Florida Board of Governors Must Avoid Screening Course Content for Wrongthink on Israel

The Board of Governors must address anti-Semitism without transforming institutions into dystopian censorship regimes.

In a misguided attempt to protect students from anti-Semitism on their campuses, the Florida Board of Governors recently ordered all of its institutions to screen the content of their courses for antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias.

As first reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education, on August 2, Emily Sikes, the State University System of Florida’s interim vice chancellor for academic and student affairs, sent a memo to the leaders of the system’s 12 public universities instructing them to screen their course offerings, including faculty syllabi, textbooks, and test banks, for evidence of “antisemitism or anti-Israel bias” by August 16. 

When university presidents flagged the feasibility of the search on such a short deadline, Chancellor Ray Rodrigues sent a follow up email instructing them to perform a keyword search for the words “Israel, Israeli, Palestine, Palestinian, Middle East, Zionism, Zionist, Judaism, Jewish, and Jews” and to provide the Board of Governors the list of courses that use any of those terms in their syllabi as well as a list of “their related instructional materials.” 

According to the email (embedded in the CHE report), the initial keyword search will identify the courses that need to be reviewed for bias by the conclusion of the Fall Semester. The Chancellor concludes, “[t]his review should flag all instances of either antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias identified and report that information to my office.” 

While Heterodox Academy (HxA) shares the Board of Governors’ commitment to creating academic environments free of discrimination, the directive poses a significant threat to academic freedom because it seeks to label certain viewpoints as anti-Semitic or biased in a naked attempt to stigmatize those views and exclude them from classrooms. 

To be clear, institutions of higher education have a legal and moral obligation to foster an environment free of discrimination, including anti-Semitic discrimination. With emotions running high on campus and beyond surrounding the conflict in the Middle East and growing examples of Jewish students being harassed by their peers, it’s only natural for university leaders to take action. After all, for institutions of higher education to fulfill their function of providing educational opportunities for all, their leaders must ensure that all their students have a learning environment conducive to learning. 

In addition to this responsibility, public colleges and universities are also subject to nearly 65 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence on the First Amendment and academic freedom. The Court’s long history of protecting academic freedom began in 1957, when the Court warned that, “[s]cholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust.” Ten years later, the Court elaborated on this, declaring that academic freedom “is a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.” 

To meet these dual obligations, the Board of Governors must address anti-Semitism on campus without practices that transform the institutions into dystopian censorship regimes. However, its current plan is shortsighted and just won’t cut it. Does the Board of Governors really think that students will be able to understand anti-Semitism and its origins if they can’t study primary documents that make anti-Semitic arguments? And how are students to critique those arguments if they can’t even read them?

Moreover, censorship has never been, and will never be, an effective tool to address bigotry because it doesn’t even seek to change hearts and minds. Instead, futile attempts to shield students from ideas, adds to their allure. And because it's also unconstitutional, it's ultimately counterproductive. 

Fortunately, the constitutional prohibition on banning ideas from the classroom doesn’t leave campus leaders powerless to address anti-Semitism on their campuses. There are other approaches to combating anti-Semitism, and other forms of bigotry, that lean on the universities’ unique position as a place of debate and discussion that are far more promising.

To begin with, institutions could train faculty and students alike about classroom norms that encourage constructive disagreement. Encouraging a culture of open inquiry and viewpoint diversity creates an environment of respect and ensures that students and faculty of all perspectives can be heard. Trainings should include skills-based offerings that teach faculty and students how to constructively engage views they find offensive. All of these trainings should start at the point of hire, or in the case of students, matriculation, and they should be ongoing.

Administrators should create forums for more productive and structured exploration of the conflict.

Next, those responsible for making curricular decisions can always evaluate their offerings with an eye towards adding missing perspectives. Reasonable minds can differ on the proper balance of shared governance and how much oversight a Board of Governor’s should have over curricular decisions, but to some extent that question is besides the point, because no one should be trying to purge relevant ideas from classrooms. Assuming that the Board of Governors does have some curricular oversight authority, while it must not review course content in an attempt to filter out “wrongthink,” a more appropriate exercise of that authority would be to review what perspectives and information students are encountering on any topic so that it could supplement its offerings with additional courses or programming. 

Regardless of who is conducting course reviews, any review of course offerings should be with the aim of improving the diversity of ideas students could encounter and should avoid micromanaging individual classrooms. There is nothing wrong with a professor offering a course examining the Palestinian view of the Middle East, or alternatively the Israeli perspective. Not every perspective on a topic needs to be provided in every course. But the Board of Governors has a legitimate interest in ensuring that students also have opportunities somewhere in the overall body of course offerings to explore alternative views.

To avoid the chilling effect of the screening directive, the Board of Governors should be crystal clear that no point of view on the conflict of the Middle East will be off limits. It should also clarify unequivocally that it will not insist on a particular balance of how competing ideas are shared in particular classrooms. 

Contentious issues or views that some find objectionable must not be ‘screened out’ of the classroom. Such views should be engaged constructively in relevant courses. This is true of curricular decisions regarding courses that discuss the Middle East, just as it is true with teachings on other hotly contested issues. 

If Florida’s State University system is to remain a first class education system, it must pursue constitutionally sound methods of fostering a discrimination-free educational environment and must abandon the current misguided, unconstitutional approach. Luckily, there are many constitutional and effective tools available.