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University Censorship:
State-Mandated Verbal Rules That Censor Course Materials
Few things are more insidious and dangerous to a free society than the censoring of ideas, especially within educational settings. Censorship is a key component of oppression and control. In recent years, Florida has taken extraordinary steps to censor from our educational spaces--in both K-12 and higher education--ideas that far-right policymakers find threatening to their hegemonic control.
See, for example, House Bill 7 (the Stop WOKE Act), Senate Bill 266 (course content restrictions and bans on DEI at universities and colleges), Senate Bill 931 (prohibiting DEI policies), House Bill 1467 (book bans in school and classroom libraries), House Bill 1069 (pronoun restrictions), House Bill 1557 (Don't Say Gay), and House Bill 999 (eliminating Women's Studies).
This page is devoted to an even more nefarious attempt by Florida to control what educators can discuss with their students: new "verbal rules" that all state universities are required to follow but that are nowhere written or codified. In short, state policymakers are circumventing normal procedures and even state law (Article 120 of the Florida Statutes) in order to further censor what we can teach and what our students can learn. The items below highlight the state's illicit maneuvers to censor university course materials, the individual universities' willingness (if not eagerness) to comply with the state's demands, and my attempts to push back against such infringements on academic freedom, free speech, and what our students can learn.
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This piece mostly mirrors the Orlando Sentinel piece above.
What is happening in Florida is happening in many far-right states. Using verbal mandates rather than statutes or administrative rules to censor speech and to limit academic freedom on campuses is a tactic being prompted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as a means to circumvent state laws, state rules, and to make judicial injunctions more difficult.
For more information, visit PEN America by clicking the image to the right.
Beware the Danger of Ideas!
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