Textbook Madness in Florida

Last week in my Inside Higher Ed column, I wrote about a number of different recent events in higher education that I thought were “nuts,” things so beyond what we should find acceptable in a free society with independent educational institutions that we have to be willing to pause and say how bonkers these things are.

One of those things is some goings-on in Florida, which I don’t even quite wholly understand, where a textbook for Introduction to Sociology courses has somehow become “state-approved.”

The notion that government officials now have the power to pre-approve texts for a university course at a public institution is the kind of assault on academic freedom we might’ve thought beyond imagining even a few years ago, and yet here it is, happening.

I couldn’t cover the full story in a short column, but fortunately, Victor Ray at his Group Threat newsletter (co-written with Heba Gowayed), published a two-part interview with Florida International University sociologist Zachary Levenson unpacking what went on here. They’ve graciously let us republish the full interview here.

Victor Ray is the F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Iowa and Vice-President of the American Sociological Association. His first book, On Critical Race Theory: Why it Matters & Why You Should Care, was published by Random House.

Victor: I want to start with the big picture. Can you take a minute to explain what’s happening and how Florida got to the point where the Introduction to Sociology textbook that course instructors are supposed to use is state-sponsored and state-approved?

Zachary Levenson: Sure, so let me give a broad overview, and I’ll try to do it through some of the legislation passed, without getting too into the weeds. I should mention I’m, of course, not only not an expert on this, on the legislative side, but I just came to Florida: this is my third year teaching here. I had been teaching for 5 years in North Carolina at UNC Greensboro, then spent a year in Texas, and finally moved here. So, I’ve seen different sorts of censorious regimes around the teaching of race and sociology more broadly.

I arrived in Florida at a very strange moment. My first semester teaching was immediately after SB266 went into effect. SB266 is a law that includes quite a few things, some of which have been struck down. This was part of the moral panic that began in 2019 around critical race theory and the state campaign to purge race, gender, and other forms of sociological thinking and topics from the curricula.

The law itself is very oddly and very particularly phrased. First, it prohibits teaching identity politics without defining what it means. It doesn’t give any content to that concept. It has tended to be interpreted overly broadly, and deliberately so, because university administrations are terrified of threats to their accreditation, threats to withdraw state and federal funding, which are written into the bill. So, you cannot teach identity politics, whatever that might mean.

In practice, my chair received a message from the provost asking about an event that I organized that included 3 sociologists, one from the Anglophone Caribbean, one from South Africa, and Michael Burawoy, because it had the word “Black” in the title. Black was interpreted as…I don’t know if they were drawing on the identity politics part of the law, or on the part I’ll talk about next.

A second component, and this is probably the most widely cited, is often said to prohibit the teaching of systemic or structural racism. In the classroom, the law prohibits the teaching of systemic racism as inherent in the United States. So, it’s not prohibiting teaching about systemic racism. It’s prohibiting the teaching of systemic racism as an American phenomenon and as inherent in the United States. It’s unclear what exactly that means in practice, and it has not been adjudicated. I’m sure over the years this will go to court, and we’ll find out, but for now, the consequence is that these laws are being interpreted too broadly to prohibit teaching about race and gender.

The third component is the promotion of Western civilization and specifically the teaching of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Why would I teach the Declaration of Independence in an introductory sociology course? It’s bizarre. On the question of Western civilization, every sociological theorist in our classical theory class – all the texts – are Western texts, whether we like it or not. So, it’s unclear what exactly that means.

The law went into effect over the summer of 2023. The reason this has taken so long, we’re now in 2026, is that once it’s been signed by the Governor, it trickles down to the Board of Governors, the body that rules the entire State University System.

Each university, as in most states, has a Board of Trustees. The Board of Governors sometimes gives directives to the Board of Trustees, who then give directives to campuses. In this case, what’s happening is that staffers for the Board of Governors, not the board members themselves, but staffers for the Board of Governors, will call provosts. I emphasize call. Written directives never come; they are always oral directives. They’re issued to provosts, and then provosts call, not put in writing, department chairs, and then department chairs call the individual instructors teaching a given class.

