I tend to take claims like these with a grain of salt.
But I just went line-by-line through the DeSantis education bill. And you guys, it’s *bananas*. A road map for wrecking one of our great state systems of higher education. 🧵 1/
Breathtaking control of viewpoint and content throughout all academic activity in the entire Florida system. All colleges and universities are forbidden to spend any money to fund pedagogy, programming, or activities that “espouse diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
No core class can present American history contrary to a founding narrative “based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” /3
All state colleges and universities must remove Women’s & Gender Studies from the list of available majors and minors. No major or minor can exist if it is deemed to be “derivative” from the “belief system” of “Critical Race Theory”—gee, wonder where that will go. 4/
All faculty hiring will be done by the university board or president—who *may not delegate* any aspect of any hiring decision or any hiring authority to any group of faculty however constituted. They are “not required to consider recommendations or opinions of faculty.” 5/
On the faculty hiring one, I keep thinking I must be misreading something or missing some other aspect of the administrative/governance workings of state education in Florida. But man the language seems unequivocal. 6/
The only thing that seems as less worrisome on the *face* of the bill is post-tenure review. Long convo, but if you’re gonna have post-tenure review, these considerations seem defensible. (Yes, given everything else, the as-applied potential is super troubling.) 7/
Not good times, guys!
So I thought I’d share this walk-through for those who, like me, sometimes wonder whether some seemingly nutbar thing is being fairly described. Based on the above, the answer here seems clearly to be “yes.” 8/8
POSTSCRIPT: With apologies, the notifications have become unmanageable--I literally can't refresh fast enough to keep up. So I'm muting this thread but will try to poke through it manually. Sorry if I don't answer you; there's a good chance I didn't even see what you wrote 😬
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