The College Board has “purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism” from its Advanced Placement African-American studies curriculum after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—and likely Republican presidential candidate—moved to ban the curriculum in public schools (New York Times, 2/1/23).
Sometimes you have to destroy academic freedom to save it, Joshua Rauh argues in the Wall Street Journal (2/8/23).
Conservative media took a victory lap. “Critical race theory is out, and Condoleezza Rice is in,” boasted the Wall Street Journal editorial board (2/1/23). “It’s vindication for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.” The headline of a Journal op-ed (2/8/23) on legislation that prohibits diversity education declared, “Florida Shows How to Combat Woke Indoctrination on Campus.”
A New York Post editorial (2/2/23) called Florida an inspiration to other states, and asked for a “a leader who will step in and save the State University of New York from woke madness.”
Fox News (2/1/23) highlighted the marginalization of the Black Lives Matter movement in courses’ changes, which it framed as the Advanced Placement course being “stripped of ‘woke’ content after criticism.”
The roots of BLM trace back to the acquittal of vigilante George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, in Sanford, Florida—so the “‘woke’ content” Florida is being heralded for successfully suppressing is the legacy of a historic injustice in the state.
At City Journal (2/2/23), the American Enterprise Institute’s Max Eden made no effort to hide the fact that DeSantis was aiming to stifle the ideas of “far-left academic ideologues”—“left,” of course, being an entirely subjective term, especially in states where Civil War revisionism still exists. Eden had earlier hailed DeSantis in Newsweek (1/31/23), adopting a John Birch Society tone as he suggested that Black studies were an “attempt to impose a far-left worldview on high school students.”
DeSantis has also become a darling of the international right: The British Telegraph (2/5/23) said he should be a model for the Conservative Party as it fights multiculturalism and diversity.
Where ‘woke goes to die’
There’s a broader context here. DeSantis appointed several allies to oversee the prestigious New College of Florida—among them anti-anti-racism crusader Chistopher Rufo, worrying faculty that the governor wants to convert the small public liberal arts school into a conservative idea mill (Chronicle of Higher Education, 1/27/23). DeSantis has also mandated that “public colleges and universities survey students and faculty about their beliefs” (The Hill, 6/23/21). Now he’s bullied a major national player in college education into whitewashing its study of the Black experience…during Black History Month. Not very subtle.
DeSantis is offering red meat to the conservative media who are able to mobilize Republican voters by painting college campuses as left-wing indoctrination camps that mold good Christian patriots into non-binary Sandinistas; this will serve him well if he does chase the GOP presidential nomination. But he’s also accomplishing the Right’s overall censorship goals, regardless of what he does with his own political future: He has successfully used state power to suppress speech and activity that might counter racism, homophobia and the growing militarization of police.
It’s why he has proclaimed that his state is where “woke goes to die” (CBS, 11/9/22)—using an African-American Vernacular English expression that signifies awareness of social and racial injustice. DeSantis joins the tradition of another defiant Southern governor, Alabama’s George Wallace, who stood in a schoolhouse door in 1963 to oppose racial integration—but while Wallace represented a dying old order, DeSantis actually has a shot at national power.
This is what makes DeSantis a hero in conservative media. New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz (2/3/23) claimed that “leftist” corporate media like CNN are, by contrast, suffering from “DeSantis Derangement Syndrome.” In fact, more centrist media are in no way hammering DeSantis with the same vigor that their right-wing counterpoints are defending him—and that lack of symmetry is illustrative of the truncated political spectrum of corporate media.
‘Builds his brand’
While right-wing outlets depicted Ron DeSantis as a role model, more centrist publications like the New York Times (2/9/23) presented him as…a role model.
With the headline “DeSantis Takes On the Education Establishment, as He Builds His Brand,” the New York Times (1/31/23) treated the story with a both-sides, political horse race approach that downplayed the severity of the issue at hand.
It was even more curious that Times columnist Pamela Paul (2/3/23) wrote about the collegiate struggle against woke word-policing and academic censorship without even mentioning Florida.
What Paul misses here is that the main reason journalists and academics find their jobs in jeopardy for saying something controversial is because this generation of media and academic workers enjoy less job protections than their elders. For example, she reported that Hamline University “had refused to renew an art history professor’s contract because she showed an artwork that some Muslim students may have found offensive,” though it reconsidered this move after popular outcry.
But this wasn’t the result of oversensitivity or Islamic policing of US academia. The problem was that the instructor had no tenure or other job security, which, in an era where colleges are employing a customer service model of education, which means one’s scholarship is meaningless against any tuition-payer who wants to “speak to the manager.” Acknowledging this would pin the problem on neoliberalism and managerial capitalism, which is something the Times can’t do.
