Rampant Gaslighting About Freedom of Speech at Florida Universities

By Diane Roberts

Florida’s institutions of higher education are in trouble.

The University of West Florida is being run by Manny Diaz Jr., a former social studies teacher (and ex-Commissioner of Education) but, given that he’s Ron DeSantis’ choice, he’ll likely get the permanent position.

Florida Atlantic and Florida International have had undistinguished former legislators imposed on them; and USF president Rhea Law has announced her resignation, creating an opening for another DeSantis-friendly politician.

At the University of Florida, our supposed flagship institution, the provost is interim, the Colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Law, and Arts are being run by interim deans, and 30 chair or director positions are vacant.

This obvious dysfunction has not gone unnoticed: The best and brightest academics are not exactly enthusiastic about working in Florida.

I’ve been teaching for more than 30 years; I love my job at Florida State — for now, at least. The students are wonderful (most of them), and I admire, even like, my colleagues (most of them).

Ron DeSantis hasn’t gotten around to trying to trash our reputation and cripple our academic freedom the way they have at New College, UWF, and UF.

Not yet, anyway.

The state’s “post-tenure review,” in which professors (who already undergo yearly reviews) must further justify their existence to the Board of Trustees, has driven some of the most productive academics out of Florida.

Nearly a third of Florida’s faculty want to leave the state.

If I were a young professor looking for a job, I’d avoid Florida.

Churn at UF

Our state government is authoritarian and proudly ignorant, hell-bent on destroying what makes universities great — freedom of expression, critical thinking, creativity, exposing students to ideas that may challenge them (or even upset them), unfettered research, scientific rigor, and advances in knowledge based on data.

Why would a scholar want to pursue a career in such a fact-resistant, small-minded, censorious state?

As has become its habit, the University of Florida has changed presidents. Again.

Dr. Donald Landry has become UF’s interim president, replacing Kent Fuchs, the former interim president and one-time actual president who stepped back in when Ben Sasse, the unqualified spendthrift former president resigned under a cloud, and then had to stay on when the trustees’ choice, Dr. Santa Ono, who’d resigned as president of the University of Michigan to take the job at Florida, fell foul of the Board of  Governors’ anti-DEI hysteria.

This is not how serious institutions of higher education conduct themselves.

But then, Florida is not a serious place.

Enter Landry, late of the Columbia Center for Human Longevity and a medical doctor with “elite” Ivy degrees.

Landry seems positively giddy at becoming UF’s latest interim, calling it “the culmination of my career” and “the opportunity of a lifetime,” and demonstrates an Olympic-standard talent for sucking up, calling UF “a preeminent university in what one could argue is the preeminent state in this nation at this moment in time.”

He obviously wants the permanent job. The trustees obviously want him to have it: They’re paying him $2 million for this year, with the possibility of a $500,000 bonus.

If they don’t give him the permanent job, they have to pay him another $2 million.

Purge of academics

While the fact-based community knows Florida is Ground Zero for the climate crisis, Landry told UF’s right-wing trustees what they wanted to hear, insisting the science is “not settled,” even though the science is indeed settled: 97% of climate scientists agree on anthropogenic causes of global warming.

Maybe they should have asked him if the Theory of Gravity is sound or if the sun orbits the earth.

Or if he’ll defend professors’ freedom of speech.

DeSantis and his anti-education squad have passed laws banning anything that smells of DEI, clamped down on the honest study of American history, pitched hissy fits over pro-Palestinian campus protests, and railed against so-called “woke” professors who have the temerity to recognize that gay people exist, trans people exist, systemic racism is real, and science doesn’t care what you believe.

Now they’re going after educators who dare disparage Charlie Kirk.

Let’s stipulate that Kirk did not deserve his violent death. No one does.

He was a human being. He had as much right as the rest of us to speak his mind.

Which is the whole point.

A University of Miami neurologist was fired for posting, “What was done to Charlie Kirk has been done to countless Palestinian babies, children, girls, boys, women and men not just over the past two years of the ongoing genocide, but decades.”

A retired University of Florida law professor was stripped of his emeritus title for saying, “I did not want him to die. I reserve that wish for Trump.”

At FAU, three professors have been placed on administrative leave. One, a tenured professor of art history, didn’t comment on Kirk’s death, but re-posted others calling Kirk bigoted and racist.

It’s not illegal.

As the great Rick Wilson says, “tastelessness is not treason.”

‘Outrageous things’

Kirk identified as a “free speech absolutist,” declaring, “You should be allowed to say outrageous things,” even if you upset people.

Among the outrageous things Charlie Kirk said:

On journalist Joy Reid, the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, former First Lady Michelle Obama, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson being “affirmative action picks,” he said, “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

On women: They should “submit to a godly man,” marry early, and have babies.

On Jews: “The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”

On guns: “I think it’s worth [it] to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

As offensive, stupid, prejudiced, or karma-inviting as you or I might find what Kirk said, we live under a system of laws that protect his right to say it.

‘Civility’

The question is whether the DeSantis administration and Florida’s education establishment, including UF’s new president, understand that freedom of speech applies to all of us.

Donald Landry says he’s big on civility: “I will be locking in a culture of freedom of academic expression tempered by civility.”

Landry enjoys the support of Christopher Rufo, who calls him “a principled leader who will reverse ideological capture and restore truth-seeking within the institution” at UF.

In case you’ve forgotten Rufo, he’s yet another pious conservative who likes to claim he cherishes free expression on campus, telling PBS News Hour in May the DeSantis administration has “expanded the range of discourse in higher education,” and boasting, “At New College of Florida, for example, where I’m a trustee, we have probably the widest range of discourse of any public university in the United States.”

A habit in Florida

Getting rid of a visiting professor who focuses on Black history contradicts Rufo’s smug assertion.

No one at New College accused Erik Wallenberg of incompetence or bad teaching or any other malfeasance.

But Rufo called him “a pure left-wing mad-lib” and sniffed, “New College will no longer be a jobs program for middling, left-wing intellectuals.”

Firing a professor because you don’t like his politics is not evidence of a wide range of discourse.

It’s also likely illegal.

Landry should take note and someone should alert him to Florida’s long, shameful history of McCarthyite attacks on academics.

In the late 1950s, the Legislature started investigating universities, determined to search out communists, biology professors who taught evolution, English professors who assigned “The Grapes of Wrath” and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, and especially gay people in the student body or the faculty.

Scores were fired or expelled.

Perhaps former president/former interim president Kent Fuchs can tell Donald Landry about the time he, and UF trustees head Mori Hosseini, tried to ban four law professors from signing onto an amicus brief opposing a state law making it hard for former felons to vote, and stop three other professors  from testifying as expert witnesses on the ground that their actions might impede Ron DeSantis’ agenda.

Landry’s UF contract stipulates that a number of important decisions, including hiring, must be approved by Mori Hosseini — which means a highly partisan political appointee will exercise even more control over how the university works, what’s allowed, what’s censored.

You either have academic freedom, or you don’t.

You either have a First Amendment, or you don’t.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.