The DeSantis plan on Florida's public universities: What's the batshit to not-batshit ratio?

 The name, "Ron DeSantis," already has the left in apoplectic fits nearly as convulsive as those induced by the name, "Donald J. Trump."  Are you more or less triggered by the name, "Meatball Ron?"  Regardless, when it comes to DeSantis's goal of turning Florida into the state "where woke goes to die," things tend to get more complicated as you look at these inconvenient things called "facts."  I am not sanguine about the future of academia.  Those familiar with James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose & Peter Boghossian's Grievance Studies hoax understand how low the standards for publication are in many disciplines, how gullible and anti-intellectual many faculty are, and all in the name of an ideological agenda that institutions do not sincerely pursue anyway.  I, personally, was threatened with physical violence by an antisemitic faculty member, and Case Western Reserve University refuses to take any action, not merely out of the institution's indifference to antisemitism-- unfortunately, antisemitism is not only tolerated within many institutions, but encouraged by left-wing dogma-- but out of more specific institutional corruption.  Universities may be doomed, which is an open question among the critical theory resistors.  Yet what has Ron DeSantis proposed?  Some of what he has proposed is truly batshit.  Some of it has glimmers of sanity, but there's enough batshit to re-run the Civil War and hand victory to the South on the sulfur content alone.  This morning, let us consider Florida's HB 999:  Public Postsecondary Educational Institutions.

Dude, how about you jazz that up a bit?  If you want to play on the national stage, Meatball, you gotta learn to brand, baby!

Anyway, unlike House or Senate bills, you can actually read this thing for yourself.  It is short.  Read it.  Here is a link, again.  There are a variety of headlines floating around, and let's consider a) whether or not the headlines are accurate, and b) the merits.  After all, a lot of this category of legislation is blatantly mischaracterized.  Consider, for example, what opponents called the "Don't Say Gay" bill, which, while it rhymed nicely, was not what the bill said.  Its primary component was to prohibit discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in Kindergarten through Third Grade, and then only in age-appropriate ways beyond that.  Put that way, it sounds less ominous, and it polls a lot better, hence the moniker.  See what I mean?  Branding, baby!  So what about this time?

Amazingly, the descriptions I am reading sound mostly accurate.  Um... weirdly accurate.  Eerily accurate, and I'm glad I don't teach at a Florida public university!  Would it be better or worse than Case Western Reserve University?  Well, all they have to do is not threaten me with physical violence, and it would be better than the psychopaths at CWRU, so there's that.

Anyway, some of the controversy surrounds the fact that the bill would prohibit state universities in Florida from offering majors in fields like Gender Studies.

I... agree.  If there were no Gender Studies major at my meshuggah University, the creation of such a major would require a faculty vote.  I stay out of University politics, for the most part, because my University is a toxic shithole where I am threatened with physical violence, and those people are best avoided, but on that?  I'd vote no, emphatically.  While "emphatically" adds no weight to the vote beyond my one, I'd vote hell no, if I could.  And funny thing, but CWRU was asked to consider a major in "Law and Social Justice" this year.  Even the leftiest of the lefty nutbars have been squeamish about that one.  Why?  Because this stuff is bullshit, and most of us know it.

The central observation from the Grievance Studies affair was that fields that exist around political grievance have no intellectual standards because intellectual standards aren't the point, or as Jonathan Haidt puts it, consider two competing values: truth and "social justice."  Pick one.  When you pick "social justice," you will wind up sacrificing truth eventually, which was why Lindsay, Pluckrose & Boghossian could publish such utter shit in the social justice disciplinary journals.

And the worst were in Gender Studies.  In fact, that's how they started, publishing a paper claiming that "the penis" is a social construct, and that this social construct is responsible for climate change.  How about the Gender Studies journal to which they submitted, and received positive evaluations, for a paper which was merely Mein Kampf with one or two words changed to flip the enemy?

Or the kicker-- the publication of a paper in which they studied dog rapes in a dog park, using their "analysis" to claim that men need to be trained like dogs based on their analysis of rape culture among dogs?  That one didn't just get published.  It won top honors in the journal.  Best in breed, one might say!

Yes, Gender Studies really is a joke of a discipline.  Gender, as a topic, should be studied within psychology (already problematic), sociology (also problematic) and other fields, but the problem of creating separate departments and majors is that you create ideological echo chambers, which are bad enough in the media, and intellectually deadly in academia.

Eliminating Gender Studies as a major?  Yes, eliminate it.  The bill also prohibits a major in "Critical Race Theory," although a major in a racial identity that is not explicitly labeled "Critical Race Theory" might slide through, so that's of a lesser importance.  I'd still oppose a major in Critical Race Theory.  I wrote a long series a while back on CRT, and how ludicrous it is.

