Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continued his attack on perceived enemies on Tuesday, signing a law that effectively ends tenure at state universities.
The Miami Herald explains the new bill:
Every five years, [Desantis] said, tenured faculty would be required to go before their university’s board of trustees, which could part ways with them. The text of the bill does not give that level of specificity but rather states a five-year review would take place to be determined by the state Board of Governors. Each state university already requires tenured professors to take part in an annual review.
“We need to make sure the faculty are held accountable and make sure they don’t just have tenure forever without having any type of ways to hold them accountable or evaluate what they’re doing,” DeSantis said at a press conference. “It’s all about trying to make these institutions more in line with what the state’s priorities are and, frankly, the priorities of the parents throughout the state of Florida.”
“Tenure was there to protect people so that they could do ideas that may cause them to lose their job or whatever, academic freedom — I don’t know that’s really the role it plays, quite frankly, anymore,” DeSantis added.
Completely misrepresenting the function of tenure – which encourages veteran academics to explore ideas without fear of retribution – DeSantis said tenure creates an “intellectual orthodoxy.”
Andrew Gothard, president of United Faculty of Florida, told the Herald that DeSantis and his allies don’t understand how tenure works, explaining that tenured professors can still be fired for cause.
“Tenure allows for due process and a hearing and has typically protected people from being fired for political reasons,” he said. “From where we stand, the only indoctrination happening right now is coming from Tallahassee.”
The new bill is part and parcel of Florida’s GOP-driven war on education. The Herald reports:
House Speaker Chris Sprowls called the legislation a way to prevent “indoctrination.”
He also said it would increase transparency with a provision that would require course syllabuses to be posted online, preventing attempts by professors to “smuggle in ideology and politics.” Sprowls said it would prevent students from signing up for a class on “socialism and communism” when they thought they were signing up for “Western democracy” and classes about “what it means to be an actual American.”
“The most obvious consequence of this is that it’ll make it next to impossible for Florida universities to compete for top-notch faculty members, dragging down the quality of the institutions as a whole. But no big deal for DeSantis. He, after all, went to Yale, not U of F,” wrote political commentator James Surowiecki on Twitter.
