BY YOVANNA PINEDA
With a supermajority in the state legislature, Florida governor Ron DeSantis has passed his dream legislation, which seeks to punish those who think differently from him as a white, cisgender, heterosexual male with zero tolerance for the state’s diverse citizens, including African Americans, transgender and LGBTQ+ communities, and immigrants from nearly two hundred nations.
During the early 2000s, Florida universities grew at unprecedented rates thanks to increased enrollments of students of color. In response, administrations expanded diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs to attract faculty of color to apply for positions at Florida institutions. Before arriving at the University of Central Florida in 2010, I had an established career as an associate professor at a liberal arts college in New England. But in March 2010—that winter had been particularly bad in Boston—I accepted an invitation to interview as a diversity hire at UCF. The campus tour revealed UCF’s hidden treasure: one of the most diverse student populations thinkable, representing all religions, political views, nationalities, and disciplines. I became delighted with all the possibilities this diversity promised for my teaching and research. During our orientation, my cohort of new hires had more women faculty of color than I had ever seen in my combined graduate and academic career until then (1994–2010).
Although Governor Rick Scott railed in the 2010s against anthropology degrees at Florida universities, it was not until July 2020 that Republican politicians led by DeSantis ramped up their culture war against education, minority communities, and all groups that didn’t support MAGA-ism. The culture war has consisted of battles against teachers and administrators at K–12 schools, including the “mandate against mask mandates,” the anti-LGBTQ+ law known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, and revising math textbooks to remove references to “diversity.” DeSantis openly supported hate groups such as the Proud Boys who angrily protested on university campuses and the Moms for Liberty who shouted at my kindergarten-aged daughter and me for wearing masks while walking to her school. After initially touting vaccines that Trump supported, DeSantis then did an about-face and stayed silent about the benefits of life-saving vaccines even as the Delta, Omicron, and Florida’s Deltomicron COVID variants infected more than 7.5 million people and killed 87,141 of them.
With DeSantis running for president and throwing as much red meat to the MAGA base as he can, this past academic year 2022–23 has been the worst of all for Florida education. In January 2023, the Florida House of Representatives audited all state universities in a witch hunt for all DEI-program employees, their salaries and records of their communications. Then came the bill which is now law SB 266, with its prohibition on teaching about systemic racism, which contains other implied language provoking fear in many and deterring them from working on DEI initiatives. Thus far, DeSantis’s anti-woke crusade has been codified in laws ranging from rolling back LGBTQ+ rights to whitewashing Black and women’s histories.
Most egregiously, the new history textbooks for K–12 claim that enslaved Africans benefited from their enslavement by acquiring “valuable skills.” This is an interpretation that epitomizes systemic racism—that is, the subject about which DeSantis seeks to ban all teaching.
I often wonder whether DeSantis’s ideas come directly out of a fascist playbook. I stay in Florida, but my family will leave. In addition to banning books and passing racist and anti-gay laws, Republicans have promoted misogynist prohibitions, such as a ban on discussing menstruation in school. This is why I just moved my daughter this month to my birthplace, California, so she could continue her education and never have to suffer from these laws.
In higher education, DeSantis’s laws and policies strike at faculty members’ livelihoods and well-being. Some fear for their safety on campus since the political environment that these laws and policies have fostered encourages hate groups to come to campus and heckle students and professors who disagree with them. Other faculty are understandably scared to teach race or gender studies. The vague wording of the laws makes us all potential targets of our “anti-woke”—read anti–academic freedom—state government.
Given these authoritarian policies, it is easy to understand why so many outstanding research professors, teachers, and staff members are leaving Florida, or even quitting or retiring their careers in higher education altogether.
What DeSantis and his collaborators do not understand is that working in Florida education is for many of us nothing short of a calling. Even before he was elected governor, faculty and staff worked under difficult conditions, including limited state funds for research and a patriarchal and hierarchical administrative structure. Faculty like myself work here because we want to serve marginalized communities and our students. The work was meaningful and worth pursuing.
For the time being, I’m not leaving because I have chosen to fight this attack on academic freedom and people of color. I am active in our faculty union, helping to increase faculty union membership to the 60 percent now required by DeSantis’s law SB 256 so we don’t lose our contract. We hope to achieve the legally unprecedented requirement of 60 percent that is clearly intended to make the bar so high as to decertify Florida education unions and weaken faculty and teachers even more. The union bargains for all faculty regardless of whether they are members. Thanks to the efforts of my team, we have increased union membership from 31 to 45 percent of all faculty since January 2023. We are not giving up.
