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<\/a><\/p>\nAh, Florida. The Sunshine State. Or, as some people who are inordinately fond of messing with other people\u2019s freedoms have taken to calling it, the Free State of Florida<\/a>.<\/p>\n That is the nickname favored by a governor and a Republican supermajority in Tallahassee who are far more invested in trolling liberals, squabbling amongst themselves, and finding ways to make life harder for people who are already struggling<\/a> than in helping their fellow Floridians prepare for a future radically different from the sunny one they have always been trained to expect.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the hands of Florida\u2019s GOP, what Thomas Jefferson called the \u201csacred fire of liberty<\/a>\u201d has become a cruel, meta-Orwellian internet joke.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFree State of Florida\u201d certainly feels cruel to those of us who work in the state system of higher education, to which my university belongs. (It feels even crueler to public school teachers and librarians, who have had to deal with book bans that somehow aren\u2019t book bans<\/a> and the infamous \u201cDon\u2019t Say Gay<\/a>\u201d law, as critics have called it.)\u00a0<\/p>\n During my 22 years here, I have watched a rising tide of illiberalism gnaw at the solid ground of academic freedom, of trust and commitment to equality and diversity, upon which our universities were built. It was a foundation that made the idea of studying and working at these institutions appealing to talented scholars from all over the world. Almost as appealing as the prospect of Golf Cart Life in The Villages \u2014 the massive, overwhelmingly white retirement community not far from Orlando \u2014 has been to older Donald Trump fans from blue states.\u00a0<\/p>\n Those kinds of transplants, hundreds of thousands of whom have moved to Florida over the past few years to escape such so-called abominations as COVID-19 mask mandates and state income taxes, have supplied much of the illiberal energy<\/a> coursing through our state politics. With all the sex, drugs, and golf carts they have at their disposal (just watch Lance Oppenheim\u2019s documentary Some Kind of Heaven<\/a> if you doubt me), conservative retirees aren\u2019t likely to see a need to enroll in our universities; few of them will ever witness for themselves how we educate our students.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s too bad. Our traditional students could learn a lot from them, and the retirees might develop some useful media literacy skills. Instead, they have been all too willing to believe right-wing propaganda.\u00a0<\/p>\n Under its intoxicating influence, they have weakened our academic communities by helping reelect the obstreperously anti-\u201cwoke\u201d Gov. Ron DeSantis and by voting for Republican state legislators who would rather waste the public\u2019s time and money on sham debates over \u201cwoke indoctrination<\/a>\u201d in our classrooms than address real problems.\u00a0<\/p>\n For instance, these legislators could have been promoting the renewable energy revolution that should have taken off decades ago, and in which Florida could have been a leader in the country and the world. (Maybe Communist China, as they like to call it, will give them all medals some day for helping China become a world leader in renewable energy technologies<\/a> at the expense of the United States.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Some of the state government\u2019s efforts to kill \u201cwokeness\u201d in higher education have been impossible to ignore. They are detailed in a report<\/a> published in 2023 by the American Association of University Professors:\u00a0<\/p>\n The hostile takeover of New College in Sarasota.\u00a0 Sometimes the assaults on academic freedom are carried out swiftly, openly, and unapologetically. For example, last fall, after telling a joke that had something (I\u2019m still not entirely sure what) to do with the killing of Charlie Kirk, one of the visiting instructors in my department, Jacob McElroy, was reported by a student. A few days later, he was escorted out of his classroom by campus police officers and summarily fired<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Not Repression\u2019s First Rodeo<\/p>\n Some observers might be tempted to point out that the situation could be worse \u2014 as bad as things were, say, during the Cold War.\u00a0<\/p>\n As outrageously discriminatory as the state government\u2019s anti-educational projects have been (projects that have been made even more outrageous by being carried out in the name of fighting discrimination and enhancing education), an optimist might note that we don\u2019t seem to be anywhere near having a 21st-century version of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (FLIC), better known as the Johns Committee<\/a> (1956\u20131965).\u00a0<\/p>\n The Florida Legislature\u2019s answer to McCarthyism in Washington, the Johns Committee harassed the NAACP and whipped up anti-gay hysteria at the University of Florida, among many other activities driven by paranoia over communism and terror over how white supremacy was losing ground in a rapidly changing multicultural society.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cAnticipatory obedience,\u201d as Timothy Snyder has dubbed it, is alive and well at many universities that depend heavily \u2014 some might say abjectly \u2014 on state funding for their ongoing existence.