Look, it’s Florida House Bill 999, a festering, inflamed pustule on the body politic of The Great State of Snowbirds, Twelve-Lane Highways, Murderous Wildlife, and Exception. It was introduced yesterday with great fanfare in The Sunshine Apparently Isn’t Always a Great Disinfectant State, and with a catchy title:
Technically that entire thing is the title. If they’re taking suggestions for shorter, more memorable alternatives, maybe they could go with the Florida Understands the Correct Knowledge Inculcation Necessary for Government to Massacre Education in the Sunshine State Act. You make the acronym. (Leave off Act.)
It’s all there in the title, but we should look at a few highlights in the FUCKINGMESS Act. (Oops I made the acronym for you.) Shall we? No, you first.
This part is a masterpiece of bigotry and incoherence. “[…] a curriculum that teaches identity politics, such as Critical Race Theory, or defines American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on,” &c.? These people want to tell other people what they can teach when they can’t even be relied on to construct a sentence that doesn’t collapse in a gentle warm breeze such as you might find on the shell-strewn beaches of Sanibel? But the bigotry somehow shines through like blazing, myeloma-encouraging sunshine through a thin, sticky coat of Hawaiian Tropic.
Instead, the bill goes on to say, gen ed courses should eschew “theoretical” or “exploratory” content in favor of “traditional, historically accurate, and high quality” coursework. (Again, make it make sense, these sentences! Make the adjectives appropriate to the nouns!) Why? How else are we going to “preserve the constitutional republic”? I mean really, how else? (Also, fuck democracy, we’re not a democracy, someone else can brainwash the kids to preserve that.)
I think everybody knows that the only antidote to the crap being peddled by the Rootless Cosmopolitan Globalist Cultural Marxist instructors raking in almost nothing to teach the Children Who Are the Future of Florida (no acronym there) is a burning, puts-hair-on-your-chest Tito’s Vodka (or what’s Sammy Hagar’s tequila called–Cabo Wabo? Don’t make me look it up)-like shot of Entrepreneurial Vision, though good luck getting any of them to pronounce that first word correctly, not that I can half the time either. Trot out some Exceptional Individuals; they will Highlight the Possibilities. And for God’s sake don’t interact with experts from government, politics, policy, and journalism on a frequent basis or any-other-level-of-recurrence basis. No experts, please, people. What are universities for, manufacturing expertise? What are we, a goddamn democracy?
As John Dewey, Thorsten Veblen, James Cattell, and other early proponents of shoring up faculty governance at institutions of higher education argued, these institutions ought to be run like democracies. Cattell came right out and said it 110 years ago: “The university should be a democracy of scholars serving the larger democracy of which it is part” [sic, it’s a constitutional republic, you dumb bunny]. But as Ron DeSantis, sponsoring representative Alex Andrade, Head Architect of Motivelessly Malign Education Reform (ooh! Tom DeLay will be jealous if that catches on, unless he’s dead) Christopher Rufo, and all of the others skipping gaily down this path that Betsy DeVos so boldly blazed would respond, Make us. That is, faculty governance might be for democracies, but hiring is for the Captains of Industry (or junk bonds, whatever) populating boards these days (and in Veblen’s time, when he called them Captains of Erudition). The bill (as the two-page title hints) is full of exciting opportunities for hiring and don’t let’s forget firing to be taken out of the hands of the people who are qualified to judge scholarship and teaching in their disciplines and put into the meaty mitts of the Captains. After all, if we want to smother Woke in its sleep, keeping it from saying Gay or Actually it’s really hate, not heritage, we have to run these places like the tight ships that we know all entrepreneurial enterprises run by the exceptional individuals to be, and cut out the middlemen, unless they’re deans.
So anyway, it was nice while it lasted. American higher ed, American democracy, America, all that. I rewatched the original Rollerball the other night (which holds up as an impossible combination of awesome and awful, by the way), and in its future, America is gone, corporations have divvied up the world and are now running everything and everyone. There’s a part of the film where James Caan gets made fun of by a teammate for wanting to read a book for himself, rather than getting one of the librarians who aren’t really librarians to summarize it for him; he finds out they can’t let him have what he wants because it’s classified but also because the books have all been digitized and are in Geneva on a supercomputer the size of a house that would now fit on your wrist, except it turns out a bunch of them–and so, much of the world’s knowledge–have been lost. It seems it’s not in the interest of the corporations that run the world to have people know things or think about how things are organized and who’s in charge of them and whether any of it should change. No exploratory content for them, thank you very much.
Samuel Cohen 