Extinction Event: Political Involvement in General Education Curriculum in Florida and in General

One key role placed by scholarly societies is to monitor the health of a field on a local, national and international level. Knowing what the state of affairs is, is a prelude to formulating field-wide programs or targeted interventions aimed at addressing local or systemic problems. While I will not stress it here, a joy-rich upside of keeping up with a discipline from a society perspective is that society leaders learn not just about problems but also about successes and victories worth celebrating and hopefully emulating. But here my focus, unfortunately, is on the problems and not the many accomplishments one might consider. Building on my previous post, here I am again considering the national situation in general (in the USA) as it relates to the work of the American Folklore Society (AFS), my primary disciplinary home, and the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in which I am also active, including as a board member of the Council for Museum Anthropology, a AAA section.

I urge readers of this post to read the IHE story and then to begin exploring other reporting on the impacts of SB 266. Read the legislation itself and study the situation. Here, I note that Florida education leaders had already removed a statewide introductory sociology course Principles of Sociology from all general education offerings and “declared the discipline inherently liberal (Moody 2024).” (See also Hartocollis 2024). My concern here is general, but this is also personal, as general education sociology courses that I took at the University of Florida and what is today Palm Beach State College (then Palm Beach Community College) were the stepping stones that I took to becoming a BA sociology major. Being a sociology major (and anthropology minor) student in turn was the basis on which I sought and earned master’s degrees in folklore and anthropology and ultimately my PhD and my life and career. I use what I learned in those general education sociology courses every day. I am who I am because of them.

What Inside Higher Education has called “A Battle Over Florida’s General Education Courses” has reached a new stage, as reported on yesterday (10/3/2024=Moody 2024). Public universities in Florida, the state where I was born, raised, and educated (University of Florida ’90) are grappling with [Florida] Senate Bill 266, a far-reaching law that is now central to the transformation of public higher education in Florida. I will not unpack all aspects of it, but key to what I am evoking here are the ways that the legislation constrains and controls general education courses. As reported by IHE:

Florida International University’s Board of Trustees voted last week to drop 22 courses from the core curriculum, including Anthropology of Race & Ethnicity, Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies, and Sociology of Gender. The move follows last year’s passage of SB 266, a sweeping higher ed bill that, among other things, limits the scope of general education courses permitted at public universities.

Removing Principles of Sociology was a foretaste of the larger situation now. Because legislators and system leaders have construed large swaths of the humanities and social sciences to be inherently political and thus biased, these courses are moved out of eligibility for general education credit. Those who work in colleges and universities know the ways that such shifts will ramify (/are already ramifying). General education courses serve whole campuses. Some undergraduate students gain basic knowledge of disciplines through them and then move on to other majors and minors and interests. That is as it should be. But some students, as I did, come to find their home and stick with the fields that they first meet through the fulfilling of general education requirements. A general education course becomes a discipline and perhaps also the basis for a career. No humanities or social science department wants to, or expects to, see every general education student become a minor or major student, but they usually find that some do do this. General education impacts the lives of every general education student and general education courses also help students find what they are most passionate about and most interested in.  There is a kind of triangular shaped demographic pattern present here. At the top, a relatively small number of students will follow me, and those like me, all the way up the ladder from a general education course to a doctorate and a place in the research university or research museum (etc.), but there are layers all the way from the relatively large auditoriums in which my colleagues and I teach general education courses to this small peak. Many students begin in such courses and climb further up and make meaningful lives and careers for themselves on the basis of BA/BS majors, BA/BS minors, and MA/MS degrees. A system that has been tweaked and adjusted based on shared governance principles at the department and campus and institutional level for decades is now being thrown completely out of whack. By forces above and beyond these levels. The consequences of politicizing general education are great.

From the perspective of disciplines and the scholarly societies that serve them, the new approaches to the politicization of general education are another existential threat.  Fields like sociology, anthropology, and folklore studies have no choice but to understand, and seek to address, what is happening and what is likely to happen. Such fields are viable, in part, in universities because of their contribution to general education. Those currently experiencing the transformation of higher education beyond Florida have already seen the ways that approaches being pioneered in Florida (or Texas or North Carolina, or…) are being transferred to other states. This is not just emulation but is a matter of common tactics being formulated and promulgated to the states by national advocacy organizations.

What is my takeaway here? My purpose in this post (and the previous one) was to raise these issues relative to scholarly societies. Scholarly societies do not possess the kinds of resources that national think tanks, bill mills, and political parties possess, but these matters are fundamental to the very existence of, and future of, scholarly fields and the scholarly societies that support them. To be perfectly clear, folklore studies, as an academic discipline in the United States, would not survive the removal of folklore studies courses from undergraduate curriculum in the states where our field lives inside public colleges and universities. If what is happening now in Florida reaches its intended conclusion there and if it is repeated elsewhere, there will be, to use a new metaphor, an extinction event.

This is hard. It is hard if you teach courses now being targeted. It is hard if you are a department or program chair. It is hard if you are faculty leader on an impacted campus in an impacted state system. It is hard if you are a faculty leader on such a campus in such a system. It is hard too if you are a student who wants to take an impacted course, for whatever good reason, and it is being pulled away from you in a context in which there is already ever more pressure for students to not explore but to instead knuckle-down and speed into the “talent pipeline” that awaits outside the graduation ceremony.

Facing such things is not what motivates teachers to teach or elected leaders to try to serve their scholarly societies, but there is really no choice. It is another situation like that attributed to Rabbi Tafron, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” None of us will fix, or see an end to, the systemic and intersectional problems that we presently face, but if those who can do something don’t try to do something, whatever is to come will surely be worse. For fields, like folklore studies, that serve broad publics, these matters are not just academic, they ramify and impact those communities that we serve and all of those diverse populations, left and right, up and down, that we support and partner with close to the grass roots.

Hartocollis, Anemona. 2024. “Florida Eliminates Sociology as a Core Course at Its Universities.” The New York Times, January 25, 2024, sec. U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/us/florida-universities-sociology.html.

Moody, Josh. 2024. “A Battle Over Florida’s General Education Courses.” Inside Higher Ed. Accessed October 3, 2024. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/governance/state-oversight/2024/10/03/florida-institutions-slash-general-education-offerings.