In late July, trustees at Florida International University approved a revised list of courses eligible to fulfill undergraduates’ general-education requirements. They thought they’d done everything necessary to comply with a 2023 state law that curtails “identity politics,” distortions of major historical events, and “unproven, speculative, or exploratory content” in the curriculum.
Three weeks later, Jennifer L. Doherty-Restrepo, FIU’s assistant vice president for academic planning and accountability, got an email from a senior administrator in the state university system. Attached was a spreadsheet that highlighted issues with dozens of courses on the approved list. The feedback, and its specificity, varied.
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In late July, trustees at Florida International University approved a revised list of courses eligible to fulfill undergraduates’ general-education requirements. They thought they’d done everything necessary to comply with a 2023 state law that curtails “identity politics,” distortions of major historical events, and “unproven, speculative, or exploratory content” in the curriculum.
Three weeks later, Jennifer L. Doherty-Restrepo, FIU’s assistant vice president for academic planning and accountability, got an email from a senior administrator in the state university system. Attached was a spreadsheet that highlighted issues with dozens of courses on the approved list. The feedback, and its specificity, varied.
A course on the history of design from antiquity to the Middle Ages, for example, “does not seem broad enough for the general student population,” says the spreadsheet, which The Chronicle obtained through a public-records request. For 20-odd courses, FIU administrators simply needed to “confirm alignment” with the new law, known as Senate Bill 266.
Faced with those “vague” written comments, Doherty-Restrepo sought “additional clarity,” she told professors at a September Faculty Senate meeting. She spent “an hour and a half on the phone” with a university system staffer she did not name “going line by line of each course that they flagged for additional further review and potential revision,” she said. The verbal feedback she got was “more specific,” and she took notes.
In September, Doherty-Restrepo resubmitted FIU’s course list. That spreadsheet — also obtained by The Chronicle through a public-records request — includes notes that seem to summarize concerns communicated to her (it didn’t say from whom). For one thing, a course called “Labor and Globalization” is “too focused on struggles/challenges of those in low-wage jobs” and should be revised. Two courses — “The Basic Ideas of Sociology” and “Global Women’s Writing: Gendered Experiences Across Societies and Cultures” — are “too focused on women” and should be removed from the general-education curriculum. (Doherty-Restrepo did not respond to an interview request to discuss her thinking on the subject.)
The input offers a tantalizing glimpse inside the opaque implementation of SB 266, one of the most sweeping attempts to regulate colleges’ curricula in recent memory. A Chronicle analysis of how campuses adapted to the law sheds new light on what courses lost the general-education designation — should the Board of Governors, which oversees Florida’s 12 public universities, approve the final lists at its Thursday meeting — and why. Many classes were cut because they hadn’t been offered in years, or because they were too advanced for general education. (A 3000-level course called “Samurai War Tales,” for example, used to be on the University of Florida’s list.)
Others, however, were axed because of their subject matter, having fallen victim to a fuzzy and fraught process in which professors, administrators, employees of the university system, and bureaucrats from an obscure state office all played a role. That process produced a narrower general-education curriculum. For faculty critics, it also raised suspicions that an absence of clarity and an urgent deadline had the ultimate effect of eroding their autonomy and injecting partisan politics into curricular decisions.
Defenders of the new Florida law argue that elected lawmakers are the proper stewards for ensuring that students receive a balanced, unbiased general education.
In a federal lawsuit filed earlier this month, six professors argue that SB 266 is “vague, viewpoint-discriminatory” legislation that “restricts academic freedom and imposes the state’s favored viewpoints on public higher education, punishing educators and students for expressing differing and disfavored viewpoints.”
Defenders of the new Florida law argue that elected lawmakers are the proper stewards for ensuring that students receive a balanced, unbiased general education. They note that Florida’s reforms do not ban any classes from being taught but simply define the courses that are considered fundamental to every undergraduate’s degree. And they say that it’s left-leaning professors — and not legislators — who have brought politics into the classroom.
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In an interview, Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the state university system, made reference to recent findings from Gallup that show the public’s confidence in higher ed has dropped significantly over the past decade, and that concern related to the sector’s supposed rigid political agenda was the top reason cited in the poll released last year.