<\/p>\n At my university, I haven\u2019t seen any evidence of Johns Committee\u2013style tactics such as spying, infiltration of progressive organizations, or the spreading of right-wing propaganda. The political purges of faculty members that some of my colleagues and I were fretting about two or three years ago have not materialized. The Johns Committee\u2019s ideological heirs in Tallahassee, unlike their predecessors, have not been cornering terrified, humiliated professors and students in smoky motel rooms to grill them about their \u201csubversive\u201d behavior.\u00a0<\/p>\n Far from it. Republican legislators have shown zero interest in going to the state universities and getting their hands dirty \u2014 or in meeting with us at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t mean we aren\u2019t scared.<\/p>\n In the case of my colleague who got fired, I doubt that someone from the governor\u2019s office or the Legislature called our provost on a burner phone at 3 a.m., telling her to \u201ctie up the loose end\u2026 or else.\u201d They didn\u2019t have to. \u201cAnticipatory obedience<\/a>,\u201d as Timothy Snyder has dubbed it, is alive and well at many universities that depend heavily \u2014 some might say abjectly \u2014 on state funding for their ongoing existence.\u00a0<\/p>\n Indeed, this is where the resonances with the FLIC era become especially troubling. As historian Stacy Braukman shows in a book on the Johns Committee<\/a>, the University of Florida administration engaged in plenty of what it called \u201clegitimate self-policing.\u201d Not only did they give the Johns Committee free rein to spy on campus community members in bathrooms and behind hedges, and to haul suspected gay men and lesbian women in for interrogations that would now be regarded as grossly unconstitutional, but they chose to fire, rather than defend, faculty members and other employees accused of being gay. Meanwhile, they kept students in the dark about the whole Inquisition-like process.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible that administrators at my university have sent dozens of scorching emails to Tallahassee in private, but I don\u2019t recall them making the tiniest squeak of public protest as we shut down our DEI programs and started coming under pressure from state officials to remove words such as \u201cdiversity\u201d and \u201cculture\u201d \u2014 yes, \u201cculture\u201d<\/a> \u2014 from our syllabi.\u00a0<\/p>\n Administrators have dressed their lack of gumption up in the beige language of compliance and legality \u2014 even when, as my colleague John W. White observes<\/a>, they are complying with a \u201claw\u201d that doesn\u2019t exist. They keep behaving as if the laws, regulations, and \u201csecret rules\u201d in question have been handed down from Olympus rather than crafted by people: people who can be browbeaten, shamed, denounced, \u201cprimaried,\u201d lobbied, cajoled, and so on.\u00a0<\/p>\n But perhaps I should be more grateful. Our administrators\u2019 quiet efforts to deal with an indisputably tough situation seem to have kept the Eye of Sour-Ron<\/a>, as it were, from fixing on our campus. Our administrators have to be scared, too. I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if most of them \u2014 maybe all of them \u2014 are personally opposed to the deformations of academic freedom they feel obligated to comply with; they must have been dealing lately with some serious inner conflict. And, after all, the people who lost their positions at places like our woke virus-infested LGBTQ Center when it was shut down are still employed here. So am I.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n For how long, though?<\/p>\n The trouble with accommodationism \u2014 from the perspective of the brilliant M. Gessen<\/a>, who was raised in the Soviet Union and returned to Russia as a journalist in time to cover the ascent of Vladimir Putin \u2014 is that, while it can often seem rational and even charitable in the beginning (when you can tell yourself, for example, that you are keeping your co-workers and subordinates from losing their jobs), it only feeds authoritarianism\u2019s insatiable appetite for power over the long run.\u00a0<\/p>\n Republicans in Tallahassee seem to have grown bored for now with their experiments in de-\u201cwoke\u201d-ification. Or maybe they\u2019re tired of all the bad publicity, or frustrated with the lack of an unequivocal MAGA triumph<\/a> at New College.\u00a0<\/p>\n But they have learned what the rest of us will tolerate. It is an invaluable lesson they will easily recall the next time they feel the need to scare up a few votes.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFind out just what any people will quietly submit to,\u201d Frederick Douglass said<\/a>, \u201cand you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.\u201d Or, to paraphrase Timothy Snyder, we \u201c[taught] power what it can do\u201d when we should have been teaching it to fear the wrath of a group of smart, highly trained people who could have collectively decided \u2014 especially if large numbers of students had started agitating \u2014 to draw a line and defend it.<\/p>\n Looks Can Deceive<\/p>\n What does quiet submission \u2014 life at Compliance State University \u2014 feel like?\u00a0<\/p>\n Honestly, to me it doesn\u2019t look too different from life in the Before Ron era (B.R.). Most faculty members still seem to be teaching what they have always taught. Too many of our students still spend too much of their time staring at their phones.