By CHRISTOPHER ROBÉ AND DAWN L. ROTHE

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
Alice in Wonderland

It is difficult for many of us in Florida to fully grasp how we have ended up as ground zero for the culture wars over gender, sexuality, Black history, and so much else. Back in 2018, one might recall, Ron DeSantis barely squeaked by, winning the governorship with less than one percentage point above his rookie opponent. Initially, it appeared as if DeSantis might have been an improvement against our prior governor who rode the crest of the Tea Party movement and enacted head-scratching actions like blocking a sorely needed public rail system and banning state employees from mentioning climate change in a locale where the threat exponentially impacts us.

Yet, as Donald Trump and other politicians whipped up a backlash against Muslim and Latino Americans, racial justice protests, LGBTQ+ communities, and public health policies, to name only a few, DeSantis’s politics metastasized in reactionary directions. For example, over the course of the last two years, DeSantis and his minions have passed legislation that has done irreparable damage to Florida’s systems of public education, from K–12 to the college and university systems. They have censored aspects of Black history and criminalized discussions about racism and inequality along with issues of sexuality and gender. In general, they want to eliminate nuanced classroom discussions that threaten their power and expose their biases.

We both teach and research subjects related to analyzing crimes and harms of governments and corporations, racism, social movements, and neoliberalism. Overall, we explore the ways in which state power operates and how various communities challenge it. Although we are senior faculty with robust scholarship and expertise in academia that makes us feel less vulnerable to these recent anti-intellectual laws, many others do not feel this way or share our relatively secure positions. We hear from colleagues and students how course content is being self-censored for fear of being targeted.  We also hear how students from vulnerable communities feel that their speech is being constricted on campus and in the classroom, as their very sense of identity, history, and beliefs are being adamantly denied and criminalized by the state. Public higher education should be a place for students to explore their concerns, identity, and ideas without fear of retaliation. Junior faculty starting out their careers shouldn’t have to be worried about how their research might offend a politician who often holds no expertise in their subject matter. This is why tenure exists in the first place: to defend the free discussion of ideas in the classroom and the pursuit of research from political interference.

Yet political appointees are being installed as presidents and provosts at our universities, and boards of trustees, often having no academic background, are given more power in hiring and firing. All of this threatens the integrity of tenure and faculty autonomy.  We are all confronted with the threat and real potential of losing our jobs for speaking the truth, presenting scientific facts in our publications, research, and teaching that counter Florida’s state-enacted and twisted version of history and draconian white heteronormative notions of race, gender, and family. Academic freedom, the bedrock of higher education, is endangered.

As a result of all of these developments, faculty and teachers are fleeing from the state and higher education altogether in droves. Friends and colleagues whom we have known for years, who once considered Florida a place they wanted to retire, are looking for jobs elsewhere, anywhere, or have already left. Students stand to lose out the most. The experienced faculty with deep institutional knowledge that could once have assisted students in navigating their institutions will be absent. The sense of predictability about how their campuses operate, which is a foundation in assisting students in successfully advancing towards their degree and graduating, is undermined by the political whims of those in power. The clock of 2023 winds backwards to decades earlier as cutting-edge research of certain topics is denied funding and discussion in the classroom, censored since it contradicts state law; as higher education closes its doors to diverse student bodies whose very existence challenges the state’s reductive understandings of identity and history; and as higher education serves as a vocational advanced high school where critical thinking becomes endangered.

This is what we are currently facing and fighting against. As leaders of our local chapter union, we are uniting with students, faculty, staff, and other community members to challenge this politicized attack against a quality and accessible public higher education for all. The knowledge we produce results from where our research takes us, not from political dictates. Our classroom content marries our academic expertise with the interests of our increasingly diverse student body. We do not impose our ideas upon students. We respond to student interest by framing our knowledge in accessible and engaging ways that resonate with students’ lived experiences.

We cannot roll back public higher education to make it belong once again exclusively to white, Christian, heteronormative, upper-class men as it has historically been for much of its existence. Yet our state laws regulating public higher education assume this to be inherent. Any subject that doesn’t align with those in power is suspect, at best, and criminalized, at worst.

We won’t have it. We can’t have it. Students deserve better. We all deserve better.

Christopher Robé is a professor in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University. He is vice-president of the FAU chapter of United Faculty of Florida. He researches media activism. His book Abolishing Surveillance: Digital Media Activism and State Repression is forthcoming from PM Press.

Dawn L. Rothe is a professor in the School of Criminology at Florida Atlantic University. She is president of the FAU chapter of the United Faculty of Florida. She is the author or co-author of 12 books and over 100 articles and/or book chapters. Currently she is working on her latest book, to be published by Routledge Press in 2024.