Florida HB 999

is this the way to change higher education?

Scene: Classroom, Diversity Issues 2, Spring 2019.

Shocked (white, female) classmate: “Are you saying that white privilege doesn’t exist for anyone, ever?”

Me: “No. I’d have to think for a long time, and do some research, before I’d make that argument, if I’d make it at all. I’m saying that I think the assertion that white skin always creates privilege in absolutely every situation is unwarranted and frankly ridiculous.”

Several other (all white, both female and male) classmates: chime in with various assertions of “That’s racist,” and “That’s a white supremacist viewpoint!” and “How can you be so blind?” and “Spotted the racist!”

Me (surprisingly calmly, given the situation and my PTSD): “I want to offer an example to make sure I understand your argument. Right now, at this moment, there are white teenagers in West Virginia in foster care because their parents are both dead or both incarcerated or otherwise unable to be parents due to opioid addiction. They are dirt poor. Some of them barely have two sets of clothing, and their foster parents are likely just barely above the poverty line and taking them in to get a little extra money to feed their own kids with. Their lives are stress and poverty 24/7 for reasons that are no fault of their own. They have nobody on their side, no consistent source of love, are taking care of themselves at all times. You are saying that those teenagers all, 100% of the time, in all situations, have privilege over Sasha and Malia Obama?”

Aforementioned classmates, without any hesitation: “Yes” and “Absolutely” and “Of course they do,” with nodding heads.

Me: (looks at the professor hoping for sanity).

Professor: (nods in agreement with my classmates).

Me: “Um, ok then. I can see I’m not going to get anywhere, so I’ve got my participation points for today and I’ll shut up now.”

Why This Story Is On My Mind

Florida is proposing a piece of legislation that would radically change higher education in the state. Florida House Bill 999, the text of which you can read in PDF form here, is being touted by supporters as eminently reasonable and by opponents as an authoritarian control mechanism.

Having read the bill, I’m tentatively in favor of it. There is a lot that’s good in it, including a requirement for transparency with regard to student graduation rates, performance by traditional, online, and other teaching methods, average wages over a career of students who earn degrees in these majors, and many other things that are important and would be very valuable to know.

This provision seems like sanity itself:

A state university is prohibited from using diversity, equity, and inclusion statements, Critical Race Theory rhetoric, or other forms of political identity filters as part of the hiring process, including as part of applications for
employment, promotion and tenure, conditions of employment, or reviewing qualifications for employment. This paragraph applies to the hiring process for any position at the university, including the position of president of the university.

and this one would’ve been glorious and wonderful for me as an undergraduate:

General education core course options shall consist of a maximum of five courses within each of the subject areas of communication, mathematics, social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences.

and I especially like this:

The Legislature finds it necessary that every undergraduate student of a public postsecondary educational institution in the state graduates as an informed citizen through participation in rigorous general education courses that promote the values necessary to preserve the constitutional republic through traditional, historically accurate, and high-quality coursework. Courses with a curriculum based on unproven, theoretical, or exploratory content are best suited to fulfill
elective or specific program prerequisite credit requirements, rather than general education credit requirements.

What Makes Me Nervous About It

This provision makes sense to me, but I am interpreting it sensibly:

General education core courses may not suppress or distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics, such as Critical Race Theory, or defines American history as contrary to the creation of a new
nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.

It is quite easy to tell how anyone on the left would interpret “identity politics”: they would say that the factual events of America’s founding are white supremacist identity politics, and teaching them without an emphasis on the inherent systemic racism and the way that systemic racism has infused every breath taken by everyone who has lived and died in America since its founding is further identity politics.

There’s also a danger of “Critical Race Theory” being interpreted too broadly, though the fact that these courses are only restricted from general education core courses is enormous protection.

Beware the Strawman

Twitter is full of leftists quoting these provisions, particularly the “unproven, theoretical, or exploratory” bit, and saying it outlaws the teaching of science (the theory of evolution is by definition theoretical) and other such things.

Even if one is dumb enough to interpret it in the manner of the leftist strawman fit for Twitter, it still only restricts those things from being general education core requirements. It does not eliminate them from courses at all. It simply removes the possibility of all students being required to take them as part of a general education requirement to get a degree.

