Florida has a problem of preemptive censorship.
“Students can no longer take sociology to fulfill their core course requirements, Florida’s state university system ruled on Wednesday.”
-New York Times, January 28, 2024
At first, I thought I misread the opening sentence of this news article, but unfortunately not. Can the leaders of an American state really be so shortsighted to ban an entire branch of the social sciences? It seems inconceivable that the vast discipline developed from the ideas of intellectual giants like Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Karl Mannheim, George Herbert Mead, and Charles Cooley could be taken out of a core curriculum in a modern university. Yet again, Florida has acted preemptively to muzzle ideas that are deemed too dangerous for students.
At its core, Sociology is the study of people in groups. No one can credibly declare its irrelevance. And the irony here is obvious; Florida’s sad-sack governor is a good example of someone who might have received help from the study of how we connect with others. Even with his limited horizons, the simple-minded charge that the whole of sociology is “woke” is hopelessly shallow and misplaced.
For good reasons, most Americans take offense to the politicization of education. Ideas about human groups fire the imagination and renew the culture. The banning of an introductory course in sociology is especially pitiful because its key ideas are foundational for a number of fields. My own discipline of Communication Studies has shamelessly borrowed some of its best ideas from the fertile minds of 19th Century sociologists. Many of us are still evangelists for the imaginative work of Irving Goffman, Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Todd Gitlin, David Reisman, and others. The window of sociology lets us see how—not if—we are the products of our affiliations, through family, marriage, and the myriad groups and organizations that shape our world. Scores of professional applications are in debt to the sociological perspective, among them: social work, ministerial training, urban planning, social services, prisons and policing, education, and the training of mental health professionals.
Sociology is the study of people in groups. No one can credibly declare its irrelevance.
Losing the option of an Introduction to Sociology course deprives students of an eye-opening glimpse of its intriguing interconnections. And first courses are often key in helping new students decide on their majors. Given this tight weave of related subjects, I hope that higher education agencies will rethink accrediting schools who have removed sociology from the core curriculum.
Florida clearly has a problem with preemptive censorship. We already know that climate change curricula are mostly off the table in the grade school curriculum, as are fair-minded and contemporary approaches to gender, identity, and sex. Books are being locked down for promoting “unhealthy” choices. An original and modest AP course in African American Studies for high schoolers was axed as inappropriate. And diversity, equity and inclusion programs have been banned in state universities. In addition, there was also a very public decapitation of a state liberal arts institution in Sarasota. The Governor and his people controlling the University system thought that New College was “too liberal,” setting off terminations, resignations, and a wave of uncertainty for its students.
At this rate Donald Duck will soon have to be fully clothed if he shows up in the Magic Kingdom. Geologists at the Kennedy Space Center will have to pretend that the solar system is just six thousand years old. And we can imagine a false need to stow away official art considered too degenerate for public display.
Florida is not alone in attempts to purge universities of their academic independence. But it has a penchant for censorship that keeps compounding. Coastal states like Connecticut, New York and New Jersey have begun units on climate change in the schools. By contrast, Florida allows the use of classroom videos dismissing climate concerns. Somehow the state’s public utilities will have to prevaricate even faster to keep up the official delusion that water in the streets of Dade County is coming from broken pipes. Whatever political leaders in Tallahassee may wish, most homes in Florida are eventually going to have more of an ocean view than they bargained for.
Not being prepared to live in this world has consequences. Florida and its students are paying the price for a government that is not prepared to deal with the complex world around them. Parents may need to take a second look at whether they want to have their children left in the dark on issues vital to their interests.
We do not yet know how many of these hate laws will withstand court scrutiny. But the very thought should send shudders down the spines of those familiar with the attempts of German Fascists to purify their society of “decadent” art and “alien” ideas. Most of the homegrown pinheads proposing this censorship may have never learned that the United States and the West did the world a favor by sheltering a important German academics fleeing to safety from authoritarians. Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik and Herbert Marcuse are only a few intellectuals that found their way to the United States. They fled the Nazi’s thought police who found their teaching and religious beliefs alien to the culture. All focused their scholarship on culture and society, making advances in American explorations of philosophy, psychology, sociology and cultural analysis. Indeed, Adorno and Frenkel-Brunswik’s explorations of “The Authoritarian Personality” remains relevant in this era of populist-fascist dictatorships. What they described as theory we now understand as fact.