“When a state like Florida can say we’ve eliminated these unproven concepts from general education,” thereby relegating them to electives and other courses that students opt to take, Rodrigues said, “that puts Florida in a position to say, ‘We are addressing the No. 1 concern the American public has expressed about higher education.’”
SB 266 is the centerpiece of Florida’s legislative efforts to remake public higher education in the state, aligning with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s efforts to rid the system of “woke” ideology.
Rodrigues told The Chronicle that state legislators have relayed to him concerns from parents of students arriving home for Thanksgiving after beginning their freshman year. Sitting around the dinner table, those students would “just be communicating cultural Marxism,” Rodrigues said he was told. That “begged the question for many of these parents, as communicated to me from the legislators, ‘What am I paying for?’”
Those complaints, he said, prompted lawmakers to target the general-education curriculum — which often fills students’ first-semester schedules — for reform.
Of the 120 credit hours required to graduate from the state university system, 36 come from general education. Some of those credits are part of a standardized state curriculum, commonly referred to as the “core.” Every student at a public university is required to take at least one course in each of five disciplines: communication, mathematics, social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. The remaining credits come from a menu of institution-specific general-education courses.
Along with banning Florida’s 40 public colleges and universities from spending state or federal funds on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, SB 266 bars core general-education courses that “distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics” or are “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.” Humanities core courses in particular “must include selections from the Western canon.”
It remains unclear which parts of the new law apply to which elements of the general-education curriculum. Asked if those restrictions also apply to institution-specific courses, Cassandra Edwards, a spokesperson for the university system, pointed to part of SB 266 that says all general-education courses must “meet the course standards” that are outlined in the new state statute that includes those restrictions.
General-education courses should also, SB 266 says, “whenever applicable, provide instruction on the historical background and philosophical foundation of Western civilization and this nation’s historical documents,” such as the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In addition, courses with a curriculum “based on unproven, speculative, or exploratory content” are best suited as electives or prerequisites, and not to be taken for general-education credit. (Campuses that violate the law would not receive some state funding.)
SB 266 made waves in January 2024, when both the university system’s Board of Governors and the state Board of Education, which oversees Florida’s 28 public colleges, voted to nix one of the existing core-course options, “Principles of Sociology,” and replace it with an introductory history course. Manny Díaz Jr., the state commissioner of education, had proposed removing sociology, writing that it “has been hijacked by left-wing activists and no longer serves its intended purpose as a general-knowledge course for students.” (The professors’ lawsuit challenging SB 266 names Díaz, as a member of the Board of Governors, as a defendant.)
SB 266 is the centerpiece of Florida’s legislative efforts to remake public higher education in the state, aligning with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s efforts to rid the system of “woke” ideology.
After the statewide governing boards approved the list of core courses, Florida’s dozen public universities began reviewing their existing general-education offerings. Aiding that work — though to what degree is unclear — was the Office of Articulation, an entity within the state Department of Education that, according to its website, “coordinates ways to help students move easily from institution to institution and from one level of education to the next.” Members of that office furnished each institution in February with a spreadsheet of its current general-education courses and instructions to mark each course with one of three designations: “Reviewed: No Updates,” “Reviewed: Updated,” or “Reviewed: Removed From General Education.” The revised lists, the office explained, would need to be submitted to the state by September 1, after approval by the institution’s board of trustees and president.
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Then the lists would go to the Board of Governors and to the state Board of Education, to be approved or rejected.
For faculty members and administrators across Florida, this was a tall order: They had to review, in some cases, hundreds of courses in a matter of months, developing a process for doing so as they went.
By April, officials at the University of West Florida thought they were well on their way to being able to present a list of courses for trustee approval. Dallas Snider, UWF’s vice provost, sent a spreadsheet to system administrators asking if they had “any questions or concerns.”
They did. In May, according to correspondence obtained by The Chronicle through a public-records request, it seems he and Emily Sikes, the university system’s then-interim and now permanent vice chancellor for academic and student affairs, got on the phone, and that Sikes identified five courses that needed revising. On May 13, Snider sought more clarity.
“We have looked over the five questionable Gen-Ed courses and are concerned about the needed changes,” Snider wrote to Sikes and Lynn Hunt Nelson, now the university system’s associate vice chancellor for academic affairs and innovation. (Snider did not respond to an interview request, and Sikes and Nelson were not made available.)
