This summer, Florida’s 12 public universities were told to identify courses to be reviewed for “antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias.” The details of that audit are now coming into focus.
Campuses have submitted hundreds of courses to be inspected, according to spreadsheets from six institutions obtained by The Chronicle. Many of the nearly 250 courses are related to international politics, Judaism, and the Middle East.
Others are decidedly not. For example, “Percussion Ensemble” at the University of West Florida, “General Parasitology” and “Painting Workshop” at Florida Gulf Coast University, and “Global Hip Hop” at Florida International University all made the cut.
The spreadsheets offer a glimpse into an otherwise hazy process initiated earlier this year by Ray Rodrigues, the university system’s chancellor. In August, the dozen universities were told to conduct a keyword search of their undergraduate and graduate course descriptions and syllabi for the following words: Israel, Israeli, Palestine, Palestinian, Middle East, Zionism, Zionist, Judaism, Jewish, and Jews. Each institution should then begin a “faculty review” to look for “instances of either antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias,” which should be reported to the chancellor’s office, Rodrigues told university presidents in an email.
Since then, little detail has emerged about the review, including what courses may be scrutinized. The Chronicle filed public-records requests with the 12 state universities for the course lists they compiled. The University of Florida, New College of Florida, Florida State University, UWF, FGCU, and FIU provided documents by Friday.
The spreadsheets list information about each course, including its “instructional materials,” such as textbooks or works of literature. (The texts reported span centuries — Plato, Plutarch, and James Joyce make appearances on one list.) Most of the colleges compiled courses that were offered in the spring, summer, and fall of this year. Names of instructors are not included.
Many of the submitted courses are obvious fits with the keyword search. Among the most popular disciplines are religion, European history, and comparative politics. “The Second World War,” which, according to its description, “examines the military, social, political, diplomatic, cultural, and economic aspects of the Allied and Axis powers on all fronts of World War II,” is on UWF’s spreadsheet. “Themes in Holocaust History,” which is “an assessment of how the Holocaust has been studied by historians over the past half-century, with a focus on debates and how differing conclusions have been drawn over time,” is on Florida Gulf Coast’s.
Other courses that were reported are tangentially related, or not related at all, to Israel or Judaism. “Percussion Ensemble” seems to have wound up on UWF’s spreadsheet because, according to its course description, students will rehearse and perform “a variety of music,” including from the “Middle East.” It’s unclear why “The Gilded Age,” an American-history seminar that examines societal shifts in the decades following the Civil War, made the list. According to Florida International’s spreadsheet, the syllabi of a computational biology lab and a course called “Contemporary Art” made them eligible for inclusion. Florida Gulf Coast’s spreadsheet includes “Calculus II,” “Choral Lit and Conducting Tech,” “Chemistry Senior Seminar,” and “International Marketing.”
If the university system “had any scruples about academic freedom,” it would have taken a more minimal approach — deploying “a scalpel instead of a hammer,” said Alex Morey, vice president of campus advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has admonished the systemwide review as “Orwellian” and an attack on First Amendment rights.
“They’d want to get the fewest number of courses possible to make sure that they’re not pulling in the art professor and the calculus teacher and nursing courses and that sort of thing. So it just doesn’t seem like it was well thought out,” Morey said. “But again, when you’re dispatching with basic constitutional rights, I’m not expecting people to be thinking down the line.”
The Chronicle asked the state university system about criticism that the inquiry erodes academic freedom. In an email, Cassandra Edwards, a spokesperson for the system, said that academic freedom “is not a license to promote antisemitism.” She quoted from the American Association of University Professors’ 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which says that academic freedom in teaching “carries with it duties correlative with rights.” One of those duties, Edwards wrote, is complying with state law that bars discrimination and antisemitism in Florida’s public-education system.
Edwards also said that “due to the large volume” of courses, “a sample” was chosen for review this semester. She did not say which courses were selected, or by whom.
‘Necessary Steps’
The review was sparked this summer by an incident at Florida International. In June, screenshots of test questions for a course on terrorism and homeland security were posted on X. One asked: “When Israelis practice terrorism, they often refer to it as ______.” with four possible answers to select: “proactive attacks,” “self-defense,” “military actions,” and “terrorist defensive strategy.” Another question stated that “terrorism began with two Zionist organizations, the Irgun Zvai Leumi and______.” The post caught the attention of Randy Fine, a Republican and Jewish member of the Florida House of Representatives, who said on X that he spoke to FIU and the Board of Governors, which oversees the 12 institutions in the state university system, about “their #MuslimTerror-supporting employee.”
The “problematic questions” were “automatically generated” from a large question bank that accompanied the 10th edition of the textbook Terrorism and Homeland Security, Shlomi Dinar, dean of FIU’s Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs, told a local news outlet in a statement at the time. According to Dinar’s statement, the instructor did not choose or write the questions. That did not reassure Fine. In another late June X post, the state representative said that he told FIU’s president that “unintentional Jew hatred due to university incompetence isn’t going to fly.”