(As an aside: It’s unclear who all these people are. None of the BOG members has any background in sociology, nor are any of them even academics. Nor do any of them have backgrounds in education administration! These are political appointees and include politicians, real estate developers, lawyers, businesspeople, insurance executives, and even a roofing contractor, but no actual educators).

Over winter break, our department chair received a call from the provost instructing him to tell the faculty teaching Intro to Sociology that their current syllabi are not in compliance with state law. I should also mention that SB266 is rarely cited. So, these oral directives were given to faculty to not use their current syllabus over winter break. The rest of the department was not told until the Friday before we began teaching, that following Monday.

For obvious reasons, people were up in arms. The tenure-track professor who taught Intro to Sociology felt he could refuse to teach the class, and he did. The rest of the people teaching intro were adjuncts, which meant that they did not have the right of refusal. They are at-will employees, unlike the rest of us who are unionized.

Victor: Right. Wow, okay. So, I have a few clarifying questions. Are these directives given over the phone because no one wants to have a paper trail?

Zachary: Exactly right, and I can even be more specific here. Judge Walker forced a modification of the Stop Woke Act, restricting its scope. The State Board of Governors can remove classes from the general education curriculum. This would mean that a student who is not a sociology major but wants to take Intro to Sociology for general education credit can no longer receive credit for that class.

Victor: What legal ground are they claiming to directly say what can and can’t be taught in the classroom?

Zachary: I mean, if you want specific legal grounds, it is the text of SB266, so identity politics, systemic racism is inherent in the United States, Western civilization. Those three things.

Victor: So, as a non-lawyer, that, to me, appears to be a violation of what the judge has said about the Stop Woke Act.

Zachary: Absolutely. I mean, it’s precisely for that reason that all these directives remain in oral form. You will not find a written record. I’m a member of an informal statewide committee where we exchange information among sociology departments across the state. We did find an instance at Florida, or at the University of Florida, where a faculty member was expressly told in writing not to teach so-called “gender ideology.” But the problem is, to bring a lawsuit, as I understand it, and again, I’m not a legal expert here, but as I understand it, you would need two things. You’d need the directive not to teach something, or the directive to teach something, and you would need some kind of express harm, so a sanction or a threat to one’s employment status, or salary, or whatever else.

Administrators and staffers for the Board of Governors will never say this. But the reason to pursue the oral directive strategy is that it leaves no paper trail. It’s patently illegal. It does violate the prior ruling.

What’s interesting to see is the emergence of this strange intermediary camp. So, if we can imagine the Board of Governors and their staffers are trying to impose this on the campuses, faculty are resistant to having it imposed upon them, and then when we think about, say, provosts, various other administrators, department chairs, and even a couple of faculty who have been involved in the process. They hold this position to protect the faculty. If you were to talk to them, they would say, we’re just trying to make sure that faculty are not fired. We’re protecting their jobs.

And it’s true in the sense that if we comply, our jobs are presumably safe. But in complying, we’re accepting a state-created syllabus and violating professional ethics.

Victor: Well, if I’m teaching a race class and I don’t talk about structural racism, I’m already not doing my job. I have a paycheck. But the work I’m doing violates what I’ve signed up to do.

Zachary: That’s right, I mean, that’s how we’ve been framing it in the Faculty Senate. Just yesterday, there was a discussion here at FIU about the conflict between the law and the ASA’s code of professional ethics.

Victor: What impact is this having in the classroom, both for people teaching these new textbooks and for other professors? Are people self-censoring? Are they going beyond the textbook cuts, being even more cautious than the state has mandated?

Zachary: To use the legal term, it’s having a chilling effect. You know, people are generally terrified because it’s so haphazard. This isn’t about targeting the professors that you would expect them to target. It’s about the randomness; it’s the stochastic nature of this authoritarian project.

