#academeblog

University of Florida administrators have created a slideshow to help faculty understand the implications of the state’s new law, House Bill 7, also known as the Stop WOKE Act. One slide says, “At its core, the bill’s message is: ‘No one likes to be told what to think. And that includes students.’ The theme of the bill is that instructors should not present personal beliefs about a topic as the ‘right’ point of view or compel or encourage students to adopt a specific belief.” For craven capitulation to right-wing distortions of what goes on in universities, it would be hard to top this statement.

UF administrators seem to be affirming two bonehead ideas. One is that education doesn’t involve teaching students what to think. The other is that professors try to foist their “personal beliefs” on students, using their authority to compel students to accept those beliefs as their own. Faculty who view the slideshow—no doubt suffering through the process of being told what to think—could be forgiven for wondering how people with so little understanding of higher education came to be in charge of it.

We should note that HB 7 is aimed not at faculty across the board but at faculty in the social sciences. Faculty in physics, chemistry, and biology, for instance, unabashedly tell students what to think. And it’s a good thing they do, because education in these fields consists largely of teaching students what is known about the natural world and how it works. Right-wing legislators aren’t exercised because chemistry professors tell students what to think about the structure of the carbon bond in the benzene molecule. What bothers these legislators is faculty teaching what is known about the social world and how it works.

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My point was never to make white students feel bad about advantages they enjoy in a society dominated by white people and in which white means normal. My point was to help them understand how the social world works, how they fit into it, and how others fit into it differently. If this induced any guilt, it would have been only because students felt it was wrong, according to their own sense of justice, to continue to reap benefits they hadn’t earned, benefits that came at the expense of others.

Right-wing legislators in Florida and other states have weaponized the guilt that some white people, whether they’ve gone to college or not, might feel if they were to honestly confront the facts about white privilege. These legislators have said, in effect, “Neither you nor your sons and daughters in college classrooms should have to feel this way, and to ensure that these bad feelings don’t arise, we’ll forbid social scientists from talking about this stuff, which is all just propaganda anyway.” Administrators who appear to scold faculty for imposing their personal beliefs on students, or for telling students what to think, lend credibility to these charges. That’s more damaging than silence.

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Today, social scientists are the targets of what the AAUP and other groups have called “educational gag orders.” But tomorrow, climate scientists could be forbidden from teaching about human contributions to global warming, or biologists from teaching about evolution, or geneticists from teaching about race as a social fiction. Indeed, if the social sciences can be stifled for political reasons, so can any discipline deemed troublesome. Our only hope is to build solidarity across disciplines. If we can’t manage it now, when the wolf is at the door, the last professors who find themselves facing gag orders might wonder why no one else is left to help them resist.