Weeks later, Rodrigues informed university presidents of the review and the keyword-search process. He told the Miami Herald the move was prompted by “a question that said Jews invented terrorism.” The chancellor also referenced the FIU incident in a late-August exchange with the Advisory Council of Faculty Senates for the university system, according to correspondence obtained by The Chronicle.
On August 27, the council expressed serious concern about the review to Rodrigues, arguing that it was not only misguided and “logistically impractical” but it “verges into antisemitism itself.” “Put simply, under this policy, a course on ‘Judaism and Politics’ would likely be subject to heightened review, while a course on ‘Christianity and Politics’ likely would not,” the council wrote in a summary of its concerns, which the council’s chair, Amanda Phalin, an associate instructional professor of management at the University of Florida, shared with Rodrigues via email. “This differential treatment burdens the teaching of courses on Judaism — an outcome that is arguably antisemitic.” (Phalin declined to comment.)
The chancellor was unpersuaded. In an email reply, Rodrigues noted that the council “has spent several meetings to identify their concerns, yet the fact that antisemitic material was presented in a course this summer is absent from their list.” Ignoring that this occurred “is not an option,” he wrote. The publisher of the textbook — Cengage Group — “has taken the necessary steps on their end to ensure this does not happen again,” Rodrigues continued. “Our universities need to take the necessary steps on our end.” (A spokesperson for Cengage told The Chronicle in an email that when it learned of concerns with the textbook and the test bank, “we paused both digital and print sales while we pursue a full academic review, which is currently ongoing.”)
The same professors “who are quick to assert their academic freedom,” Rodrigues wrote, “are always silent on the duties that accompany that freedom.”
‘Hilariously Shortsighted’
It’s unclear where the systemwide review stands. Edwards, the system spokesperson, did not say how many courses are in the “sample” that’s being scrutinized. A faculty committee at each university is responsible for wading through materials — everything that’s “presented to students,” said Edwards — from those courses to determine if there are instances of antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias, according to the university system. Rodrigues told the Herald in August that those committees should “err on the side of caution” when it comes to potential bias.
Altony Lee III, another spokesperson for the university system, said in an email that universities will use a statutory definition of antisemitism. That statute lists examples of antisemitism related to Israel, including “applying a double standard to Israel by requiring behavior of Israel that is not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” and “delegitimizing Israel by denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and denying Israel the right to exist.” However, the law says, “criticism of Israel that is similar to criticism toward any other country may not be regarded as antisemitic.”
If universities “find content that violates these standards,” they should flag the material to the chancellor, Lee wrote. They should do the same for any examples of “anti-Israeli bias,” he said. To determine if something fits the bill, universities will use the Oxford Languages dictionary definition of bias, according to Lee, which he said is, “cause to feel or show inclination or prejudice for or against someone or something.” (Rodrigues told the Herald that “if there is a question of whether something is biased against Israel, we will bring in those who have that expertise to do that review.”)
Lee said the review is “an ongoing process” and no deadline has been set.
The Chronicle asked the six campuses that provided spreadsheets for details about what happens next. Most did not respond by Friday. (Florida colleges spent this week preparing for and responding to Hurricane Milton.) A spokesperson for Florida Gulf Coast said in an email that the university “has complied with all the requirements.”
Academics whose courses or textbooks were listed expressed concern about the perceived intrusion into curricular matters. Sean Yom, an associate professor of political science at Temple University, edited a textbook that was listed on Florida International’s spreadsheet: the ninth edition of Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa. In an email, he called attention to the use of the phrase “anti-Israeli bias” in Rodrigues’s mandate. That wording, Yom wrote, “suggests that any academic materials found to be criticizing (rather than, say, blindly praising) any aspect of the contemporary Israeli state would be found in violation” of antisemitism statutes, something he called “hilariously shortsighted.”
Though he said he doubts his textbook “will be flagged in any way,” Yom wrote that he’s “perturbed by this action, because it reflects nakedly autocratic domineering within public universities.”
Oren Baruch Stier, a professor of religious studies who directs the Holocaust and Genocide Studies program at Florida International, said it’s “mind-boggling” to live in a state “where there’s this level of micromanaging of what experts are doing in the classroom.” What’s also frustrating, he said, is the “murkiness” of what happens next. “We don’t know what they’re going to do with the data,” said Stier, who teaches “Judaism after the Holocaust: A Focus on Elie Wiesel” and “Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism,” both of which were listed by FIU. “We don’t know if that’s going to lead somebody at the Board of Governors to actually try to cancel a course or tell a particular instructor that they can’t teach a certain course or a certain idea or a certain topic.”
Erik Larson, who chairs FIU’s religious studies department, also noted that uncertainty. Will this review ultimately bring about censorship of what a professor can teach or assign? “We don’t really know right now,” Larson said. But, he added, “faculty definitely know that people are watching.”
You can explore the spreadsheets here.