Every case (except for Charlie Kirk tweets) I can think of of a professor being suspended or threatened for so-called “race or gender ideology” somewhere in the state of Florida has come from a student in the class filming or complaining. They catch it, go directly to a member of the Board of Trustees or the Board of Governors, make it a pet case, and then that person is disciplined.

It’s not like there’s a formal statewide process in which they’re evaluating everyone’s teaching and deciding, you are the violators of the prohibition on teaching “gender ideology.” Rather, a student will file a complaint, and the Board of Governors or Board of Trustees will demand that the university president suspend the instructor.

It’s not happening much. But it just happened, and this is a wild case.

The Board of Governors decided, unilaterally, that no published textbook in the field of sociology could be used in compliance with the law for an Intro to Sociology class. None.

Victor: There’s not a single existing textbook on the market that could be used that would qualify under state law?

Zachary: Correct.

Victor: I’m sorry, that’s kind of funny. Like, the absurdity of not a single sociology textbook getting past the censors. I mean, it makes me kind of proud of our colleagues, but...

Zachary: So, they convened this textbook committee to devise an alternative. They found an open-source textbook and edited it, taking a 650-page textbook and boiling it down to roughly 250 pages. [The committee] had two representatives of the State University System – so research universities and four-year universities – and then two from the college system, or two-year colleges. Four sociology professors, and then, whoever the Board of Governors wants on that committee, including folks like this far-right Philadelphia Society ideologue, Jason Jewell, behind the whole thing, who’s worth looking up. Along with the President of Hillsdale College, he’s an activist in the Classical Christian Education movement, and he’s a regular speaker at the annual National Conservative conference. NatCons actively promote the so-called “traditional family,” and Jewell has argued for defunding public libraries because “there is pornography in the children’s section.” I mean, these are extreme ideologues we’re talking about, not people who are worried that sexuality is being covered in the classroom, and they’re just religious. This isn’t that.

Recently, Professor Philip Wiseley, who teaches at Florida SouthWestern State College, was removed because a student complained that he taught “gender ideology” in the classroom.

Victor: A quick point of clarification. Do they ever define “gender ideology”?

Zachary: No. Whenever it has been specified, it is that there are two genders. He wasn’t teaching a gender studies course; it’s not like he was even having them read some deep cut from Judith Butler. All he said was that “gender non-conforming” is – to quote him – “a term used to signify that a person does not see themselves fitting into a dichotomous conception of gender.” That’s it!

Victor: Okay, so, like, day one.

Zachary: Oh, just mentioning that it exists, not even going in-depth. That was deemed “gender ideology.” He was removed from the textbook committee and suspended from teaching. It’s stochastic violence to keep us all terrified.

Victor: Conservatives, for the longest time, have said that higher ed is liberal indoctrination and that they want a diversity of ideas on campuses. Is there any sort of conservative pushback against what’s happening here?

Zachary: Insofar as there is something we could call a conservative pushback, it’s tended to focus not on the framing you’ve just put forward. So, an authoritarian state imposing a textbook, or restricting the diversity of ideas, restricting the free market of ideas, we might say.

There have been MAGA folks who have come out against some of the appointees to boards of trustees and the Board of Governors for being overly zealous. So, some of these folks—we can find openly racist statements, we can find advocacy that women should not be educated.

When these are the people who are being appointed, there have been community mobilizations, especially in smaller towns. Even MAGA folks have opposed them, like, these people also are not going to help our cause. Why are you bringing in these ideologues? Note that this is quite different from concerns about state intervention and restricting the marketplace of ideas.

I think it boils down to two things. The most obvious kind of snarky answer is to say, free speech for me and not for thee, and that it’s politically motivated. But I actually think there’s something else going on, which is that the framing that I’ve been trying to put forward, a number of us have been trying to put forward around the state, which is that the government is actually imposing a curriculum and a textbook. This is a state-mandated restriction on faculty speech because teaching is not state speech, as we know from court rulings. It’s academic speech. But this framing is unfortunately not very prevalent. I think one of the challenges right now is to get that framing out there.