There are a few more minor points of sanity.  The new thing in faculty job applications is that everyone, regardless of discipline, has to submit a diversity statement to pledge allegiance to Ibram X. Kendi (fake name), Judith Butler and a bunch of other anti-intellectuals, con artists, cranks and charlatans.  Why do prospective math professors have to pledge allegiance to postmodernists who reject the concept of logic as a racist/patriarchal social construct?  Welcome to the new religion.  Yes, get rid of this nonsense.

Where the bill really starts going off the rails is everywhere else, where it spills more toxic waste than a train in East Palestine.

You may have read that DeSantis wants partisan appointees to be able to review the appointments of tenured faculty.

Yup, that's in there!  Bu-bye academic freedom.  Say anything that deviates from right-wing orthodoxy, and you're fired.  Do you trust DeSantis or his hacks on this?  I don't.  I trust them slightly more than I trust CWRU, but the difference is that current rules don't let CWRU review my tenure just to fuck with me.  As much as they desperately love to fuck with me.

There is a description floating around that is about half-right, but still distressing.  You may have read that there is a component of the bill that bans "unproven" or "theoretical" content.  That is not quite right.  Here is what the bill actually says:  "Courses with a curriculum based on unproven, theoretical, or exploratory content are best suited to fulfill elective or specific program prerequisite credit requirements rather than general election credit requirements."

That's a little different, so let's try to unpack it.  First, I have a big problem here.  As any student of mine will know, if you use the word, "prove," or any variation thereof, you had better be referring to a mathematical proof.  Otherwise, grammar-nazi-me will hassle you.  In science, we never prove anything, and anyone writing this way who does not understand that is part of the problem.  It is, in fact, a big problem because science is inherently uncertain, and subject to revision as we acquire more data.  Hence, any educated person reading this, properly parsed, would read it to ban the requirement for any Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geology, or really, anything except Mathematics.  Congratulations, dumbasses, you just banned the requirement for anything except math.

Theoretical?  Do they know what the word, "theory," means?  Even beyond the strict, scientific definition of the word, are they aware of how much Economics meets the more colloquial definition?  Hell, string theory is theory by that definition, and sure, they can get away from that problem in the wording of the text by saying that it is not a gen-ed class, but when you don't know what a proof is, or what theory is, you will run into these problems.  Exploratory?  I can do even more with that.

Can a university require art?  Literature?  Philosophy?  Anything like that?  Is it possible to devise a "liberal arts" curriculum by the traditional definition of that term within these bounds?  No, because they're trying to be too cute by half, too clever by half and have legislators devise curriculum rather than professors.  This restriction does not merely prohibit universities from creating ged-ed requirements around CRT, or Judith Butler or anyone like that.  It bans damn-near everything if you read the text.

Aren't these people supposed to be textualists?

And if you violate nonsensically written text, they'll call up your tenure for re-evaluation!  What could possibly go wrong!

But do you think they'll do that to someone teaching Milton Friedman's monetary theories?  If not, this is a system rife with possibilities for ideological abuse, and that's exactly why tenure exists.  To prevent that.  Academic freedom is supposed to prevent that, and I don't give a flying fuck whether the pressure comes from leftists, as it does now, or hackish right-wing political appointees.

I will note that I teach Judith Butler.  I teach Kimberle Crenshaw.  I teach Thomas Sowell.  I teach all this shit.  Why?  Because if someone, anyone, tells me not to teach a book, an author, a perspective, that's exactly what I do.  That is the purpose of academic freedom, and that is exactly what DeSantis is trying to undercut in Florida.

Universities are fucked.  They have been taken over by leftists, loonies, and anti-intellectual thugs.  This bill is even worse than pouring water on a grease fire.

Hey, look!  There's a fire!  I know, I'll pour water on it!  Please warn me if you are going to do that, so that I can be elsewhere.  Preferably with someone else pointing a camera at the whole affair.  I'll watch and laugh at your idiocy, as long as you aren't doing it in my kitchen.

How bonkers is this bill?  Lemme put it this way.  The only way I could interpret it as sane is if Meatball Ron is trying to destroy the Florida state university system based on the premise that academia is fucked anyway.  Accelerate the process, and see what comes next.  That is the closest I can come to an explanation based in sanity.  Otherwise, this is a master class in what-the-fuckery.

And remember, I've been on the Lindsay, Pluckrose & Boghossian side for years.

Larry Keel, "Teach's Wrath," from The Sound.