\u00a0<\/p>\n But this definitely doesn\u2019t feel like freedom. Everyone who submits to injustice secretly knows the truth of Audre Lorde\u2019s words<\/a>, however badly they want not to believe them: \u201cYour silence will not protect you.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n What this does feel like is uncertainty, a limbo of unknowing.<\/p>\n A while back, when a student complained about me to one of our trustees, the message about the complaint that filtered down to me from the trustee consisted of essentially one word: \u201cpolitics.\u201d Was the student a conservative who thought I was trying to infect them with the \u201cwoke mind virus<\/a>\u201d? Had I said something that a left-leaning student considered insufficiently progressive? Or did the complaint come from someone who, like many of our students, despised politics and felt that I had no business making whatever comment I had made in an English class? I never found out.\u00a0<\/p>\n Two years ago, campus police arrested a small group<\/a> of pro-Palestinian student protesters. The arrests took place at the same spot on campus, the Green, where anti-abortion activists and ultra-fundamentalist preachers have been given carte blanche, for as long as I can remember, to verbally harass our students and display large, gruesome photographs of dismembered fetuses.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Last year, when I invited one of my colleagues who grew up in an illiberal democracy to participate in a teach-in about anti-democratic developments in the federal government, she immediately declined, saying she felt the risk was too high. She is a US citizen. When I invited a fellow professor who comes from Sweden, of all places, I got the same answer. (To their credit, our university administration supported the teach-in; it was state and federal authorities that my colleagues feared.)<\/p>\n Would faculty members who participated in the Gaza protest have been fired? Would my colleagues have been sent to \u201cAlligator Alcatraz\u201d for taking part in the teach-in? Five or ten years from now, will the state replace all humanities professors with TruthDroids\u2122 trained by conservative education icons Christopher Rufo, Hillsdale College, and the organization that misleadingly calls itself PragerU<\/a>? In other words, will the state get down to the kind of hard-core ideological indoctrination work that they have accused people like me, without evidence, of doing?<\/p>\n Will I face some kind of retribution for publishing this essay?<\/p>\n The answer to all these questions is, \u201cProbably not.\u201d But there is a vast difference between life lived in the \u201cProbably not\u201d \u2014 this funhouse of vague risks and unforeseeable threats in which we dwell \u2014 and Emily Dickinson\u2019s House of Possibility<\/a>. That is a part-imaginary, part-literal place of boundless creativity and imaginative freedom that has much in common with the university model I fell madly in love with in the 1990s.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the heart of the current situation in Florida smolders a question that people all over the nation have been asking in this, the 250th year since Jefferson played such a pivotal role in helping us declare our independence: Are we still free?<\/p>\n My first experience of true academic freedom was as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis, which is world-renowned for its interdisciplinary research programs and its commitment to confronting modern environmental and social predicaments.\u00a0<\/p>\n The next was when I became a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia. That institution was founded to promote the \u201cillimitable freedom of the human mind\u201d by Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in 1820<\/a>, \u201cFor here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error as long as reason is left free to combat it.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n At the heart of the current situation in Florida smolders a question that people all over the nation have been asking in this, the 250th year since Jefferson played such a pivotal role in helping us declare our independence: Are we still free?<\/p>\n The answer to which seems to be hovering uncomfortably somewhere between yes and no.<\/p>\n Right now, the operative question for many of us in Florida\u2019s system of higher education is, What can we still get away with?<\/p>\n Can we still teach foundational texts that make some of our students, and even ourselves, squirm?\u00a0<\/p>\n Can we still profess the ugly, beautiful, necessary truths that we have spent years of our lives struggling to understand about race, gender, sexuality, religion, and other controversial topics?\u00a0<\/p>\n For instance, can we still talk about squirm-inducing aspects of Jefferson\u2019s own life, above all his relationship with Sally Hemings and their daughter and sons<\/a>, whom he kept in slavery even as he was eagerly designing an academic utopia of \u201cillimitable freedom\u201d for the privileged young sons of other white men?\u00a0<\/p>\n Can we still \u201cfollow the truth wherever it may lead\u201d as we carry out the kinds of advanced research, and create and perform the kinds of provocative art, that the self-appointed champions of orthodoxy in all its varieties will undoubtedly find disturbing?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Yes, we can. Mostly. For now.\u00a0<\/p>\n But are we free?