General Education Courses Under A Diversity Regime

To get my degree in mathematics—I repeat, for emphasis, my degree in mathematics, the subject that has hurdles between you and a degree that include taking three semesters of calculus, doing thousands of hours of homework, mastering trigonometric substitution, writing dozens of proofs and evaluating hundreds more, making predictive models from large datasets, learning to do at least basic coding in two languages, symbolic logic, and other such tasks—I had to take three courses approved for diversity credit.

Some majors had some classes that got diversity credit. For example, history majors could take “Marching Under the Rainbow: the History of Queer Activism” and get a D-credit. STEM majors had no such “extra bang for the buck” in our coursework of learning about, you know, objective reality, so the departments created Diversity Issues courses for us. They crammed the objectives of the university’s overall requirements into courses that met in the engineering and computer science building, where most of us spent our days.

Another Memorable Diversity Issues Class

One day we learned about the Genderbread Person. Which, for the record, is now considered too oppressive and regressive, and has been replaced by the Gender Unicorn.

Our speaker that day was a woman who identified as non-binary. She breathlessly explained to us how she was (no, I’m not respecting her pronouns and calling her “they”) non-binary in part because sometimes she feels like a woman and other times like a man. Someone asked her to explain with a concrete example.

Her example—I kid you not—was that in the mornings, at the gym, she feels like a man when lifting weights, but last weekend she had attended a friend’s wedding, where she felt like a woman.

I raised my hand and said—trying to keep the venom I felt out of my voice, though I don’t know how successful I was—”Can you explain to me why I shouldn’t be deeply and profoundly offended? You just said that when you’re doing something difficult that requires discipline and strength you feel like a man, but when you are doing something that involves dressing up and attending a ceremony focused on beauty and emotions, you feel like a woman. How is this not just adherence to regressive stereotypes?”

She was horrified, stammered, stuttered, “Oh no, no, that’s not what I meant at all!” and made some pathetic excuse about not speaking for “all persons in the non-binary community,” but it was bullshit.

It was exactly and precisely what she meant. And everyone in that room, including the professor who held me after and asked me to “tone it down,” knew it.

One More Story: My Brilliant Therapist

I happened to have therapy a couple of hours after this class.

In this one, we learned about everyone who fits under the “Asexual Umbrella.” One of these categories was demisexual, defined as “people who only experience sexual attraction after they’ve formed a close emotional bond.”

I sat and listened to this pathologizing of normal, healthy female sexuality: sexuality that requires some level of commitment (here, emotional) from the male before sexual activity commences. I suspected it was bullshit, but I wasn’t sure. (I was not nearly as far along in my recovery from a childhood that included a great deal of sexual trauma as I am now.)

I went to therapy a couple of hours later and started the session like this:

“Well, (therapist’s name), today I learned something important about myself.”

Therapist: “Oh? What was that?”

Me: “Today I learned that I am deeply and profoundly oppressed by my status as a sexual minority.”

Therapist: (raises an eyebrow).

Me: “I in fact fit under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. A is one of those extra letters, and I am in fact a type of Asexual.”

Therapist, laughing: “What?!”

Me: “I am, I’ll have you know, an oppressed demisexual.”

Therapist: “What does that mean?”

Me: “A demisexual is someone who only experiences sexual attraction when they have formed a close emotional bond.”

Therapist: (nods, several times, thinks for about thirty seconds.) “When I was a boy, we had a different word for people like that. We called them, ‘women’.”

I laugh every time I remember that conversation. I am grateful for anyone who is willing to tell the truth. I am especially grateful that I found a mental health professional who tells me the truth, even if I’d rather not hear it.

Student Debt Reality

I am paying off my student loans as fast as I can—every paid subscription goes to help lower that balance, for which I thank you all—but I will, by the time I’m done, have paid over $9,000 for those three classes.

Some More Truth

Leftist gender ideology and Critical Race Theory, two theoretical frameworks that have infused absolutely everything on every public university campus, are not normal. They are not true. They are religious in nature and we are all entitled to be atheists with regard to their religions.

Florida HB 999 may be the way to tackle it. It may not be. It may pass and make huge changes—if it does, I’ll certainly investigate it thoroughly and encourage my friends who intend to send their children to college to consider Florida universities—or it may pass and backfire.

Either way, the rest of us will learn from what happens.

But someone has to do something. The current status of universities, as indoctrination factories that weaken the United States as one of their core missions, is intolerable.

I’m glad that Governor DeSantis and the Florida legislature are willing to try to do something.

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