Victor: During the moral panic over critical race theory, I was writing my book, and I was speaking about the panic; a lot of faculty thought they were safe. “I don’t do race, so this doesn’t really concern me.” But you said that there are also other forms of sociological thinking that are under threat, and I wanted to hear a little bit about that. Now that censorship has spread, what other aspects of sociological thinking are under threat here?

Zachary: If you look at the letter of the law in SB266, there’s a broad prohibition on political advocacy in the classroom. I teach urban sociology, for example. I could imagine that, if I’m teaching about eviction or dispossession, or even if I’m teaching a quantitative analysis of the political economy of gentrification, it could be seen as advocacy. And so, one worry here is that they’re going to start broadening the net for who knows what’s next.

Their approach is what I like to call “Control-F politics.” They’re searching for critical race theory, as you might imagine. The word “trans.” It’s as stupid as if you were to put a space between “TR” and “ANS” in the word on your syllabus; they probably wouldn’t catch you. I mean, that’s the intellectual level of this stuff. They don’t know what they’re after.

The classes that they’ve gone after are bizarre. So, Introduction to Sociology, Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity (that one I get)… but Social Problems? I mean, can you imagine a sociology course that comes more out of the Cold War and the War on Poverty than Social Problems? But this is what they’re coming for. And they’ve come for an anthropology class that’s one of our most popular, called “Myth, Ritual, and the Supernatural.” And while they won’t state why, it’s presumably something about it being anti-Christian – you know, myth and ritual and supernatural.

But they’ve told us what they’re up to. The last State Education Commissioner has said that sociology is a left-wing project that needs to be stamped out.

These people are coming for the social sciences more broadly. And once they come for sociology, they’re going to come for anthropology. They’ve already started to come for history. Over the summer, they prohibited the use of history books to teach African and Latin American history and instead required that it be taught solely from primary sources.

But if you think about what history is, it’s writing about primary sources. So that second-order reflection was prohibited!

Victor: So, some folks are scared and saying the faculty should give them this, and they will stop. Other folks are organizing. Just what does the organizing look like?

Zachary: Organizing here is tough. As I mentioned, we are unionized, but I think there had been very little communication between departments or across departments in the state before this. That’s getting better now, but these are all informal committees where we’re just meeting on Zoom and trying to exchange information. So, broadly, I think it’s about, at this point, exchanging information and seeing what’s happening in other departments,

I can tell you, organizing is very uneven across the state.

Since Dr. Phillip Wiseley was removed from the textbook committee, people statewide are scared. So, what’s happening is that adjuncts, for example, are exclusively teaching intro in my department right now. Many of them are obviously complying because they’re at-will employees and could be fired on the spot. And if they’re ABD grad students or adjuncts who need the work, they’re not doing it for fun.

Representatives of the campus administration – not the Board of Governors – are all coming forward with the same line: there is no state-imposed textbook; you are incorrect; we did not tell you to use a textbook. Now, one, that’s not true. It was communicated to individual faculty that you need to use this textbook.

Two, let’s imagine it were not communicated. The line of argument is the following. We’re not telling you to teach it; we’re trying to protect you. So, what does “protection” mean in this case?

It means that if you teach any other textbook, you can be fired on the spot if you’re an at-will employee or an adjunct. And in the case that you are a tenure-track faculty, and therefore, a union member, it is unclear what would happen, because our collective bargaining agreement protects our speech in the classroom, including control over course material. The point is that our academic speech is protected by our collective bargaining agreement. And so, that’s yet another reason they can’t put this in writing. It would violate not only the law but also our collective bargaining agreement.