But Paul—who I am happy to report is no relation—wasn’t done. She followed up (2/9/23) saying liberals should “learn from Ron DeSantis” rather than fight him:
If ideological conformity has taken root in American universities, long a bastion of liberal ideals, then Democrats are the ones with the knowledge, experience and record to attend to the problem. It’s on liberals to check the excesses of illiberal orthodoxies rampant among those on its far-left wing. It’s on us to ensure academic freedom and the kind of educational system parents can trust.
‘The state’s legitimate power’
In the Atlantic‘s theory of free speech, harsh criticism on social media may be a dangerous totalitarianism (8/31/21), but governments actually banning ideas is just the democratic process in action (1/30/23).
Paul isn’t the only pundit who brought a blame-the-victim approach to the issue. Tom Nichols at the Atlantic (1/30/23) framed Florida’s ideological purge as the consequence of democracy:
If Ron DeSantis wants to put [Rufo] in charge of a “top-down restructuring” of a Florida college, the governor has every right to do it.
Elections have consequences. If the people of Florida, through their electoral choices, want to wreck one of their own colleges, it is within the state’s legitimate power to do so.
As a New England resident, Nichols declares, “I couldn’t care less what kind of damage Florida does to its own schools.” That contrasts a bit with the magazine’s series, “The Speech Wars,” which tends to present controversies over free expression in more alarmist tones, as when the magazine’s Conor Friedersdorf (9/21/19) warned: “Campus-speech restrictions jeopardize society’s ability to seek truth and advance knowledge.” (“The Speech Wars” project, incidentally, receives part of its support from the right-wing Charles Koch Foundation.)
But then, Nichols says that he agrees there’s “some truth to the charge” that “colleges have, in fact, become ridiculously liberal,” as he has written on “some stories of campus boobery.” So he does share some ideological common ground with DeSantis, even as he scorns him for his populist pretensions.
Intervening in college affairs
DeSantis is the most successful and high-profile Republican leader to crusade against academic freedom and free speech on campus, but there is no shortage of examples of this political trend.
Right-wing control of North Idaho College’s Board of Trustees has shown how the right can take electoral action to intervene in college affairs directly (Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/15/21). Georgia’s Board of Regents, appointed by the Republican governor, moved to make the tenure process more onerous and give the board more oversight (WABE, 10/13/21), while Republican Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said he would “push to end professor tenure for all new hires at Texas public universities and colleges” in order to fight “faculty members who he says ‘indoctrinate’ students with teachings about Critical Race Theory” (Texas Tribune, 2/18/22).
Chalkbeat (2/1/22).: “At least 36 states have adopted or introduced laws or policies that restrict teaching about race and racism.”
And thanks to the state legislature in Louisiana, “a task force to study tenure policies at the state’s colleges and universities” is “worrying [Louisiana State University] faculty members that lawmakers may pass laws aimed at limiting academic freedom” (Reveille, 8/6/22). Conservative donors at Yale University were able to pressure at least one professor into resigning her post (New York Times, 9/30/21). All over the country, conservatives are looking to legally ban Critical Race Theory (Chalkbeat, 2/1/22).
In other words, the news with DeSantis and the College Board isn’t just “building his brand” for the campaign, or the consequence of democratic outcomes, as the Times and Atlantic suggest. Rather, it is another material victory in the right’s long war against higher education, one that more or less started when National Review founder William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale in 1951.
DeSantis is emboldening Republicans in other states to amp up the campaigns against higher education. Following his lead, South Carolina lawmakers (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/8/23) have sought “information from the state’s 33 public colleges and universities regarding all spending on programs, trainings and activities targeted toward people based on their race, ethnicity or sexual orientation,” defining
diversity, equity and inclusion programs as, among other things, attempts to take an official institutional policy on concepts such as unconscious or implicit bias, cultural appropriation and microaggressions.
As a likely contender for the White House, DeSantis is telegraphing that if elected, he will rein in the power of educators and encourage the closing of the American mind. Anyone in the United States who cares about free speech and academic freedom should be alarmed; so far, DeSantis is polling well (538, 1/10/23).
Outlets like the Times (e.g., 2/10/23) and the Atlantic (e.g., 2/4/23) spill a lot of ink about whether “wokeness” is hampering our discourse (FAIR.org, 11/17/21, 3/25/22). It would be refreshing if they put this question in the context of the Republican-led assault on learning and debate—because right-wing media certainly do.
Somehow this DeSantis man sounds for all the world like a run- of -the -mill thug. He appears to be empty headed—perhaps it’s too much Florida sun? Still he was a horror to send those immigrants who came to Florida –while he decided to ship them off to Massachusetts . Who does this? No one with a functioning brain—I hope.
I can’t resist renaming him—from DeSantis to De Satan—as he cares not a whit for
people, nor for creating a positive functioning society. Maybe he has spent too much time in the sun—and somehow imagines himself to be a savior of—-something. Maybe it’s just his ego—–I wonder if Disney will leave Florida due to this DeSatan’s man’s idiocy.
