By Zachary Levenson<\/p>\n
This article was originally published by Truthout<\/a><\/p>\n The Board of Governors overseeing the new curricula includes roofing contractors, insurance execs, and no professors.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Imagine the following scenario: You\u2019re teaching Introduction to Sociology at a community college in Florida, and today, you\u2019re trying to explain the well-documented pay gap between men and women in the United States. You check the guidance you just received from your dean, who received instructions via email from the executive vice chancellor of the Florida College System. The instructions state explicitly that explaining \u201cunequal outcomes between men and women\u201d in terms of \u201cinstitutional sexism\u201d would violate state law.<\/p>\n So how are you supposed to explain this disparity? The email includes guidance on just this question:<\/p>\n biological sex chromosomes determine \u2026 how females and males behave \u2026 So, in teaching this, one might point out that women and men with the same credentials enter different jobs such that certain jobs are occupied primarily by women (i.e., female-dominant) some are occupied primarily by men (i.e., male-dominant).<\/p>\n Did you misread the guidance? Your eyes scroll up on the page, which is a state-created curriculum for use in all non-elective Intro to Sociology classes taught in Florida\u2019s community colleges. You are explicitly prohibited from discussing \u201csystemic racism, institutional racism, [or] historical discrimination.\u201d You cannot \u201cstate an intent of institutions today to oppress persons of color.\u201d You cannot \u201cdescribe when, how, or why individuals determine their sexual orientation and\/or gender identity.\u201d<\/p>\n Surely this is a mistake?<\/p>\n Far from it. Last semester, my department at Florida International University received word that the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees the state\u2019s public university system, had determined that none of our syllabi were in compliance with state law. It seemed to many of us that the board was proceeding from a willfully broad interpretation of the law, so we asked our provost for guidance.<\/p>\n The law in question is Florida Statute 1007.25, which is, frankly, incoherent. If I were to try to render it intelligible, I would point out that the law prohibits any mention of \u201cidentity politics,\u201d though it never specifies what is meant by this contested term. It also bans \u201ctheories that systematic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.\u201d What exactly \u201cinherent\u201d is doing in this sentence remains a mystery. Are we allowed to teach theories of systematic oppression if we historicize them, refusing to reduce them to \u201cinherence\u201d? Can we teach them in contexts beyond the U.S.? All of this remains unclear, as state officials read these lines as a carte blanche for purging race, gender, and inequality from the curriculum altogether.<\/p>\n In August 2025, the provost\u2019s office requested compliance guidelines from the Florida Board of Governors. What did faculty need to do in order to bring their curricula into compliance with state law? In response, the Board of Governors formed a committee, launched in October, that was tasked with producing two items: first, a set of guidelines for compliance, and second, a special textbook that would be compliant with the law.<\/p>\n The committee included two sociology professors from the university system, two from the college system, and an unspecified number of political appointees without any background in the discipline. Among these political appointees were Jason Jewell, who was appointed the state\u2019s chief academic officer after directing a \u201cGreat Books\u201d program at a small Christian college in Alabama; and Jose Arevalo, the aforementioned executive vice chancellor of the state\u2019s college system. Arevalo was hired after writing a dissertation at Hillsdale College on \u201cGreat Books\u201d proponents like Mortimer Adler and Allan Bloom. (In this context, \u201cGreat Books\u201d is shorthand for the promotion of the Western canon.) It was Arevalo who sent the email to deans with the list of prohibited topics.<\/p>\n Pretty quickly, one of the four sociologists on the committee was removed \u2014 and now remains suspended from teaching at his college \u2014 for allegedly professing \u201cgender ideology.\u201d In practice, this professor simply referenced the existence of gender non-conformity. No matter. He was removed from the committee, which was now operating under the open threat of repression. His removal sent a message, in other words, to the other sociologists on the committee, and to those of us teaching around the state.<\/p>\n What happened next is hard to discern, since the working group did not operate in public view.<\/p>\n The Florida Board of Governors, which had already determined that no existing Introduction to Sociology syllabus complied with the board\u2019s ideological preferences, also determined that no existing intro to sociology textbook was legal to teach in the state of Florida. Instead, the working group somehow decided that it would be a good idea to take an existing open-source textbook, published under a Creative Commons license, and bowdlerize it<\/a>, reducing it from nearly 700 pages to just over 250.<\/p>\n The working group entirely jettisoned whole chapters on race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, social stratification, and global inequality. Words like \u201cracism\u201d and \u201cdiscrimination,\u201d which appeared roughly 120 times each in the original, now appear 25 times combined. Countless additional topics were cut, or else mangled, and most comparisons of the U.S. to other countries were removed.<\/p>\n Then, immediately before winter break, in mid-December 2025, my department\u2019s chair received a call from the provost, who had in turn been called by a staffer from the Florida Board of Governors\u2019 office. The chair proceeded to call each faculty member who was scheduled to teach Intro to Sociology, asking them to use the state-created, censored textbook.<\/p>\n As a department, we pushed back, demanding the directive in writing. If this is about compliance with the law, why are these administrators and bureaucrats too terrified to issue mandates via email? The example with which I opened this column \u2014 college deans receiving a written directive from Executive Vice Chancellor Arevalo \u2014 was highly exceptional. In general, their strategy appears to be covering their tracks. As the sociologist Max Weber famously put it, modern bureaucracies are \u201cbased upon written documents (\u2018the files\u2019), which are preserved in their original or draft form.