Call him “The Ronald.” Launching all-out war on much of the curricula at public colleges and universities, the governor of the Sunshine State throws no small shade. Under his aegis, Florida House Bill 999 decries, damns, and seeks to defund “programs…that espouse diversity, equity, or inclusion, or Critical Race Theory rhetoric.”
Such a blitz should surprise no one. For four years, he stood foursquare behind The Donald’s 30,000 documented public lies. The gap between Trump’s infamous command to disbelieve “what you're seeing and... reading” and DeSantis’s crusade against courses not friendly to hard-right hegemony is not wide.
And there’s more. Bill 999 looks to empower political appointees to ditch “any major or minor [course of study] that uses pedagogical methodology associated with Critical Theory” (CT). DeSantis claims such guilt by association, such culpability by “methodology” is needed to keep higher ed from growing “politicized.”
What a concept! Deploying political hacks to depoliticize! (Never mind it makes about as much sense as tapping pyromaniacs to run the fire department.)
Somehow, DeSantis himself survived attending two schools (Yale and Harvard) that tend to give hard-right hysteria a wide berth. At our peril do we deem him an imbecile. Here’s what looks to be his perversely-and-seditiously appealing game. By pegging himself and other anti-CT swells as avengers against pro-CT commies, libs, infidels, groomers, pedophiles, and cannibals, he paints his side as Good-Smiting-Evil. (Never mind his freedom-fragging agenda epitomizes what professor/pundit/author Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls “the strongman’s playbook.” Oh, well.)
Granted, he’s not polling well right now. But look. In May, 2015, neither was Trump. (Even in early-to-mid fall, 2016, few, if any, Big Media sages gave Big Blonder a snowball’s chance in Boca Raton of winning. Oops.)
Better late than never, let’s help cooler, better heads prevail. Sociologist/historian/award-winning author James Loewen observes that our powers-that-be strive to “keep crucial facts from us to keep us ignorant and stupid. Most scholars of education share this perspective, often referred to as ‘critical theory.’”
Hello. To strongmen (quoting George Orwell), public “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” For a bigwig in what begs to be defined as the Party of J6 to blast the wall between academic inquiry and political iniquity cannot augur well at all.
Long-time Wall Street Journal stalwart/author/Pulitzer laureate Douglas Blackmon asks us to resolve our history and our politics through a “sharp lens” that can penetrate smoke-and-mirrors foisted by those who misinform and misrule. Sounds like a plan to me. A WWII vet, my late father did post-doc work at one of the two great schools DeSantis attended (and reportedly loves to boast on). Were he alive, you can bet he’d detect, in DeSantis’s ripe rhetoric and despotic vendetta, no small stench of fascism.
An apple for besieged academia, anyone? And, for swing voters and cetera, how about some clearer, cleaner lenses?