‘Viewpoint’ bill is an assault on Florida higher ed – Sarasota Herald-Tribune

opinion

Howard Simon| Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Gov. Ron DeSantis is poised to sign House Bill 233, abill that requires the State Board of Education and each of Floridas colleges and universities to conduct an annual assessment related to intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity.

According to the bill, the Board of Education must select or create an objective, nonpartisan and statistically valid survey to measure the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented and whether students, faculty and staff feel free to express their beliefs and viewpoints on campus and in the classroom. Under the bill, the first survey mustbe published on Sept.1, 2022.

This all sounds benign; it even sounds protective of the free exchange of ideas on campus.Butis it a predicate to an assault on higher education?Does the legislation address a genuine problem?Or does it merely vent a judgment by some far-right conservatives that college liberal arts courses are all driven by woke" political correctness?

The claim that a liberal arts education is valueless and unconnected to postgraduate education or to a meaningful postgraduate career is obviously absurd. And the claim that a liberal arts education is just woke" political correctnessis insulting to the nations professors. (Full disclosure: for nearlynine yearsI taught philosophy to undergraduates at two universities in the Midwest.)

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Apparentlysome conservatives have concluded that Americas universities are dominated by professors whose political leanings are liberaland thereforeprovide an intellectually biased education. But are colleges and universities really able to block competing ideas and perspectives on campus?

There is, after all, the First Amendment. Recall that just a few years ago University of Florida lawyers fearing a lawsuit accusing UFof violating the First Amendments constitutional protections convinced the school's presidentto reverse an initial decision denying alt-right firebrand Richard Spencer, the leader of the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, the right to speak on campus.

Unfortunately, House Bill 233 will not be the first piece of legislation adopted by the Florida Legislature that is based on unexamined anecdotes that someone heard about. It's funny how unexamined anecdotes are regarded as impermissible hearsay in courts that operate by rules of evidence for determining violations of law yet it isstandard fare for theFloridaLegislature to rely on them when creating and adopting laws.

The Legislature now wants to dump this into the laps of the Board of Education and Floridas colleges and universitiesand force them spend time figuring out how to implement what seems to be a solution in search of a problem.

But lets presume, for the sake of argument, that theres something to the stereotype that college students and university faculty members are more liberal than conservative in their values and political viewpoints. If the mandatory survey assessing viewpoint diversity confirms this, how willthe information that the state government collects be used going forward? And lets not be nave: information collected by government is information that will be used by government.

Will the assessment of viewpoint diversity involve an assessment of each member of the faculty? Will they be asked to characterize or divulge their personal political orientation? What if they refuse? Will students or the administration provide the characterization of the faculty members political leanings?Does anything seem more un-American? To paraphrase the legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel's question regardinghis pitiful 1962 New York Mets team, Dont anyone around here remember the McCarthy years of the 1950s?

Could the survey be the basis for future hiring decisions? For example, let's say that a university's chemistry department has seven professors who are conservative and four who are liberal. Will that mean that the university must hire more liberal professorsin order to achieve properviewpoint diversity on its campus? Who knows? House Bill 233contains no prohibitions on how the information willbe used.

Given that there is so much potential mischief in House Bill 233 and so little protection for academic freedom it certainly wouldn't take long for Florida's lawmakers and university communities to regret yet another legislative mistake.

A resident of Sanibel Island, Howard Simon served as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1997 to2018.

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'Viewpoint' bill is an assault on Florida higher ed - Sarasota Herald-Tribune