A post about how local politics are impacting me.

I said there'd be more positive, fewer politics and above all a focus on what I myself experience. I didn't say NO politics, No negative stuff. Anyway, so about that election and about how Florida was already careening into a ditch. This was initially going to be in the weekly story I mail out after Thanksgiving, but I just couldn't bring myself to put it in there. So I'm putting it in an unmailed but posted story and linking to it. It's just too long and too dark for this week. Anyway, a story by Clara-Sophia Daly in the Miami Herald on November 24 captures what it is like on the campus of the fourth-largest and, until this year, fourth-ranked public university in the country:

Professors are angry and concerned about their jobs and say an environment of fear has swept across the university as administrators scramble to comply with the law. Should universities not comply with the law, they stand to lose part of their funding...the administration made it clear that two courses – Sociology of Gender and Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity – would never pass the test for inclusion in general education, based on early guidance from the state.

While the university's administration was promised the final say in what and how it taught, provided it complied with state law, this simply did not happen. The state has micromanaged the process while demanding adherence to vague guidelines in state law, such as adding "Western canon" to course descriptions without providing any definition of what the term "Western canon" means. This has pushed a whopping 38 percent, in one survey of 350 professors, to apply for new jobs out of state.

From my perspective, I graduated from FIU's History Department with a Masters Degree in April. I found the department to teach students the historical process and analysis carefully, being critical of historical arguments we liked and disliked. If any of the professors from the 11 courses I took pushed students in one way of thinking over another, it was likely the conservative professors. Yes, there are conservatives in the department! And no, I didn't think they did anything wrong, either. They had a perspective, and I disagreed with it; I made my arguments clear in my papers, and the professors assessed my papers based on the structure, support, grammar, etc, of the argument, and that was that. For whatever it is worth, I earned the same grade from all of my classes, 'A,' whether I liked the professor or not, whether or not they liked me, whether they were liberal, moderate, or conservative--and I had professors from the entire range. I think. None of my professors ever told me how they were voting, how they thought I should vote, who they thought people should vote for, or anything of the sort.

While I have that experience with the FIU History Department, my 18-year-old child is now in the Politics Department. She's told me of great frustrations with her classmates for having and voicing strong opinions she disagreed with. Guess what? She's very liberal, the students in question are quite conservative or maybe just very pro-Trump, and her professors moderated the conversation correctly so that the students could engage one another in a safe environment, agreeing and disagreeing as they each saw fit.

Do I know professors from my department who are planning to leave? Yes. Do I know professors from my department who left this summer? Yes. Do I know professors from departments adjacent to mine who are planning to leave? Yes.

It's a hot mess, and what is incredibly frustrating is it is all based on outright lies or, on occasion, exaggerations about what life is like on a big public university campus. This is the same strategy extremist Ronald Reagan used to seize the governor's mansion in California when he took the "rioting" at Berkeley and exploited it for political gain.

[I]n 1966, the American Council of Education chose Berkeley as the nation’s “best balanced distinguished university.” But for Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign, campus radicalism was a goldmine. Rhetorically, he tied the “rioting” and “anarchy” of Berkeley students to academic freedom run amok and communist professors indoctrinating the next generation.

Governor Reagan, without much authority to do so, used the California Highway Patrol to force the closure of a popular gathering place for anti-war protestors at the University of California at Berkeley. This provoked students to march on the location, and 800 police met 6,000 protesters. As The Rolling Stone tells the story,

James Rector, a student, was shot and killed by police, and 128 protestors were admitted to local hospitals. When Reagan was pressed on why the police used such force, he answered, “It’s very naive to assume that you should send anyone into that kind of conflict with a flyswatter.”

"The Battle of People's Park," as Rolling Stone put it in their 1969 coverage of the police riot, was not about student protests. But about the ridiculous, unsupported by the facts, claim that Reagan made that UC Berkeley was “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sexual deviants." Today, the University of Florida system, including Florida International University, faces similar, unfounded claims of indoctrination, Communist sympathies, and student radicalization.

The parallels are unsettling.