Citing a few of the flagged courses, Snider asked: “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,” he wrote, “to get this right the first time.”
That didn’t happen. In late July, more than a month after UWF’s trustees voted to approve the list and it was submitted to the state, Snider was told of more problems, which led to a granular back-and-forth with the university system.
SB 266’s Western-canon requirement was one sticking point. In August, Sikes emailed Snider a spreadsheet listing 18 courses “that we had some additional questions [about] after our review.” In the spreadsheet, there’s a column labeled “Issues,” with short notes. An “Introduction to Poetry” course’s description does not include “selections from the Western canon reference.” A course called “Basic Communication Skills” is marked “No Western Canon.”
According to the spreadsheet, UWF also needed to verify that a developmental-psychology course called “Human Development Across the Lifespan” did not include “exploratory, speculative content.” Administrators also should “confirm” that other courses, like “Introduction to Machine Learning,” met the “natural-science criteria” of state law.
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It seems Snider, like FIU’s Doherty-Restrepo, also struggled to interpret this sort of feedback. The machine-learning course qualified as part of UWF’s institutional general-education curriculum, he told Sikes in an email, because it aligned with the university’s student-learning outcome for natural science — “evaluate scientific information using appropriate tools and strategies of the discipline” — and that that outcome was consistent with state law.
“Is this sufficient confirmation” that the course “meets the natural-science criteria?” Snider asked. “Is this the type of evidence you are looking for?”
“We need confirmation that the course will use the scientific method to explain natural experiences and phenomena,” Sikes replied, citing SB 266. (It ultimately remained in the general-education curriculum.)
The University of Florida, meanwhile, undertook an internal audit to gauge its courses’ compliance with the law — an organized process that still led to confusion and a shifting list of permissible courses.
In February and March, the university’s general-education committee circulated a form for departments to fill out for each of their general-education courses. It asked about material that would be prohibited under SB 266. “Does any offering of this course include material that an educated but non-expert observer might see as ‘distorting significant historical events’?” one question asked. If so, respondents were asked to explain how the course handled “differing interpretations of historical events while maintaining accuracy and objectivity.”
Likewise, if a course could be seen as “teaching identity politics” or “arguing that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States,” the form required respondents to “describe how the ideas are presented as objects of analysis within a larger course of instruction that is delivered in an objective manner without endorsement of the concepts.”
The committee waded through responses for nearly 800 courses and settled on a revised list of courses, which the trustees’ academic-affairs committee approved in June.
But when the general-education committee returned for its first meeting of the semester in August, one member said, it learned that state officials had moved many more courses onto the chopping block, though exactly who had done so and which courses were at risk remained unclear. The same month, the then-provost, J. Scott Angle, pulled a vote on the course list from the Board of Trustees’ meeting agenda; board documents said the list “needs further review to ensure we are 100-percent compliant with our state laws and Board of Governors regulations before submission.”
In the end, about three-quarters of the University of Florida’s courses were axed from the general-education curriculum.
When the list did finally come before university trustees, in October, the extent of the cuts was a surprise to at least one administrator who’d been helping oversee the process. “While we knew about the process, we did not know, until now, about the content of that list,” Gillian Lord, associate dean of UF’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, wrote to college leaders in an email obtained by The Chronicle. She’d been informed by upper administration that nearly 60 percent of the university’s 1,181 general-education courses would be losing that designation. “I’m sure there will be no lack of emotions upon reading the list” of affected courses, she wrote. (Lord declined to comment.)
A few weeks later, a faculty member wrote to Lord saying she’d heard that professors could petition to have courses re-added to the general-education rolls. “Well that’s interesting. I know NOTHING about that!” Lord replied, in an email obtained by The Chronicle.
By late October, Lord was helping to guide the appeal process, emailing members of the English department about two courses the university hoped to have restored: “Issues in American Literature and Culture” and “Topics for Composition.” Lord needed them to send her a “short explanation to allay any BOG concerns regarding content” and a revised syllabus reflecting that explanation. “In most cases, the best strategy for this, we think,” she wrote, “is illustrating the difference between identity and identity politics, and showing how one can talk about historical facts without indoctrinating.”
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In a follow-up email, Lord indicated the college was guessing as to why certain courses were cut. “Please remember that we are all flying a little blind — since we don’t know what the original objection to the course was, we’re not sure what the remedy would be, necessarily,” she told a faculty member. “There is no guarantee that any of this will work, of course — we’re doing what we can to present the best possible chance for units to rescue some of their courses.”
