Editor’s Note: Jack Griffis currently serves as General Manager for Spinnaker Radio, WSKR 95.5 FM-LP. Spinnaker Radio staff do not have any editorial oversight to this publication, UNF Spinnaker, as they are two separate entities.

We’ve been informed, with all the certainty of a meteoric omen, of the impending arrival of Florida DOGE by our governor Ron Desantis. With all the subtlety of a virus surveying an immune system, an agent will enter our campus, analyze our courses, infrastructure, clubs, programs, and countless other facets of UNF’s community, and tell Desantis where the fat could be trimmed on UNF’s budget. 

Naiveté within me has a few suggestions: President Moez Limayem’s bloated salary of half a million dollars, which thus far he has used to be a yes-man to the BOT (who have given him pay raises in turn), and underdeliver salary increases to bargaining UNF faculty. Descending a little further down the hierarchy, we get to the police department, with Chief Mackesy’s absurd $127,726 salary (the 4th highest of an educational police chief in the state of Florida, as reported in 2021, for a campus much smaller and less populous than its peers) somehow being unable to help him or his team catch a burglar until he had already struck five times—but certainly allowing them to rough up 20 year olds in a 4-on-1. 

And with all that space freed up in the budget—the library computers might be able to get new keyboards and mice that don’t stick (such as those on the second floor, near the back of the right side, you can go test ‘em for yourself) when you press down on them, or—could you imagine—reducing certain student fees and costs, making the University easier to access for all! Once more I reiterate– naivete in the highest degree. As we have witnessed on a nationwide scale, programs that are deemed “unprofitable” or “inefficient” from a quantitative standpoint (the humanities, which has already taken quite a beating at UNF after accusations of being “DEI”) will be given the axe, while the needs of students, faculty, and programs are left unconsidered in these calculations. The “reduced budget” will be brutal on “inefficient” departments such as English, Art, and Music—we might even live to see our nursing department replaced by a cheap GPT in the name of efficiency, hypothetically of course (but wasn’t DOGE itself only hypothetical at one point in time?). But what concerns me most is the formation of what Bachelard, Althusser, and Foucault call an “Epistemological rupture,” a cataclysmic phenomenon that will shape the practice of education and learning for years to come in the wake of DOGE’s financial hurricane.

Any sort of phrase with -ology at the end requires further explanation, of course. In shortened form, Epistemological is any text or discourse related to the theory of knowledge– its limits, how we discern knowledge, and what classifies “true” knowledge. Such a topic of course covers a more wide-sweeping consideration rather than education, typically concerned with how one is able to comprehend or form the truth, or how one may come to “know” anything. 

However, in the case of philosophers such as Bachelard (who formed the concept of an epistemological rupture), Althusser, and Foucault (who both contributed to developing the idea of an epistemological rupture), the scope of an epistemological rupture refers to an event that shifts the landscape of knowledge itself, defining how knowledge is understood within a given field. For Bachelard, he described it primarily within the realm of sciences, and that divide between ancient superstition and modern scientific knowledge. Foucault however, drives the term into territories such as medicine, sexuality, and prisons, describing the almost alien differences the era’s within each topic are (pre and post-enlightenment medicine, for example). A rupture completely divorces the knowledge that comes before from that which comes after, and those who become knowledgeable in the wake of an epistemological rupture consider that “before” period either totally irrelevant, or laughable, and in effect shape the way knowledge is experienced and created in their discourses. One is inclined to believe these breaks are positive– the movement from fear to rationality, exile to acceptance. But a program that seeks to slash the budget of an established academic institution (speaking broadly of the entire University system of Florida) tempts an epistemological rupture of a different kind entirely, one of a regressive character that will undoubtedly be to the detriment of humanity. We are told a government agent, unaccountable to the student body, faculty, or any staff is going to examine us for the cancer of inefficiency. Whoever that agent is, in a rather direct form, will shape the nature of this university’s education for perhaps decades to come (if the University as a facet of society even has that long). What Foucault refers to when discussing discourses is of chief relevance here– this agency will shape what is allowable within discussion, whether directly (making certain topics “DEI” and grounds for termination) or indirectly (gradually snipping away “irrelevant” classes from their departments and further narrowing what is considered acceptable or useful education). Combine this with a frankly disinterested student populace who seem more apt to use ChatGPT (itself a discourse-creation machine) than critically consider what is being lost in these cuts, there is a recipe for a generation of students who are more than willing to bound into a new dark ages. Already the University is beholden to send this DOGE representative a list of faculty, non-teaching staff, and grants; can we trust that this as-of-yet unnamed individual, who has given zero qualifications as to their ability to arbitrate what is a waste and what is not, will treat our university well? How much more can the quality of life at UNF go down before this anonymous auditor is satisfied? How many concessions must we make to satisfy the state in their quest to defund education? I am unsure, but I feel that this slash-and-burn of UNF (and countless other schools in the State of Florida) beckons trouble and could usher in an era of scientific and cultural regression.

___

For more information or news tips, or if you see an error in this story or have any compliments or concerns, contact editor@unfspinnaker.com.