Why Florida’s charge to scrutinize university syllabi for ‘antisemitism or anti-Israel bias’ is a joke
Flags fly atop the Florida Historic Capitol. Photo by Getty Images
Robert Zaretsky August 12, 2024
A new front has just opened in the Middle East conflict, not in the sands of Gaza but instead in the swamps of Florida.
Last Friday, the Orlando Sentinel reported that the State University System of Florida ordered the administrations at all 12 of its campuses to scrutinize the syllabi of courses being taught this fall for any sign of “antisemitism or anti-Israel bias.” Of course, this instruction did not apply across all colleges and departments. The odds of finding antisemitic bias in a history course were greater than, say, a hotel and restaurant management course. (It seems deconstructed cuisine is not what Jacques Derrida had in mind.
Given the challenge of poring through hundreds of syllabi before the start of the semester, the system’s chancellor, Ray Rodrigues, proposed that administrators apply a keyword search. “Any course that contains the following keywords: Israel, Israeli, Palestine, Palestinian, Middle East, Zionism, Zionist, Judaism, Jewish, or Jews will be flagged for review.” Given this nuanced approach, one wonders why other keywords — e.g., “Soros,” and “Space lasers” under the “S” column alone — did not make the cut.
Nevertheless, this review process, Rodrigues insisted, would guarantee that “all universities are reviewing the same courses, and nothing falls through the cracks.” But once the memo went out, all sorts of things immediately fell through the cracks. One was the constitutional right to freedom of expression. As the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) warned, “As public entities bound by the First Amendment, Florida’s public colleges and universities must respect constitutional guarantees of academic freedom, including a faculty member’s right to select pedagogically relevant material and how to present it.”
Inevitably, FIRE slammed this action as “Orwellian,” which, like “Kafkaesque,” is an adjective we cannot seem to avoid. When the likes of Josh Hawley or Donald Trump Jr. use “Orwellian” to describe those defending human rights, it means either that the adjective has lost all meaning or has acquired even deeper levels of significance.
Still, insofar as Orwellian evokes the image of Big Brother — the leader of a society where the distinction between actual and alternative facts no longer exists — it is a label that sticks. Yet while Rodrigues’ actions might be Orwellian, they also veer towards the vaudevillian. When he pledged that “the most important thing is that we get this right,” he seems oblivious that this effort to reassure faculty is precisely what unsettles them. It is no more possible to violate the law that protects the freedom of speech in the right way than there is a right way to violate laws that protect the environment against polluters or, at least until recently, the law that protects our democracy against, say, a president who refuses to leave the White House. (Though the Supreme Court seems to think otherwise.)
But the slapstick does not stop here. Like WC Fields, the chancellor is a chancer, little more than a huckster eager to please two audiences: Florida’s Jewish community and Florida’s Republican governor. The 672,000 Jews who live in Florida — yet another 60,000 or so are snowbirds — represent about 3% of the state’s population. In addition, nearly all of them are registered voters, which adds to their electoral weight—a weight which is no longer reliably Democratic. According to one 2020 exit poll, slightly over 40% of the state’s Jewish population voted for Trump — a jaw-dropping percentage for a historically and overwhelmingly Democratic voting bloc.
Rodrigues seems equally mindful of Governor Ron DeSantis. During a decade spent as a state representative and senator, Rodrigues invariably led the charge in DeSantis’ war against wokeism. In 2019, for example, he sponsored HB 839, a bill requiring a yearly assessment of intellectual freedom and diversity at public universities — a transparent effort, argued the state faculty union, to chill freedom of speech on campuses. No doubt coincidentally, Rodrigues, though having never served in a major administrative role, much less as president, at a college, was named last year as the state’s new chancellor. (Curiously, the nationwide search for the position, which comes with an annual salary of $400,000, yielded just eight candidates, several of whom concluded that the fix was in for Rodrigues.)
But even this misses the truly vaudevillian aspect to this affair. As he never worked as a professor, Chancellor Rodrigues never worked up a syllabus. Take it from one who has been doing this for 35 years: Most students pay as much attention to syllabi as most consumers do to the list of ingredients on a box of cereal. In principle, a syllabus is little more than a contract between professors and students. Here is what to expect at my end, and in return this is what I expect at your end. Far from being a devious means to indoctrinate students, the syllabus is a desperate means to inspire students not just to read critically, but quite frankly to read. Period.
In short, I wish professors had the power to lure students to do all sorts of nefarious things — read deeply and think critically — but in an age where, when I enter my classroom and see a few dozen ear-budded students mostly staring at their smart phones, I know that power, if it did ever exist, evaporated a long time ago. And so, Chancellor Rodrigues, if you are truly concerned to uncover expressions of antisemitism by public employees who exercise the power to indoctrinate, there is no better place to start than the recent interview with your party’s presidential candidate in which he described Jews who vote Democratic as haters of their religion and Israel.
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