Lord also apologized to the English-department representatives for the quick turnaround. “I know we’ve repeatedly asked for input and updates with very short deadlines,” Lord wrote, “and I’m truly sorry to do this again.”
She wasn’t alone in her exasperation with the timing. At a November meeting of the Faculty Senate, a faculty member complained that they’d had just two days to justify why their general-education courses should retain that designation. Joseph Glover, the provost, said he sympathized. “But I will tell you that you had a lot more time than my staff had,” Glover said. “I have staff who literally spent 12 hours on Saturday night working on this because we had been given extremely short deadlines from the Board of Governors to deal with.” (Through a university spokesman, Glover declined an interview request.)
The faculty member asked Glover why the process had been so expedited. “The Board of Governors operates under its own timeline, and we do our best to comply,” Glover replied, emphasizing that he wasn’t blaming the board. “They’re trying to get something done. We’re all trying to get something done.”
In the end, about three-quarters of the University of Florida’s courses were axed from the general-education curriculum. About two-thirds were removed at the request of the college offering the course, not by university or state officials, Glover said at the Faculty Senate meeting. On the cutting-room floor are all sorts of courses — “Greek Sculpture,” “Exploration of Stars and Galaxies,” “History of Mathematics.” Some deal with topics like race and gender, such as “Theories of Black America” and “Global Gender Issues.”
Guidance from the state helped shape what courses universities put forward. But who, exactly, was offering that guidance?
The education department’s Office of Articulation may have played a role. At FIU, Doherty-Restrepo’s spreadsheet includes references to “OA/BOG Staff feedback.” (Nelson, with whom Doherty-Restrepo corresponded, works for the academic- and student-affairs unit at the university system, which is contained in the Board of Governors’ office.) In May, Nelson told Snider, the UWF vice provost, in an email that they were “still working with the Office of Articulation on the review of your [course] descriptions.” Materials for public meetings at FIU, UWF, and Florida Atlantic University suggest Office of Articulation feedback was routed through university system staffers. (A spokesperson did not respond to a request to interview Shannon Mercer, the executive director of articulation.)
Harry Haysom for The Chronicle
Rodrigues in an interview said that university-system staff was in touch with education-department staffers though he did not know which specific office. He noted that because SB 266 applies to both public universities, overseen by the university system, and to public colleges, overseen by the education department, those two entities needed to communicate. Overall, he described the process as university-led. The institutions prepared their course lists, and “our office here at the Board of Governors was available if they had questions,” he said. “All of the universities took advantage of the offer to say, ‘Here are the things we are looking at. Do you see any concerns?’”
He said system staff would then review course titles and descriptions and, if necessary, look at syllabi and on occasion textbooks. If it was determined a course did seem to conflict with SB 266, Rodrigues said, each university chose what to do next. They could remove the course from the gen-ed curriculum, bring it into compliance, or make the case for inclusion. “That was up to each institution to make that decision for themselves,” he said.
At Florida Atlantic, internal committees, in addition to the faculty senate, recommended a revised list of general-education courses. After trustees approved their list, the university received feedback from the Office of Articulation “via the BOG staff,” prompting the university’s “academic leadership team” to make “corresponding modifications,” according to FAU board-meeting materials. The faculty senate’s steering committee held an emergency meeting to approve the revisions, which FAU trustees then also approved in late August.
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Between the first round of approval and the second, more than 20 courses were weeded out, including a research-intensive course called “RI: Disability and Society,” an honors anthropology course on magic, witchcraft, and religion, and a sociology course called “Social Problems.”
At Florida International, department chairs and certain faculty members began reviewing their general-education offerings for compliance after the Office of Articulation identified courses that may not be approved in their current form, FIU’s provost, Elizabeth Béjar, told professors at a Faculty Senate meeting.
This led to “a game of ping-pong between department heads, professors, and the administration where course descriptions and course titles were edited and certain terms were kicked out over months of meetings, phone calls, spreadsheets, and emails,” the Miami Herald previously reported.
