BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE
University of Florida administrators have created a slideshow to help faculty understand the implications of the state’s new law, House Bill 7, also known as the Stop WOKE Act. One slide says, “At its core, the bill’s message is: ‘No one likes to be told what to think. And that includes students.’ The theme of the bill is that instructors should not present personal beliefs about a topic as the ‘right’ point of view or compel or encourage students to adopt a specific belief.” For craven capitulation to right-wing distortions of what goes on in universities, it would be hard to top this statement.
UF administrators seem to be affirming two bonehead ideas. One is that education doesn’t involve teaching students what to think. The other is that professors try to foist their “personal beliefs” on students, using their authority to compel students to accept those beliefs as their own. Faculty who view the slideshow—no doubt suffering through the process of being told what to think—could be forgiven for wondering how people with so little understanding of higher education came to be in charge of it.
We should note that HB 7 is aimed not at faculty across the board but at faculty in the social sciences. Faculty in physics, chemistry, and biology, for instance, unabashedly tell students what to think. And it’s a good thing they do, because education in these fields consists largely of teaching students what is known about the natural world and how it works. Right-wing legislators aren’t exercised because chemistry professors tell students what to think about the structure of the carbon bond in the benzene molecule. What bothers these legislators is faculty teaching what is known about the social world and how it works.
What HB 7 aims to restrict, through threat of funding cuts, is teaching about how racism is woven into the routine operation of social institutions and taken-for-granted ways of thinking. Forbidden, for example, is instruction that “advances” the idea that racism can be embedded in or masked by rhetoric that touts the virtues of color blindness, hard work, neutrality, and objectivity. Also forbidden is advancing the claim that such rhetoric is devised and deployed by members of one racial group to maintain advantage over members of other racial groups. According to the most straightforward interpretation of the law, presenting a critical analysis of how racial inequalities are created and perpetuated, no matter how empirically grounded such an analysis might be, is now illegal.
Empirical grounding is, of course, crucial. When I taught about social inequality, I assigned Peggy McIntosh’s classic essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” but I didn’t insist that students take it as gospel. I certainly didn’t tell them to embrace McIntosh’s analysis because of my personal belief that she was right. She was right, I wanted students to see, because there was overwhelming evidence—presented in other assigned readings—of white advantage in the job market, housing market, schools, and the courts. Call it what you like (if you don’t like the term white privilege), I said, but the phenomenon is real and objectively documented—in many ways, many times over.
My point was never to make white students feel bad about advantages they enjoy in a society dominated by white people and in which white means normal. My point was to help them understand how the social world works, how they fit into it, and how others fit into it differently. If this induced any guilt, it would have been only because students felt it was wrong, according to their own sense of justice, to continue to reap benefits they hadn’t earned, benefits that came at the expense of others.
Right-wing legislators in Florida and other states have weaponized the guilt that some white people, whether they’ve gone to college or not, might feel if they were to honestly confront the facts about white privilege. These legislators have said, in effect, “Neither you nor your sons and daughters in college classrooms should have to feel this way, and to ensure that these bad feelings don’t arise, we’ll forbid social scientists from talking about this stuff, which is all just propaganda anyway.” Administrators who appear to scold faculty for imposing their personal beliefs on students, or for telling students what to think, lend credibility to these charges. That’s more damaging than silence.
A sense of the audience to which right-wing legislators play, and an indirect sign of their success in demonizing social science, can be drawn from news stories about the rejection of math textbooks in Florida. In one New York Times story, a parent who served on a textbook review board is reported to have objected to math problems that “suggested a correlation between racial prejudice, age, and education level and that called attention to the wage gap between women and men.” Objecting to factual portrayal of these features of the social world in K–12 textbooks suggests a deeper desire to bury these matters entirely. Right-wing legislators are both fueling and tapping into this desire, and coming after not only K–12 math textbooks but also social science taught in universities as well.
Today, social scientists are the targets of what the AAUP and other groups have called “educational gag orders.” But tomorrow, climate scientists could be forbidden from teaching about human contributions to global warming, or biologists from teaching about evolution, or geneticists from teaching about race as a social fiction. Indeed, if the social sciences can be stifled for political reasons, so can any discipline deemed troublesome. Our only hope is to build solidarity across disciplines. If we can’t manage it now, when the wolf is at the door, the last professors who find themselves facing gag orders might wonder why no one else is left to help them resist.
Michael Schwalbe is professor emeritus of sociology at North Carolina State University.
Yet McIntosh’s essay has been the object of a great deal of controversy. To say simply “she was right” suggests at least a bit of dogmatism, and your distinction between “personal belief” and *what you take to be* “overwhelming evidence” is itself pretty rickety. To be clear, I know of very little material in the social sciences or humanities that I could honestly say is “right” in such a way that I would insist to students it is. Even people who work on privilege and whiteness are not at all sure that McIntosh’s account of it is the right one.
I mention this because you (rightly) attack the Florida bill for expressing the “bonehead idea” “that professors try to foist their ‘personal beliefs’ on students, using their authority to compel students to accept those beliefs as their own.” Yet you them come perilously close to doing just that.
And let’s face it: the impression that many on the right have that a lot of left-leaning professors teach not to open minds but to tell people what the right thing to think about important social issues is not altogether mistaken. I see it every day–to be honest it’s the norm. Obviously for some more than others. But the way my colleagues talk about teaching, and the way students talk about their classes, make clear that universities and my colleagues are more and more encouraging professors to tell students what the right things to say and think are, and to stop there.
It may well be the case that in chemistry, you get water by mixing hydrogen and oxygen, and not chlorine and sodium, and one is right and the other is wrong, full stop. But in social sciences and the humanities, very few things will ever be this certain, nor should they be. It is dangerous and anti-intellectual to teach otherwise. And it plays right into the hands of the far right, because the minute we assert that we do know “the right position” about complex social issues (& I don’t mean slavery or colonialism, but subtler issues like the specific nature of privilege), they will not only attack us, but use that attack to insist that they install their own demagogues into universities, who will teach (what they think is) the “right way to think.”
“Yet McIntosh’s essay has been the object of a great deal of controversy. ”
I’d be interested in some references to any cogent critique, especially since we have considered MacIntosh to be one of the — if not *the* — scholar of “White privilege” and her essay is regarded a classic. Prof. Schwalbe seems to me to be making a reasonable point, that the weight of tons of evidence documented the existence of what we call “White privilege” — and students should be familiar with that evidence — but that interpretations of the phenomenon could vary.