BY JENNIFER RUTH

“Will You Take the Stand?” ask the Florida college students staging a walkout at noon today. In an online pledge form, they write,

The DeSantis Administration is proposing to outlaw all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives at Florida Colleges and Universities.

He has displayed a pattern of behavior in which he Hijacks School Systems as he did with the New College of Florida. Marginalizes and Dehumanizes The LGBTQ Community, and portrays an abject Disregard Of The Rights Of Students. He says we are being indoctrinated by wokeness, but we say he is using us in his narrative, and destroying our schools to achieve his vision.

We are Florida’s students and citizens. It is our education that is being tarnished and our schools being discredited.

This is our fight for freedom.

We demand the DeSantis administration restore DEI initiatives, stop its attack on LGBTQ+ students, and end his abuse of power. We will take our Stand For Freedom and walk out of our classes, our jobs, our meetings, and any other commitments, on February 23 from 12:00 – 1:00 PM, meeting at our respective student centers.

The students stress that it is their fight for freedom, implicitly calling upon generational pride. Previous generations of young adults had to fight for the desegregation of lunch counters and public schools. Previous generations had to fight, that is, for democracy. Now it’s our turn, they suggest, to do the work “to make [the US] a more perfect union” by “calling out and standing up to cruelty and governmental overreach wherever we see it.”

By fighting for themselves, these students also fight for us, the faculty. Explicitly so: “We believe that teachers should decide what to teach—without interference from politicians,” their pledge states. Yesterday’s post by Sherryl Kleinman, “UNC–Chapel Hill Board of Trustees Undermines Value of Faculty Expertise,” spells out how the disregard for faculty expertise on display among the UNC–Chapel Hill Board of Trustees is simultaneously a betrayal of students “who expect that what they’re offered is knowledge based on genuine expertise, not ideology.” Her piece shows how the proposal made by trustees, and their legislative backers, to create a new School of Civic Life and Leadership seeks to bypass faculty governance in order to impose a “blatantly political solution” to a nonexistent problem. The problem, of course, is “wokeness,” an alleged ignorance about American history, and an alleged apathy among students. This is the same playbook as in Florida and the students know it: DeSantis, they write in the section of the pledge quoted above, “says we are being indoctrinated by wokeness, but we say he is using us in his narrative, and destroying our schools to achieve his vision.”

Marches, boycotts, walkouts—that’s the world we’re now indisputably in if we want to defend the integrity of our universities and colleges. On February 15, Floridians marched on the state Capitol to protest DeSantis’s rejection of the Advanced Placement course on African American studies. One former teacher at the march said, “It’s not just the AP course. It is the whitewashing of African American history in this country.” A high-school student told a reporter that denying students the AP course “affects us directly” because “it’ll change our future if we can’t learn about the past.” Is this what the right-wing politicians call “woke”? Is this apathy about the country? The former teacher, Shaia Simmons, also said, “Black history isn’t important to just Black people, it is important to everyone. It is the fabric of the country.”

The Florida walkout is specifically in response to DeSantis’s calls to end diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives (DEI). DeSantis’s statements are pointedly public, designed as they are to rally an audience beyond Florida as he prepares to announce his bid for presidency. It is harder to know what’s going on behind the scenes at Florida’s colleges and universities. This is what we need investigative journalism for. And Emma Pettit of the Chronicle of Higher Education is doing her job well. In “How A Center for Civic Education Became a Political Provocation” Pettit takes readers “behind the scenes of a controversial effort to combat ‘uniformity’ at the University of Florida.” Drawing on FOIA requests that enabled her to access communications among administrators at the University of Florida, she details how a partisan end run around faculty governance and expertise took place at the University of Florida in much the same way as it is being proposed at UNC–Chapel Hill. The center in this case is called “The Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education,” intended to “promote freedom of thought, provide students with a ‘nonpartisan civic education’ in American ideals, teach the great books of the Western canon, and improve the political and intellectual diversity of UF’s faculty body, according to the proposal.” Pettit uncovers the machinations by which a lobbying group, paid for by a dark-money organization (“details about the Council on Public University Reform are sparse,” Pettit writes) hit up Mark Kaplan, the university’s vice president for government and community relations who, in turn, hit up the provost, Joseph Glover, with a six-page proposal for the center. Back in January 2022, Glover originally responded to the proposal by saying that it “lays out a conservative agenda to influence the curriculum that may not be well received.” In a recent email responding to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Glover writes that he saw “no evidence of a ‘conservative agenda’ being advanced.”

In Kleinman’s piece for this blog, she writes about the UNC–Chapel Hill trustees: “The irony is that even while the trustees tout the value of democracy, their actions teach a different lesson: if you have enough power, there’s no need for consultation or honest debate.” Read Emma Pettit’s story in the Chronicle today and you’ll see how the end run around faculty works from the inside.

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).