An early July email, obtained by The Chronicle, which one chair sent to his department offers a window into the deference shown to the state’s judgment. A. Douglas Kincaid, who chairs FIU’s department of global and sociocultural studies, explained that nine courses currently offered by the unit as part of gen ed had been identified as “problematic.” The university’s administration thought that five of those courses were modifiable, Kincaid wrote. “For the other four, they suggested removal.”
And for two of those four courses in particular, “our administration (provost and dean) has made clear that they do not think that either of these is a battle worth fighting.” Both of those courses — “Sociology of Gender” and “Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity” — were removed. (Kincaid did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment.)
In an email, an FIU spokesperson said that the university worked “with appropriate academic discipline leads” to review courses, and that “in some cases where documenting alignment” with state statute “proved more difficult, we recommended an appropriate course of action and provided faculty time to determine” if they wanted to revise a course or remove it from general education.
Kincaid’s department, like others at FIU, did submit revisions to courses based on the passed-along feedback, in an attempt to preserve what it could. In September, Doherty-Restrepo gave Kincaid an update on five courses he and his unit had been hoping to keep in general education, according to an email obtained by The Chronicle. One of them, “World Regional Geography,” made it through. For another, “Gaining Global Perspectives,” Doherty-Restrepo wrote that she “just spoke with the BOG staff, and we have one more opportunity to revise the course description and learning outcomes.” But the other three courses were recommended for removal. “I’m sorry,” she wrote, “I wish I had better news,” adding a frowny-face emoji. (In the end “Gaining Global Perspectives” was also removed.)
Nothing is being hidden because they are being removed from the gen ed,” Jessell said. “In fact, some could argue the large number of gen- ed courses has made it a little bit more complicated for students to progress.
Ultimately, at least seven courses that FIU’s Faculty Senate wanted to remain in general education were pruned. These episodes demonstrate what critical faculty members characterize as the pernicious role of the state in this process. They argue that the law was being interpreted in unspecified ways by undefined decision makers and then those interpretations were communicated behind closed doors. There’s been “a lack of clarity,” including an absence of written guidelines, regarding how SB 266 is being applied, Noël Christopher Barengo, chair of FIU’s Faculty Senate, said in an interview. (Barengo, as a member of FIU’s Board of Trustees, is also named as a defendant in the January lawsuit.)
Moreover, faculty members say their fundamental authority to set curriculum has been superseded. What goes into their university’s general-education selections “should be decided by faculty — educators — and not state bureaucrats who are politically motivated,” Matthew Marr, an associate professor of sociology in the department of global and sociocultural studies, said in an interview.
Marr, who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging SB 266, also thinks removing courses from gen ed disincentivizes students to enroll in those courses. “Sure, they can still take them,” he said, “but every student is micromanaged to graduate as soon as possible, and they’re really discouraged from taking any classes that don’t meet any kind of requirements.”
In meetings, FIU’s leaders have defended the process, including the level of faculty involvement in it. While the governing-board regulation that implements SB 266 “does not mention faculty, we felt it was critically important that the faculty were aware,” Béjar, the provost, said at a September Faculty Senate meeting. In Florida, general education has long been “a shared process” with the state, she also said.
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Rogelio Tovar, the chair of FIU’s Board of Trustees, cautioned at a September board meeting that “we have to be careful when we question shared governance when we don’t agree.” Every faculty member’s input “is valued, it’s considered, but we won’t always agree,” he said. (Tovar is also named as a defendant in the January lawsuit in his official capacity.) At that same meeting, Kenneth A. Jessell, the university president, said he thinks it’s “a little bit unfair” to say that removing courses from general education makes them more difficult for students to find.
“Nothing is being hidden because they are being removed from the gen ed,” Jessell said. “In fact, some could argue the large number of gen-ed courses has made it a little bit more complicated for students to progress.”
Rodrigues, the system chancellor, rejected criticism that faculty involvement has been limited. “In all of this, the faculty are front and center of it. They’re the ones who prepared the course and submitted it. They’re the ones who the provost and the dean and the chair are communicating with, and they’re the ones that ultimately decide how it should be handled,” he said. “All we’re doing is identifying if it appears to conflict with the state statute.”
Asked if university system staff developed definitions for concepts barred by SB 266, such as “identity politics,” Rodrigues said that “is a topic for a future conversation” with “people beyond me.”
