The battle for new college

A chilling effect on what? Who is getting silenced and about what? I mean - look at the course catalog. First of all for probably 90% of classes on campus DEI won't come up at all, and when it does it's limited. I took a leadership class and there was only one week devoted to DEI and leadership. And believe me their were tons of ass-backwards (IMO) opinions about DEI in that class and no one was cancelled. There is a cultural leadership class a friend of mine taught in that same program and you are safe to say whatever the hell you want in the class even if it is completely insane. These are just anecdotes though.

There are certainly people out there who have complained they were silenced - My Visit With the Silenced, Shunned, and Canceled of the Academy (just an example)

But this argument is crap to me for a lot of reasons. There are a lot of things we have to be politically careful about talking about - especially if whatever that thing is stands in opposition to what the people in charge want you to do. That is usually not as bad in academia as in other organizations - but it's a function of being a human being. We can't hide from that. And if we pretend that academia has always been this open healthy place where everyone can publicly vent any viewpoint they want - that is crap. We all know it hasn't ever been like that, although it's the ideal we all want. If a faculty member went around incessantly screaming about aliens for a long time they might also be pushed out the door. Optics matter.

Right now, the predominant view in the US is that DEI is important. So standing in the quad and telling everyone who walks by that DEI is a marxist agenda and the left is using black people to further their political agenda and that racism is dead - yeah, you're going to have A LOT of push back. But you know what you won't get a lot of pushback on? That cancel culture (about any topic) is scray - everyone knows it is. We all feel that. Liberals feel it, conservatives feel it. So if a university wants to spend a few million bucks out of a billion dollar budget to fend off the DEI crazies, and to at least half heartedly work towards having more equity in higher ed- which all the statistics will show is CLEARLY an issue - why treat it like cancer?

So now what's going to happen in Florida? Universities are going to be under assault by organizations from around the country. Accreditation is going to be harder. People of color may not feel as safe coming to school here. Faculty will feel less safe taking jobs here - which ultimately hurts us all. All of that because the governor decided he wanted to fight some war against DEI - a movement that most people actually agree with, even if they don't agree on HOW it is accomplished.

That's what we should spending our energy on - how to make the process better for everyone, not cancelling it altogether.

 

The ramifications are starting already. UF is struggling to fill faculty positions. I've heard it from two colleges and the graduate school.