Further Reading
Dr. Yovanna Pineda is an associate professor in the Department of History and Africana Studies Program at the University of Central Florida. Specializing in the history of technology and culture in Argentina, her second monograph Spectacular Bodies: Aesthetics of Labor and the Future of Work in Argentina examines the aesthetics of labor during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She’s also a labor organizer, helping to raise awareness of anti-education policies affecting Florida academics.
Years ago, a professor pranked the CritLit crowd by presenting a paper of utter gibberish made up of strings of verbiage culled from the post-colonial, post-modern, Foucauldian, etc., etc. lexicon. The paper received a respectful reading and positive reviews even though it was utterly indecipherable. Fury ensued when the hilarious trolling was revealed.
You are either pulling a similar stunt, or you are spectacularly un-self aware, or you are merely a liar. In any case, your stereotyping of those holding views different from those you espouse in terms both ignorant and vicious, provides a perfect example of why the academy requires political intervention.
Hugh E. Brennan, what on earth are you talking about? Did you read Professor Pineda’s essay?
I’m not sure how this comment passed the comment review. It makes no sense — there is no jargon in this post and there is nothing that can be construed on its face as a lie. I google-searched your name and it looks like you are the President of your university’s chapter of Turning Point? If that’s right, then I understand your comment — as ridicule and baseless contempt which, if repeated and amplified often enough, might give the public the impression that universities are out of control and require authoritarian state intervention. And why might universities need to be subordinated to partisan state control? Apparently, given your reaction to this post, because some faculty care enough about their students that they try to help their universities serve the diverse communities that enroll in them.
Although its relevance to Prof. Pineda’s essay is opaque, it appears that you are referring to the 1996 Sokal hoax in which Alan Sokal, a physicist, submitted a bogus paper to the journal Social Text. But there are important features of that “hoax” that you may have forgotten. You write “The paper received a respectful reading and positive reviews…..” but that is not completely accurate. Not only were the two editors skeptical of the paper (but decided to publish it anyway), it did not get refereed, but was accepted without any external review. Second, Sokal announced and revealed the hoax just as the issue of the journal appeared, so most of the very few of us who read Social Text already knew that it was a bogus article, and Sokal left it impossible to determine whether anyone was actually fooled by his hoax: I know of no one who found Sokal’s paper intelligible, let alone convincing. This overview clarifies some of your misconceptions: https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/sokala/theshoax.htm
More important, it is unclear how Prof. Pineda’s essay here resembles in any way the Sokal hoax essay, or in what way she is unfairly stereotyping the political actors mentioned in her essay. You write
“…your stereotyping of those holding views different from those you espouse in terms both ignorant and vicious, provides a perfect example of why the academy requires political intervention.”
This is a blatantly unconstitutional call for government suppression of speech. If you disagree with any aspect of Prof. Pineda’s essay you are free to offer a rebuttal or commentary, but “political intervention” is unacceptable, both legally and morally.
One of the problems with modern American conservatism is that it’s so boring and backward-looking. If the only way to critique a straightforward article on the present situation in Florida is to invoke an-almost-30-year-old hoax as if it’s some kind of gotcha… well, that’s kind of sad.
Avoiding undue, undesirable, and often undemocratic influence on the academic and social aims of the academe requires academics (i.e., professors, lecturers, TAs, GAs, and other self and other-imposed designations) to step outside the institutional (i.e., university and college), governmental, and union labor organizational boxes of the current model for higher education (HE).
I understand the draw to unionization, but the political, axiological, ethical, sociological, etc. divisions that are represented in this piece and comments will obviously be found inside unions as well. A such, it is not a case of them (i.e., HEIs and governments) against us (i.e., union organization), because the disunity illustrated here is unavoidable in the unions, making it them against X% of us. One way to reduce and restructure disunity across the existing HE system is to eliminate or nominalize the influence of some of the players in the sandbox.
The Professional Society of Academics (PSA) model for HE system does just that with respect to HEIs and governments. A new proper profession of academics can have disunity, like unions, but it is an independent internal matter for us alone to navigate and negotiate – without the interference of external interests from HEIs and governments. Imagine an academe where we could argue and evolve with removed or reduced pressures of HEIs and governments. This is an entirely different framework from within which to have the above discussion. I invite comment and collaboration: https://bit.ly/UnionsNotSocUnity & https://bit.ly/PSAvid01