\u201d What the Florida Board of Governors is doing then is attempting to avoid bureaucratic constraints, moving instead toward personalized, discretionary power.<\/p>\n These phone calls amount to suggestions rather than formal orders, but many of the professors pressured in this way have been working to carry out the censorship edicts nonetheless. In other words, this is a textbook example of anticipatory compliance. Until these suggestions are put into writing, it is incumbent upon Florida educators to ignore them. Certainly, we should organize to contest them, but until they are in writing, we must refuse to acknowledge them as official directives.<\/p>\n Anticipatory Compliance and Authoritarian Governance<\/p>\n As we know well from historical precedent, authoritarian regimes rely heavily on anticipatory compliance. For that is precisely what Florida has become: an authoritarian regime. At this point, not only are professors being told what they cannot teach; they are also being told what they must teach.<\/p>\n The Florida Board of Governors, meanwhile, does not include a single academic<\/a>, or even anyone with a background in education administration. These are political appointees from the business world, from insurance executives<\/a> to roofing contractors<\/a>, who are dictating how professors must teach their courses and even providing state-created textbooks for doing so.<\/p>\n What are sociologists supposed to do in this context? These state directives are telling us to abandon professional ethics and to refuse to root our lessons in existing sociological literature, abandoning the norms of our professional organization, the American Sociological Association. Instead, we are being openly threatened if we do not teach what amounts to state-produced propaganda.<\/p>\n The very concept of modern academic freedom first emerged in Medieval Europe as a means of safeguarding free inquiry from political interference. Its more contemporary incarnation, with origins in early 19th-century Berlin, was similarly framed: research and teaching were to be defended against local political authorities.<\/p>\n Here we are over a century later, trying to teach and do research in Florida, and the state is openly rejecting any semblance of academic autonomy. Instead, political appointees, working in conjunction with elected officials and, unfortunately, compliant faculty, are attempting to force politically convenient propaganda on us, insisting that such materials constitute a curriculum. They do not.<\/p>\n Lest readers assume this is some kind of Florida exceptionalism, it is far from it. State governments and university administrations in Texas, Indiana, North Carolina, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, West Virginia, Wyoming, Tennessee, North Dakota, Georgia, and likely other states too are currently involved in similar efforts. In New Hampshire, the House just passed a bill named after Charlie Kirk that bans the teaching of \u201ccritical theories or related practices<\/a> that promote division, dialectical world-views, critical consciousness or anti-constitutional indoctrination.\u201d<\/p>\n Nor is this just about sociology. References to anthropogenic climate change are disappearing from earth science departments. Historians are being told that they can only teach primary sources, with all second-order reflection on those sources \u2014 what we used to call \u201chistory\u201d \u2014 being stigmatized or even banned. Literature professors are being told that they can only teach the \u201cWestern canon.\u201d<\/p>\n All of this is to say that this fight is not about sociology in Florida; it is about resisting authoritarianism on a national scale. We must defend sociology in Florida because we defend academic teaching and inquiry, free from state interference, everywhere in our country. If we do not nip this in the bud in Florida, other states will continue to emulate this authoritarian model.<\/p>\n Defending Academic Freedom<\/p>\n What can faculty in affected states do? Two actions are crucial as a point of departure. First, they should refuse anticipatory compliance. Government officials want to terrify educators so that they act in excess of what is required. They therefore need to always demand written directives.<\/p>\n And second, they should talk to their colleagues. These directives always attempt to isolate them, with orders being passed through the phone to individual instructors. This is a deliberate strategy of preemptive demobilization. To push back, educators need each other. They must discuss these pressures openly in faculty meetings. They should build connections with faculty on campuses across the state to see how directives are being issued unevenly. They need to form an Academic Freedom Committee in their Faculty Senate, as we just did here at Florida International University for the first time. And they should work through their unions, or where that isn\u2019t possible, through their local American Association of University Professors chapter. If they don\u2019t have one, this is a perfect time to build one.<\/p>\n But this isn\u2019t just about professors; it\u2019s about all of us. This is the most flagrant attack on higher education in my lifetime. Why are politicians reducing public colleges and universities to vehicles of state propaganda? Why are self-proclaimed proponents of free speech turning around and using state repression to enforce speech codes on our campuses? Why can\u2019t we speak openly about our social world in sociology classes? Why are unqualified appointees from the business world dictating to Ph.D.-holding academics how they should teach and which textbooks they must use?<\/p>\n What we really need are people beyond the university itself \u2014 the general public \u2014 speaking out about how ludicrous this all is. We are now living through an era of state censorship, politically motivated firings, and state-produced propaganda materials. If this isn\u2019t authoritarianism in higher education, I don\u2019t know what is.<\/p>\n Giving in isn\u2019t going to get these ideologues off our backs. They are openly telling us what they are up to, working to reduce the social sciences and humanities to an appendage of the state. We are not propagandists, but professors. If we don\u2019t defend academic freedom with everything we\u2019ve got, the public university will soon be a relic of the 20th century.<\/p>\n This article<\/a> was originally published by Truthout<\/a> and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)<\/a>. 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