John White is a senior faculty fellow in the Teaching, Learning & Curriculum department and has taught at UNF since 2008. He also served on the UNF Board of Trustees and on the university’s presidential transition team when Moez Limayem first took office.
I’m writing to our UNF community to explain why I have been fighting back attempts at state-mandated censorship of university course materials and to provide critical contexts about what has been taking place.
Over the summer, the Florida Board of Education (FL DOE) and the Board of Governors (BOG)—the political appointees who oversee the state university system—demanded that administrators in our university-based teacher education programs send to the state all of the course descriptors and course objectives for teacher education courses. They then demanded that UNF administrators expunge from those materials the words “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and “culture” and any derivatives of those words, regardless of the context in which those terms were being used. To force compliance with their demands, the BOG staff told our administrators that it would approve of our courses only when our course materials met their “new rules” (this happened despite the fact that all of our teacher education courses had already been approved via existing state rules). The state’s timeline for meeting this demand prompted university administrators at UNF to circumvent the normal protocols required for such course changes, thereby eliminating faculty input into or debate about these controversial changes. …