Michelle Goldberg compares Florida governor and putative Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis’ flurry of laws to prove that he is the leader of the anti-wokies in education with Hungarian president Victor Orban.
Many on the American right admire the way Orban uses the power of the state against cultural liberalism, but few are imitating him as faithfully as the Florida governor and likely Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. Last week, one of DeSantis’s legislative allies filed House Bill 999, which would, as The Tampa Bay Times reported, turn many of DeSantis’s “wide-ranging ideas on higher education into law.” Even by DeSantis’s standards, it is a shocking piece of legislation that takes a sledgehammer to academic freedom.
It’s a flawed analogy for a few reasons. First, Hungary does not have our Constitution. Second, Orban is the president of Hungary, whereas DeSantis is only the governor of a state. Third, our judiciary has already demonstrated its unwillingness to suffer his unconstitutional laws, which District Judge Mark Walker called “positively dystopian.” So naturally, DeSantis doubled down with House Bill 999, which FIRE characterizes as “worse.”
House Bill 999 is laden with unconstitutional provisions hostile to freedom of expression and academic freedom. If passed, it would represent another retreat from the open exchange of ideas that Florida’s leaders embraced just four years ago. Back in 2019, Florida lawmakers understood that faculty and students discussing and debating ideas at odds with majoritarian public opinion is a necessary component of a liberal arts education. Now, they will consider passing into law still more restrictions on what ideas faculty and students may explore on campus.
Assuming, arguendo, that FIRE is right, and that I am right in agreeing with FIRE, that this law is both horrendous as laws go for its incoherence, poor drafting, meaningless rhetoric and absurdly unconstitutional restrictions, not to mention the fact that if DeSantis was able to pull this off, consider what that would mean when the other side pulled off the same sort of academic butchery but as to conservative views because that’s how double-edged swords work, what then?
But perhaps the most vague restriction in HB 999 is its prohibition on the inclusion of “unproven, theoretical, or exploratory content” in general education courses. A broad range of academic content — including quite literally all scientific theories — is contested and theoretical. State officials would have unfettered discretion to determine which views are “theoretical” and banned from general education courses. A bill so vague that it allows officials the discretion to declare that professors cannot discuss new theories and ideas in a particular public university class should be rejected, flat out.
In case the problem here still eludes you, “unproven, theoretical, or exploratory content” pretty much covers nearly the entirety of what higher education exists to consider and teach, and it covers the entire spectrum of academic thought rather than merely the “woke” thought of critical theory or intersectionality. Evolution is a theory too, you know. Want to outlaw it?
For the reasons explained here regularly, laws are made of words. Words are squishy, and often fail to capture what it is that a law is trying to accomplish, often suffering from overbreadth and/or vagueness, putting it into the hands of the folks wielding the bludgeon to decide what ideas are acceptable and what are not. It’s similar to those who desperately want to outlaw hate speech, provided they get to decide what speech is bad.
That DeSantis and his cohorts keep coming up with bad and unconstitutional law doesn’t require each to be parsed ad nauseam. These laws will not survive constitutional scrutiny, as well they shouldn’t and as you, if you thought it through, would want from the courts. Bad laws are bad, whether they provide the outcome you favor or abhor. These are bad law.
If students choose to major in gender studies, what business is that of yours? If it’s your kid, then deal with it at home, but not by shutting down the department. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems in education that need to be confronted, whether its indoctrination of students to racist or hateful ideology or promotion of false history that causes them to hate their nation.
If laws are not, and never will be, the solution to a problem that has arisen from academic capture of higher education by an ideologically bound cadre of professors and administrators, what lawful and constitutional means is there to shift education away from radical left extremes to accommodate “unproven, theoretical, or exploratory content” that isn’t crafted to produce the woke flavor of anarcho-syndicalists? DeSantis’ bludgeon is unlawful, unconstitutional and fundamentally wrong. So what’s right?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply, within reason. Don’t test me.
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