A chilling threat to free speech on Florida campuses | Editorial

A proposed rule will have a chilling effect on free speech at Florida's colleges and universities.

In the movie “Animal House,” unscholarly frat boys are expelled for violating a college rule they didn’t know existed: double-secret probation.

In another instance of life imitating art, Florida’s higher education Board of Governors (BOG) has come up with its own version of double-secret danger.

It’s a rule, all but final except for receiving perfunctory public comment, that prohibits universities from doing anything to promote diversity or engage in any “political or social activism.”

Here’s the Board’s definition of that last phrase: “Any activity organized with a purpose of effecting or preventing change to a government policy, action or function, or any activity intended to achieve a desired result related to social issues, where the university endorses or promotes a position in communications, advertisements, programs, or campus activities.”

Classroom instruction and student-led organizations appear to be exempt, but the whole schmear is so vague that nobody should rely on that.

A threat to campus life

Applied strictly, it would muzzle and effectively put out of business many of the dozens of specialized institutes that have been created over the years for the quaint purpose of serving the public through their tax-supported institutions of higher education.

Florida Atlantic University has a Center for the Study of Values and Violence after Auschwitz, whose stated purpose is to “stimulate dialogue” on what are indisputably social issues.

The University of Florida has the Florida Climate Institute that routinely deals with issues that very powerful political forces would rather ignore.

The LeRoy Collins Institute at Florida State University, named for the state’s greatest governor, is devoted to “developing and promoting bold, visionary public policy that will empower and uplift Floridians and Americans for generations to come.”

All of this is the ruinous byproduct of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s strategy to run for president as an extreme right-wing social warrior.

The Legislature’s role

The BOG rule is meant to implement Senate Bill 266, a Republican bill signed by DeSantis, that bans the use of any state or federal funds “to promote, support or maintain any programs or campus activities” that advocate diversity, equity and inclusion, “or promote or engage in political or social activism…”

His white power regime in Tallahassee is calculated to suppress the abundant evidence of demographic — that is, racial and economic — disparities in health care, education, housing and criminal justice. If universities are intimidated from exploring that, who will?

As the BOG took up its Orwellian gag rule, public protesters were limited to roughly one minute each under a policy allowing a total of only 15 minutes of non-member comments on any issue. Time expired before a representative of the First Amendment Foundation could testify.

This is the arrogance of power at work. It has no place in a democracy, let alone institutions devoted to freedom of thought, inquiry and expression.

Full impact is unknown

In this case, the unknown ramifications of such a broad gag rule deserved far more time. Jack Hitchcock, the Board of Governors’ student member, raised the question of what university officials would have been permitted to say or do about global events such as the Hamas attack on Israel Oct. 7.

The BOG’s lawyer said they might be allowed to speak if they were interpreted to be supporting existing laws and policies. In a democracy, no one’s freedom of speech should be limited to what the government wants said. No one’s career or job should ever be subject to an interpretation of an ominously vague rule.

As to current events, the policy could discourage, if not prevent, university officials from trying to counteract the virulent antisemitism that has been seeping into campuses and is festering off the current crisis in Gaza.

Censorship is a two-bladed sword. It’s not hard to imagine the policy being invoked against DeSantis’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, who holds a sinecure at the UF medical school and is a voluble skeptic of lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines. It could silence professors who want to refute him.

Read rule and speak out

The BOG’s faculty representative, Amanda Phalin, an associate professor at UF, warned that the rule will “significantly impede the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression for students and faculty.”

The consequences couldn’t have been framed any better.

Phalin said faculty believe “an essential thread of a university student’s education is in fact learning how to effect change to a government policy or action.” To discuss social issues “which polarize society … on which reasonable people may disagree” is, she said, “fundamental to a student’s education.”

So it is. So it always has been almost everywhere. But no longer in Florida.

Citizens have until Nov. 23 to express themselves to the BOG’s general counsel. The phone number is 850-245-9466. The email is generalcounsel@flbog.edu. The offensive rule, 9.016, entitled “prohibited expenditures,” can be found at www.flbog.edu/regulations/proposed-regulations/.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.