<\/p>\n \u2018For here we are not afraid\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been thinking a lot lately about heat lightning.\u00a0<\/p>\n (Meteorologists<\/a> would want me to inform you that what people call \u201cheat lightning\u201d is merely ordinary lightning seen from a suitable distance. But where\u2019s the poetry in that?)<\/p>\n In case you aren\u2019t familiar with it, let me explain. Florida, you see, is one of the lightning-est places on Earth. There are the massive, often terrifying \u2014 and all too often lethal \u2014 bolts of electricity that turn our summer storms into visions of the gods at war. And then there\u2019s heat lightning.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sometimes, on a sticky July or August night throbbing with the otherworldly chorus of toads mating and strange insects chattering, after the torrents of rain have ebbed, you\u2019ll see a big cloud moving slowly off in the distance, its blasts of thunder muffled and its flashes of lightning shrouded in heavy tufts of water vapor.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Lightning breaks out of the cloud now and then, but mostly it stays tantalizingly half-hidden, half-revealed within the cloud, which may tint the light in outlandish shades of yellow, blue, pink, and purple.<\/p>\n The light pulses, it glows, it broods, it shimmers, it shivers, it leaps and twists in odd directions. It appears where you don\u2019t expect it and doesn\u2019t appear where you do. At times, it will show up at one end of the cloud and then almost instantly dazzle out at the other, as if different parts of the cloud were talking to each other.<\/p>\n As if celestial synapses were firing. If the sky had a brain, this would be it.\u00a0<\/p>\n It is easy to imagine life itself beginning in this kind of cloud, with electric thoughts reaching out, doubling back, battling with themselves, testing, testing again, marrying chemical compounds with a propitious spark, dropping them, seeding the barren land with Possibility.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n But what, you\u2019re surely wondering, does heat lightning have to do with academic freedom?<\/p>\n When you spend a few minutes watching heat lightning, no matter how busy you may have been staring at screens all day and worrying about your job and complying, you can\u2019t help feeling that life is far wilder, far weirder, than the sad, safe, gray thing some humans have done their best to make of it \u2014 wilder and weirder, even, than the howling apocalypse that oil and gas CEOs, authoritarians, and fundamentalists seem to be longing for.\u00a0<\/p>\n Whether or not you believe in the supernatural, heat lightning seems to tell you that there are mysterious forces at work in this world \u2014 unquantifiable, uncommodifiable, ungovernable forces \u2014 that no developer will ever be able to pave over and no politician will ever be able to ban. Not in a million years, even on the frail assumption we\u2019ll have that kind of time.<\/p>\n If physicists are right, we are made of the same basic stuff (i.e., water and energy) as clouds and heat lightning; if physiologists and neuroscientists and Walt Whitman<\/a> are right, our hearts beat and our nervous systems hum with that same electricity.\u00a0<\/p>\n At its best, a university is a place where we can go not only to explore and better understand the truths of existence but to live them. One of these truths, I would argue, is that we have always been free to one degree or another, living in a universe in which freedom is more than a privilege or even a right \u2014 it is part of the very fabric of being.\u00a0<\/p>\n When real education is happening, all the participants are engaged in what bell hooks calls \u201cthe practice of freedom<\/a>.\u201d Thomas Jefferson\u2019s description of the \u201cfreedom of the human mind\u201d as \u201cillimitable\u201d may constitute nothing more than wishful thinking if we\u2019re talking about individual humans, but we can attain something approaching illimitable freedom collectively. This happens as promising ideas arc from mind to mind in impossible-to-predict ways and as errors, Jefferson might say, fall away in the heated but nonviolent battles of academic debate.\u00a0<\/p>\n In a cosmic sense, freedom is illimitable in that energy has a trickster\u2019s capacity for changing forms, crossing boundaries, and enduring across vast stretches of time and space. A good class discussion or a lively academic conference feels a lot like heat lightning, as you see the light of intelligence \u2014 made, again, of actual electrical (and biochemical) impulses \u2014 flash here and glow there, producing emergent forms that no one could have anticipated at the outset.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Clearly, freedom \u2014 whatever the context \u2014 is never absolute. (Some thinkers would go much further than that \u2014 arguing, as they are perfectly free to do, that what I am calling \u201cfreedom\u201d is nothing but an illusion.) Any meaningful endeavor requires discipline and boundaries as well as freedom.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nThe shuttering of LGBTQ and women\u2019s centers, along with offices promoting campus diversity \u2014 even interfaith projects.\u00a0
\nThe meddling in our curricula.\u00a0
\nThe battle against tenure.\u00a0
\nThe push to weaken or destroy our faculty union, United Faculty of Florida (while exempting unions representing law enforcement officers and other nonacademic state employees from having to meet the same forbiddingly high standards).\u00a0<\/p>\n