I can’t wait until DeSantis runs for and then becomes President.
What do you hope that a President DeSantis would achieve? And clearly, something I wrote has gotten under your skin…
If you’re not supposed to be woke, what are you supposed to be? Sleeping. And if so, should you be walking around perhaps like Frankenstein?
Nietzsche spoke to this phenomenon I think: Madness is the relative exception in the individual. It is the rule in the group, state, congregation, assemblage, organization.
All social problems can be peeled down to the kernel of capitalism. A similar affliction haunts those who share the world with DeSantis. All the ills of Desantis can be peeled down to the kernel of Christianity.
Desantis acts nothing like the example Jesus set. He being a Christian is as likely as Trump. Can’t you just see Jesus in his tunic on the campaign trail?
You might bear in mind that the proponents of critical race theory and similar bugbears of fascists are not socialists like you or me, but are centrist liberals who want nothing other than comfy careers in the diversity industry. Perhaps read some Adolph Reed, Jr about it. See his World Socialist Website interview at https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/20/reed-d20.html
this article reveals the problem with the pervasive practice of calling out the (obvious) hypocrisy and bad faith of conservatives and Republicans: it treats the “liberal” status quo as legitimate, less harmful, more just, etc., if only by implication, instead of questioning the larger assumptions of liberalism under which both liberals and conservatives operate. what is “academic freedom” supposed to mean under capitalism? what role should parents & communities have in shaping public school curriculum? what did liberals think of “CRT” before the conservative attacks? did they even know what it was?
“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”—the compound form of these modern concepts—is especially toxic. It divides us by social identity groups, ranks those groups on privilege and power, and excludes those who fail to honor the new orthodoxy. Rather than being equally endowed with innate dignity and fundamental rights as human beings—best judged by our character and not skin color—we are supposed to discriminate and confer status based on race, sex and cultural affinity.
FAIR can flail all it wants, but the proscriptions and dogmas associated with “woke” repulse all of the right and center, and much of the left. If that sounds like the path to political power, good luck to you.
And if only “Black studies” did in fact promote a “far-left worldview”. What it does impose is cultivated grievance, racism and expertise based in skin color. When Henry Rogers becomes “Ibraim X. Kendi”, it’s reasonable to ask, what’s he selling that needed a new brand name, and is there anything that overpaid white administrators won’t buy to be thought well?
The same question might be asked of FAIR. Is that sense of virtue, goodness and boundless self-approbation worth losing all political power?
Wow! Its a straw mob in the Comments section.
Yes, you can define “woke” and “black studies” and, to a lesser extent, “critical race theory” as something stupid and then attack your self-defined concept for its stupidity. But you can’t define away the facts of American racism and its ongoing consequences. You gonna keep punching down on straw men? Or fight the racist power?
Let the sun shine on the Southern Snowflakes – we can use the water.
First of all, who’s “punching down”? Woke dogmas rule institutions, get people fired and their books cancelled (literally). And the woke love to eat their own, because nobody is pure enough for the mob. Remember when Lee Fang was obliged to do the abject apology tour so as not to end forever unemployable in his 30s? *That* wasn’t “punching down”? And the detritus of fired adjuncts (masters of the universe?) who said the wrong thing or showed the wrong painting?
For the rest, the question is political. Right, center and much of left hates the piety, outraged virtue and self-conceit (we’re so good!) of the movement. Finding in race and gender the source of all injustice in this life is a great career path today, but it’s the murder of progressive politics
Keep this up, and we’ll end up with one party state. And it won’t be a party you like. OTOH, your victimhood will be intact.
Hi Jake, what’s it like being a NazBol? It must be incredibly weird to try to seamlessly blend social arch-conservatism with economic far-leftism. You have a grievance with grievance? How creative of you. And of course disliking “woke” is the grievance that unites all political ideologies. Enjoy being a victim of victimization and complaining about how everyone else is complaining. Because you are so very leftist. Yup.
Well, this “arch-conservative” wants to congratulate you for espousing a program hated not only on the right, but by the center and by much of the left, including gays and lesbians who regard it as homophobic, if not downright hateful, and women who see it as misogynistic. And we won’t even start on the Latino vote which doesn’t spell it with an “x” or recent immigrants who aren’t quite as enlightened on teaching gender dogma to their third-graders as you are.
Other than that, however, it’s great. I mean, like, all my Facebook friends agree….
The tragedy is that there is a need for ethnic studies at all, because the extermination of native Americans, slavery, JIm Crow, the civil rights movement, genocidal imperialism, and the murders of Medgar Evers, Dr. King, and Malcom X are excluded from mainstream curriculum, in favor of whitewashing (pun intended) the historical injustices that demonstrate the true moral and political character of the “exceptional state.”