Frank Cerabino Palm Beach Post
April 9, 2021
In Florida, it’s a felony to record the words of another person secretly during a private conversation.
But not if that other person is a professor at one of Florida’s public colleges and universities, according to a bill that passed both chambers of the Florida Legislature last week.
Under the guise of protecting unpopular free speech on college campuses, Republican state lawmakers are hoping to carve out an extraordinary exception in criminal law that allows Florida’s public college and university students to make secret recordings of their professors.
The carve-out to the two-party-consent law is being done to promote “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity,” according to the bill.
It goes on to say that recording college professors is justified by students for their “personal educational use, in connection with a complaint to the public institution of higher education where the recording was made, or as evidence in, or in preparation for, a criminal or civil proceeding.”
In other words, this is just a Fox News segment served up as legislation.
Not even the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to protecting and promoting free-speech rights on college campuses, supports it.
“Problematically, the bill does not define the scope of complaints to the institution that would qualify. It does not even require that the complaints be in good faith,” wrote Joe Cohn, FIRE’s legislative and policy director. “This language invites the kind of ‘gotcha’ politics at the heart of cancel culture.”
The free-speech group says this bill is bound to unleash a host of troubling issues.
“Even aside from that constitutional problem, it seems unwise to create a system where faculty members’ legal remedy is to sue their own students,” Cohn wrote.
It’s just a ham-handed attempt by conservative lawmakers to twist higher education into their own image.
The idea is that there are too many liberal college professors, so we’ll have to start secretly recording them and prosecuting them to shut them up or drive them away.
It’s right out of the “thought police” in George Orwell’s novel, “1984.”
For not only would this bill allow state college professors to be recorded secretly, but they also would be required to answer annual questionnaires from the State Board of Education and the Board of Governors of the State University System about their political views. The answers aren’t confidential or restricted in their use.
What’s that smell? It isn’t academic freedom.
So this is more of a bill about stifling free speech in state colleges and universities, not promoting it. And to add a little dollop of hypocrisy to this, it’s being pushed by a lobbyist who won’t disclose his donors.
The bill talks about the need for preventing colleges and universities from “shielding” students from “uncomfortable” or “offensive” free speech.
But there’s ample evidence suggesting that the Republicans who champion this sort of anything-goes line are perfectly capable of weighing in against their idea of “offensive” free speech, and taking action to shield students from it.
For example, in 2013, Deandre Poole, an adjunct professor of communications at Florida Atlantic University, conducted a non-mandatory classroom exercise that involved students writing the name “Jesus” on a piece of paper, and then being instructed to stomp on it.
This was a textbook exercise developed by a Catholic college in Wisconsin, and used for 10 years without incident as a way to show the emotional power that disrespect of religion carries. The point was to explore the power of religious symbols.
But when it was done at FAU, one student complained, and then-Gov. Rick Scott immediately jumped in, turning it into a national story for Fox News.
Without bothering to learn the details, Scott called the exercise an affront to Christianity. He apologized to the student, and demanded that FAU investigate the incident, never use the lesson again and take action against the professor.
“The professor’s lesson was offensive, and even intolerant, to Christians and those of all faiths who deserve to be respected as Americans entitled to religious freedom,” Scott wrote.
The professor, Poole, got death threats and condemnation from Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, Poole also was temporarily relieved of his classes by FAU, which caved to political pressure by issuing an apology for the lesson and said it wouldn’t be used again.
Putting aside the fact that Scott and the others didn’t know or didn’t want to know the real meaning of the exercise – which was the opposite of the cheap political points they were trying to make – where was the philosophy that college campuses must be bastions of free speech, now matter how “offensive”?
I suspect that today’s Republican lawmakers in Florida imagine that their heavy-handed legislation will clear academic space for former President Trump’s big lies about a not-stolen election, and protect book tours from their QAnon legislators or insurrectionist grifters.
But I’m guessing these lawmakers will quickly lose their zeal for free speech when they realize that it cuts both ways.
fcerabino@gannett.com
@FranklyFlorida