In an email, Edwards, the university system’s spokesperson, said that “the common understanding of identity politics is that it combines a focus on race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and any other number of identitarian categories with a politics of victimization. The cornerstone of the Identitarian worldview is the claim that America, contrary to its egalitarian professions of faith, is at its core a supremacist regime that oppresses certain groups.”
Asked to provide a definition of what it means to “distort significant historical events,” Edwards replied that the statutory language “speaks for itself.”
So far, no other state has attempted a general-education overhaul like Florida’s. But it could be in the offing. “It’s not uncommon to see other states — if they like what we’ve done — to then go down that path for themselves,” said Rodrigues, who added that “in terms of a coordination between states on this, that’s not happening.”
To proponents of SB 266, there’s a lot to like. In the Chronicle Review, Scott Yenor, a political-science professor at Boise State University, and Mark Bauerlein, an emeritus professor of English at Emory University and a trustee at New College of Florida, argue that while it’s true the state of Florida is “making decisions customarily handled by professors,” scholars had let general education “decay into an elective mess.” They also contend that professors are unlikely to police themselves, because a sprawling general-education curriculum allows them to offer courses on “pet themes” and bolster their departments’ enrollments.
Critics, though, say SB 266 carries adverse effects beyond the harm to academic freedom and faculty autonomy. In their lawsuit, the six professors — who work at the University of Florida, Florida State University, and Florida International University — argue that it “puts entire departments’ financial viability at risk, imposes administrative and psychological burdens on professors … and robs students of the opportunity to take these courses while also progressing toward their degrees in other fields of study.”
I’m someone that spends all my time thinking about what the canon means. So for some politician or some businessman to come in and say that they know is just really strange.
One of the plaintiffs said she hadn’t even been aware that her courses were being reviewed until her chair called her to a meeting in October. Robin Truth Goodman, a professor of English at Florida State University, said she wasn’t asked for syllabi or course materials for either of the courses being cut — “Third World Cinema” and “Perspectives on the Short Story” — and didn’t think her department chair had been, either. He “seemed pretty surprised and pained by” the news, she said. (The chair, Andrew Epstein, did not respond to emails requesting comment.)
Goodman is also a faculty senator and the president of Florida State’s chapter of the United Faculty of Florida statewide union. But she said she hadn’t heard about the general-education review process in either of those capacities; it was only through Epstein’s request to discuss her own courses that she learned the process was underway.
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The “Third World Cinema” course’s title, Goodman said, would seem unrelated to the Western canon, as SB 266 requires for humanities general-education courses, making it “unsurvivable.” But Epstein told her he thought he could make a case for the short-story course by changing its title from “Perspectives on” to “Introduction to the Short Story,” “which to me just means they didn’t like the idea of difference in perspective,” Goodman said.
In mid-December, she said, she learned that the course will likely be preserved as a general-education offering after all. It was on the list to be approved at Thursday’s Board of Governors meeting. Along with the name change, and a new clause in its description noting that the course includes selections from the Western canon, the short-story course will be moved from the 3000 level to the 2000 level, making it more accessible to freshmen and sophomores. Most of the other courses in question in Florida State’s English department met a different fate, though: Fourteen of the 17 general-education courses the department offered no longer qualify as such, according to the lawsuit.
Still, Goodman said, how either of her courses landed in the crosshairs of the state isn’t clear to her. “I’m someone that spends all my time thinking about what the canon means. So for some politician or some businessman to come in and say that they know is just really strange.”
In an interview, Rodrigues, speaking generally and not about Goodman in particular, rejected the idea that, as the academic experts, professors are the ones who should have been interpreting SB 266, along with the assertion that it’s improper for anyone other than the faculty to determine what goes into the general-education curriculum.
“If there was confidence in what the faculty were doing — in the status quo,” the chancellor said, “the statute itself would have never been created and passed.”
EmmaPettit is a senior reporter at The Chronicle who covers the ways people within higher ed work and live — whether strange, funny, harmful, or hopeful. She’s also interested in political interference on campus, as well as overlooked crevices of academe, such as a scrappy puppetry program at an R1 university and a charmed football team at a Kansas community college. Follow her on Twitter at @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.
Megan Zahneis, a senior reporter for The Chronicle, writes about faculty and the academic workplace. Follow her on Twitter @meganzahneis, or email her at megan.zahneis@chronicle.com.