So, all this is to say there’s this denial that this is what’s happening. And this has been an uphill battle. When one of my colleagues made a brilliant presentation in the Faculty Senate advocating this framing – that this is a violation of academic freedom – others would say things like, “You said that they violated our academic freedom. I want to change that language. It is too intense and confrontational. I would like to change that language to limited our academic speech.”

Now, I don’t understand what the difference between “limited” and “violated” is here, but there’s this real fear among faculty, and they don’t want to poke the bear. A lot of departments seem terrified and think that if they cave on this, they’ll be left alone. Unfortunately, the bear is already fully awake.

In my department, we’ve reached common ground, and as we see it, there are a couple of options when we discuss resistance.

First, one option would be to say, all right, let’s remove sociology from the general education curriculum and continue teaching it the way we want to teach it. We’re not going to cave. But then the problem becomes one of essentially ratifying the course’s removal from the general education curriculum without a written directive to do so. It’s textbook anticipatory compliance. And in this case, it’s actually a textbook, right?

Victor: Right.

Zachary: I think the concept of anticipatory compliance is so useful here. When we think about what’s happening, the idea of complying before we have a written directive to do so has no legal basis. We have no written directive. Somebody called and said, “Do it.”

Well, okay, so can you please put it in writing?

They will not put it in writing. They will not specify sanctions. My department drafted a letter to the provost and asked for the following: please tell us what we cannot teach, what we must teach, and the sanction for noncompliance. And she wrote back and referred us to the Board of Governors regulations, which, ultimately, when you follow the trail, point back to SB266. What is the sanction? We were told there are no known sanctions other than that the university itself may be sanctioned. And they’re of course trying to protect the institution over individual faculty.

I should say, this isn’t my strategy. It’s really what folks have been organizing around statewide: to be very clear that we do not need to comply with oral directives. We demand written directives. Once we have these written directives, they are obviously in contradiction of Judge Walker’s rulings on the Stop Woke Act. Then we can proceed legally. But for now, people need to demand this in writing. Because in keeping it informal, it’s doing a few things. One, it keeps everything off the books, and faculty are being contacted individually rather than collectively. This is not being brought up at faculty meetings. There’s a kind of silence around this, and chairs are worried about being removed.

But we’re organizing around it by demanding written directives. Until that point, we don’t need to comply with anything. And if they want to fire someone, they can try it.

Victor: So, this is two questions, but what should folks outside of Florida know? And how do you think folks outside of Florida know, and how should they prepare for similar political movements?

Zachary: I think one of the most important things folks can do to prepare is to focus on framing. Because what’s going to happen, not that I know the future, but this stuff will be legislated piecemeal. Whether this is Indiana with its ideological balance law, Iowa, or Texas, all these states have different articulations of this. But when we think about it piecemeal, I think we focus on how we teach without using the phrase “identity politics.” Or how do we teach without arguing that racism is structural and inherent in the United States?

I would put all that stuff to the side for a second, and instead focus on the big picture, which is this: states are beginning to move from telling you what you can’t teach, to telling you what you must teach, all while denying that they’re doing that. But that’s exactly what a state-mandated textbook is. And this is the framing I think is important to get out there. This is, by definition, a government mandating the use of a textbook – even if they don’t put that mandate in writing, threatening to fire anyone who does not use that textbook and teaches a class otherwise.

This is what an authoritarian state does.

This is what was done in Pinochet’s Chile. We have countless examples of them coming for sociology. But I don’t think it’s particularly helpful here to say, this is like Pinochet, or that this is Nazism or Fascism. I think when we say that it’s authoritarian, all we’re saying here is that the government is mandating that disciplines in which legislators have no expertise be taught in a certain way because it is politically inconvenient for the truth to be told.

The idea that a government would restrict academics’ free teaching of an academic subject is bizarre.

Second, I think it’s important to show that the so-called ideological conformity does not actually exist. Having a disciplinary consensus around a topic is not the same as ideological conformity, and anyone who wants to teach it in any which way is welcome to do so.

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The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.