This is what politicizing higher education actually looks like in Florida | Opinion

What’s happening in Florida is not a good-faith dispute about “political advocacy” in the classroom. It is a deliberate effort to redefine what counts as legitimate knowledge in public universities.

We saw this clearly last week, when State University System Chancellor Ray Rodrigues and the Board of Governors removed sociology from the general education curriculum. Non-majors are now unlikely to have any exposure to sociology at all.

For most of its history, the leadership of Florida’s State University System was drawn from within academia. That changed in 2009, when the Board of Governors installed Frank Brogan, Gov. Jeb Bush’s lieutenant governor, as chancellor. Since then, the pattern has crystallized: positions of authority over public higher education are granted as favors to political loyalists. Last year, DeSantis’ own former lieutenant governor was installed as president of Florida International University — a campus that already had a president and was not in search of another.

This is not incidental. It is a project.

And it brings us to Ray Rodrigues, a former four-term legislator who now presumes to lecture sociologists about “political advocacy” in the classroom. His career has been defined by politics, which is precisely why his critique lands less as concern and more as projection.

Rodrigues became chancellor just as the so-called “Stop Woke Act” — a piece of legislation that sought to police how race, gender and inequality are taught — became law and oversaw its incorporation into the university system’s policy. A federal judge blocked key provisions, warning that the law amounted to an attempt to construct a state-sanctioned orthodoxy — a “Ministry of Truth,” as U.S. District Judge Mark Walker put it at the time, determining which ideas are permissible and which are not.

That should have ended the conversation.

Instead, Rodrigues is now turning his attention to the American Sociological Association, seizing on the theme of its annual conference — “Disrupting the Status Quo” — as evidence of creeping “ideological capture.” The charge is almost comically thin. “Disrupting the Status Quo” is not a partisan rallying cry; it is the basic condition of scholarship. If that is disqualifying, then we are no longer talking about reforming higher education. We are talking about hollowing it out.

The backlash from sociologists — and from faculty more broadly — did not emerge in a vacuum. It was a response to a coordinated attempt by political appointees like Rodrigues to restrict entire domains of knowledge. Race. Gender. Inequality. Not marginal topics, but central questions in the social sciences. All existing sociology textbooks have been flagged as “noncompliant.” In their place, the Department of Education “curated” its own, convening a workgroup to censor an existing open-access textbook, reducing it to a third of its original length.

This is not oversight or reform. The state is now attempting to dictate content to professors.

The people forcing these changes are not neutral arbiters concerned with balance. They are political actors engaged in a campaign to control formerly independent institutions. They accuse faculty of bias while advancing policies that explicitly narrow the range of acceptable viewpoints, enforcing orthodoxy.

Their goal is not to eliminate politics from the classroom — an impossible task — but to ensure that only one kind of politics remains: one that is aligned with the priorities of the current state government, insulated from critique, and enforced through administrative power.

So when Rodrigues and his allies lament “political advocacy” in academia, we should understand what they are actually saying. The problem is not that politics has entered the university. The problem is that political viewpoints beyond their own continue to exist, and they must therefore be muzzled by the state.

That is the real politicization of higher education in Florida.

And if it succeeds, it will not stop at sociology. It already has begun to move into history, psychology and beyond — to any field that asks uncomfortable questions or produces inconvenient knowledge.

The issue is not whether universities are political. The issue is whether they will remain places where ideas can be freely contested — or become institutions where partisan agreement must be coerced when it can’t be earned.

Zachary Levenson is an associate professor of sociology at Florida International University.