What’s New
Florida’s Board of Governors, which oversees its 12 public universities, on Thursday approved a greatly reduced selection of courses that qualify for general-education status — the result of a monthslong process spurred by a state law that regulates “identity politics” in the curriculum.
The Details
Senate Bill 266, among other things, bars general-education core courses from distorting “significant historical events” or from including a curriculum that “teaches identity politics.” Courses with “unproven, speculative, or exploratory content” should also not be taken for general-education credit, the law says. After Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed the law in 2023, public colleges and universities were required to review their general-education offerings, which sometimes numbered in the hundreds, for compliance.
Over months, their course lists got winnowed down. Many that were stripped had not been offered in years. Others lost their designation because of their subject matter, according to a Chronicle analysis. The process culminated on Thursday, with the governing board’s approving vote.
With this action, “we can confidently say that our general-education courses that students have to take in order to graduate will not contain indoctrinating concepts,” Ray Rodrigues, the university system’s chancellor, said during the full board meeting. “No other public system can say that.”
Earlier this month, the state Board of Education, which oversees Florida’s 28 public community and state colleges, voted to approve its institutions’ reduced lists. According to a press release from the state’s Department of Education, there was a “57 percent decrease” in the number of courses with a general-education designation.
The Backdrop
The Chronicle previously examined how state universities reviewed and reduced their general-education offerings to comply with SB 266 and found it was an opaque, at times confounding process for the administrators and the professors — largely because they weren’t the only ones involved. According to public records, along with available board-meeting materials, employees for the state’s university system and for an office within the state’s education department played a role in determining if a course might violate the new law.
Sometimes, it seems, the state’s feedback could be vexingly vague. For example, after being told that five general-education courses had some sort of problem, an official at the University of West Florida asked for further elaboration. Highlighting a few of those courses, he asked a university system employee in an email: “Would you please provide more details about the issues? We don’t want to put in the time and effort to make changes and then be told we made the wrong changes. We are trying to get this right the first time.”
However, during the governing board’s academic and student affairs committee meeting Thursday morning, members praised the process as collaborative. So did a university president in attendance. Asked to give his perspective, Alexander N. Cartwright, president of the University of Central Florida, said that university system staffers were “incredibly responsive.” When there “were some courses that were seen as not complying, we felt that the explanation that came back — we at least understood and [it] was reasonable.”
Critics of SB 266 say professors — not politicians or state bureaucrats — should be the ultimate authority in determining the courses that are the foundation of a student’s education. But the law’s defenders say that faculty have abandoned any pretense at objectivity or restraint in what they teach, making it all the more appropriate for elected lawmakers to enact a check.
What to Watch For
Where Florida goes, other states could follow. As Rodrigues previously told The Chronicle in an interview about SB 266, “It’s not uncommon to see other states — if they like what we’ve done — to then go down that path for themselves.”
If similar bills proliferate in other states, legal challenges to those mandates could spread, too. One is already underway in Florida. Earlier this month, six professors who work at state universities sued in federal court to challenge SB 266. In their complaint, they argue that the law and the way it’s been implemented “leave faculty and students with too many fundamental, unanswered questions about what conduct is permitted or prohibited; how they can teach; what they can teach; and what words they can or cannot use, all resulting in self-censorship and a chilling effect across campuses.”
