 deadline to respond to a records request, “including a list of all denials to participate in activities based on the conflict of interest policy since 2015, with detailed explanations and all communications surrounding any revisions to the policy.”

In contrast, state university officials at Florida State University, the other flagship university, and Florida International University had greenlighted faculty members to testify as expert witnesses, the former against the legislation, and the latter for it, and avoided controversy.

Ominously, the Miami Herald reports that a “draft document said to be written by a university provost, proposes rules that would make it easier for veteran faculty members to be dismissed.” Reportage in the Tampa Bay Times suggests that the UF provost drafted the document.

What began as a federal reaction to the illegal actions of a few mainly Chinese and Chinese-ancestry faculty members and students in America who were collaborating with the Chinese government to steal intellectual property was seized upon by Florida’s Republican politicians and UF administrators to reinforce an effort to politically neuter faculty members in Florida’s state colleges and universities. While the federal government was seeking to protect America’s intellectual property from China, an American presidential hopeful, Governor Ron DeSantis, and his Republican cronies in the name of intellectual diversity were establishing an ideological platform in one state university and opening Florida’s public college and university classrooms to monitoring by China, a country eager to appropriate ideas of commercial value and punish deviations from its official line.

Thomas A. Breslin is professor of politics and international relations at the Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University.