Florida educators say they’ve been feeling the strain of the state’s recently passed legislation severely limiting the ability to teach about subjects like racism.
At University of Central Florida, the state’s largest, multiple professors told ProPublica they’ve canceled classes that prominently featured discussions of race, for fear of getting in trouble with the state or their employer, leaving the school’s sociology department without a single of its 39 courses focused primarily on race.
“It didn’t seem like it was worth the risk,” Jonathan Cox, an assistant sociology professor, told the outlet, about his decision to scrap two courses called “Race and Social Media and “Race and Ethnicity.
Both classes touched on the idea of colorblind racism, when facially neutral actions can produce unequal outcomes, a concept specifically barred by Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s Individual Freedom Act, which passed in April.
UCF Provost Michael Johnson warned over the summer that faculty who ran afoul of the law would face “disciplinary action” because they would be endangering millions in state funding for the university.
“I’m completely unprotected,” professor Cox, who is up for tenure this fall and is his household’s main breadwinner, added in his interview with ProPublica, “Somebody who’s not even in the class could come after me. Somebody sees the course catalog, complains to a legislator — next thing I know, I’m out of a job.”
The Individual Freedom Act, known colloquially as the “Stop Woke Act,” makes Florida one of seven states with explicit new laws limiting specific teachins around topics like race and gender, according to a PEN America database.
Florida’s law bans teaching students that one race or gender is superior, and, more controversially, that teachers can’t make pupils feel guilty for the past actions of members of their race, potentially opening anyone who speaks frankly about the history of racism and white supremacy in America to legal action.
In November, a federal judge halted part of the Stop Woke Act, with US District Judge Mark Walker comparing the law to something out of George Orwell’s 1984.
“The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints,” he wrote. “Defendants argue that, under this Act, professors enjoy ‘academic freedom’ so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves. This is positively dystopian.”
The state of Florida has challenged the ruling, and arguments are expected later this year before the mostly Republican-appointed 11th Circuit appeals court.
