BY JENNIFER RUTH
The rejection of the College Board’s AP course in African American Studies is only the latest in a series of disturbing news relating to education coming out of Florida. Other examples include the January 18 statement from the presidents of the twenty-eight institutions in the Florida College System declaring they will not fund curriculum that, to their minds, indoctrinates students “in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality”; the demand from Governor Ron DeSantis that Florida’s public colleges and universities report spending on diversity, equity, inclusion, and critical race theory; DeSantis’s appointment of six new right-wing governing board members to the New College of Florida; and the 2021 University of Florida administration decision, later reversed, to bar three professors from serving as expert witnesses on voting rights.
Yesterday, the AAUP announced a special committee “to review an apparent pattern of politically and racially motivated attacks on higher education in the state.” AAUP President Irene Mulvey tweeted that the “Special Committee will gather and review evidence, conduct interviews, determine the facts and produce a thoroughly-researched, well-documented report indicating if, where and how widely accepted standards of the profession are being violated.” Reporting on this news, the Tampa Bay Times wrote that Mulvey “hopes university administrators will feel emboldened by the support of the organization to protect their institutions from outside interference.”
Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker is urging the College Board to similarly defend itself from outside political interference. According to this article in the Chicago Sun Times, the governor wrote to College Board CEO David Coleman on Wednesday: “I urge you to maintain your reputation as an academic institution dedicated to the advancement of students and refuse to bow to political pressure that would ask you to rewrite our nation’s true, if sometimes unpleasant, history. One Governor should not have the power to dictate the facts of U.S. history.” AP courses typically take two to six years to develop in a process relying on experts in the subject area. “More than 300 professors of African American Studies from more than 200 colleges nationwide, including dozens of historically Black colleges and universities, were consulted in developing the official course framework,” the College Board said in a letter to its members on Thursday, according to this report. They will release the framework for the course on February 1.
Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor for Academe Blog and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (2022).
