John White is a senior faculty fellow in the Teaching, Learning & Curriculum department and has taught at UNF since 2008. He also served on the UNF Board of Trustees and on the university’s presidential transition team when Moez Limayem first took office.
I’m writing to our UNF community to explain why I have been fighting back attempts at state-mandated censorship of university course materials and to provide critical contexts about what has been taking place.
Over the summer, the Florida Board of Education (FL DOE) and the Board of Governors (BOG)—the political appointees who oversee the state university system—demanded that administrators in our university-based teacher education programs send to the state all of the course descriptors and course objectives for teacher education courses. They then demanded that UNF administrators expunge from those materials the words “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and “culture” and any derivatives of those words, regardless of the context in which those terms were being used. To force compliance with their demands, the BOG staff told our administrators that it would approve of our courses only when our course materials met their “new rules” (this happened despite the fact that all of our teacher education courses had already been approved via existing state rules). The state’s timeline for meeting this demand prompted university administrators at UNF to circumvent the normal protocols required for such course changes, thereby eliminating faculty input into or debate about these controversial changes.
When I was told in August by the administration to remove the aforementioned terms from my course syllabi, I immediately asked for any official documentation that prohibited the use of these or other terms. Nothing I received in response proscribed the use of any terms in our course materials. A more detailed search of state statute and state rules—a search repeated by the editor-in-chief of Spinnaker—revealed that no such new rules are written in any laws or regulations. It appears that the BOG’s “new rules” regarding prohibitions on specific terms are nowhere codified; they have been conveyed only verbally. Thus, my colleagues and I have been forced to submit to censorious new rules that we have no way of actually reading. As someone who has deep respect for the rule of law, I believe that those of us affected by a law or state rule should have the opportunity to actually read that law or rule. Further, Florida Statutes (Article 120) specifically require that laws and administrative rules be written and published in order to be valid and enforceable. Therefore, the lack of written evidence of the new rules elicited in me a fear that, here in a state with expansive “Sunshine Laws,” the FL DOE and the BOG are employing verbally-relayed commands in an attempt to circumvent the injunction on House Bill 7 (the Stop Woke Act) and to shield themselves from a likely injunction of SB 266 (in essence a new version of Stop Woke), two state laws that have sought to prohibit certain views from being discussed on our campuses.
It was based upon these contexts that I filed a grievance (a union-based approach to addressing violations of our collective bargaining agreement). I feel that as an educator and scholar I must take a stand against any effort to limit the ideas and theories my students and I can explore in our classrooms. Pushing back against censorship is all the more important when all evidence shows that the censored ideas have a tremendous impact on how our program’s graduates can relate to and teach their K-12 students.
Finally, I want to make something clear: I filed my grievance and have been reaching out to the press not to shame the UNF administration; rather, I’ve done so to fight censorship in the academy and to uphold the contract that UNF’s Board of Trustees (also state-appointed) signed with our faculty. I know my colleagues in the administration and believe that they too abhor such censorship. However, they feel powerless to resist it. For UNF administrators to question or say no to the BOG (regardless of the merits behind such pushback) is to invite their potential removal and replacement by “yes men.” We only need to look at what happened at New College to see what can happen when a university administrator finds themselves afoul of the BOG. But at some point, we must collectively do something; the stakes are too high not to resist ideological hegemony and forms of authoritarianism.
I recognize that my grievance and outreach to the press will likely be futile; the disposition of the grievance process is ultimately decided by our upper administration and a far-right leaning BOG is unlikely to change its course. But I feel that I must push back in whatever ways I can. To that end, I encourage you—no matter what your role at UNF—to use your voice to push back as well. Tell your friends, family, parents, and state policymakers that you deserve to be in a university system where you can freely delve into theories and ideas and, knowing them better, choose what you want to believe.
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