Frank Cerabino
Palm Beach Post
March 15, 2022
So much attention has been spent focusing on the harm that Florida’s lawmakers are heaping on the K-12 public schools that it’s easy to miss the harm they are inflicting on the state’s public colleges and universities.
But under the scorched-Earth political landscape of Gov. Ron DeSantis, no institution of public learning will be left behind as a target.
And so this session has seen wild efforts to tamper with the independent institutions of higher learning that have dared not to obey DeSantis’ political playbook.
Some of it stems from three University of Florida political science professors who were called to offer expert testimony in a case that challenged a Republican-authored state election law that put new restrictions on voting by mail.
The professors’ research supported the finding that Florida’s new voting restrictions made it harder for Black and poor voters to cast ballots.
Throwing out a custom of academic independence, UF administrators informed the professors that they would be barred from testifying against the new state law. The reason: The professors’ testimony was not in the best interests of the university because it didn’t support DeSantis and the Republican-controlled legislature.
It’s not hard to imagine where the pressure came from. The chairman of the University of Florida’ Board of Trustees, Mori Hosseini, has donated more than $100,000 to DeSantis’ political campaign. And three of the other 12 UF trustees are also major campaign donors to the governor.
An uproar over this unprecedented muzzling of professors by their own school became national news, and it eventually embarrassed University of Florida officials to the point where they reversed their decision.
Meanwhile, in a First Amendment federal lawsuit filed by the professors, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker called the university’s kowtowing to state lawmakers “an all-too-familiar display of anticipatory obedience.”
“UF has bowed to perceived pressure from Florida’s political leaders and has sanctioned the unconstitutional suppression of ideas out of favor with Florida’s ruling party,” Walker wrote.
The academic censorship move prompted UF’s accreditor, the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges Commission on Colleges, to announce a review of whether the university had violated its accreditation standards regarding external influence and academic freedom.
In December, the accreditation agency notified UF officials that the commission staff “have determined that there may be sufficient factual information supporting significant noncompliance with the Principles of Accreditation.”
Instead of easing their heavy hand on Florida’s flagship university, defiant Republican lawmakers struck back this session, passing legislation that aimed to strengthen its political control over the public university system and the system of accrediting schools.
Rather than comply with the accreditation association, legislators passed a bill that requires state universities and colleges to dump the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges Commission — the accreditor for all 12 public universities and 28 state colleges — and find new accreditors.
The new bill also empowers state colleges and universities to sue accreditors if the school is “negatively impacted by retaliatory action” by the accreditor.
That’s like empowering students to sue the teachers who give them bad grades.
This legislative temper tantrum is easier said than done. Switching accreditors is not a simple task.
It’s both time consuming and costly, with the costs falling on the applying institution. And it is through being accredited that schools receive their lifeblood of federally funded student loans, Pell Grants and other kinds of financial aid.
This prompted the U.S. Department of Education to warn DeSantis by letter last week of the harm a disruption in accreditation would cause.
“Proposals to amend state law must be drafted and implemented carefully to ensure that they do not put institutions and the students they enroll at risk of loss of eligibility for federal financial-aid programs,” the letter said.
And rather than acknowledge the academic freedom of public university professors, the Republican-controlled legislature passed another last-minute measure that allows the state Board of Governors to conduct a “comprehensive” review of tenured faculty with “consequences for under performance.”
Tenured faculty in state universities and colleges are already subject to annual reviews. This is just creating a new mechanism to single out academics as enemies of the state.
“At the final hour of the session, and without any public comment, this amendment will set our universities back decades in our retention and hiring efforts,” Candi Churchill, executive director of United Faculty of Florida, said in a statement. “This is another way for politicians and upper administrators to get rid of viewpoints and ideas they might not like.”
So, yes, this was a miserable session for the future of Florida’s public K-12 schools. But let’s not forget what a real stinker it also was for the state’s public colleges and universities.