Governor making a mess on the lawn of academia

You know that feeling you have when your neighbor just watches their dog poop on your lawn and walks away? It’s frustrating to know that someone was so inconsiderate, and it means you’re going to have to deal with the mess later. That’s how I felt when I heard about Gov. Ron DeSantis’ latest pronouncements on our universities.

Having been a college professor for 20 years, I feel a bit like colleges are my lawn, and I’m annoyed about what I’m going to have to clean up down the road.

A year ago, my wife and I moved to South Florida temporarily to care for my mother.

Thanks to the amazing doctors and nurses at the Lynn Cancer Institute, it looks like our stay might be a bit longer than we first expected, and we are considering making the move here permanent. My wife was easily able to transfer her job down here, but my situation is a bit more complicated. I’ve been a criminal justice professor and department chair for almost 20 years, and in any given year, there might be 20 jobs in the country that I can apply for.

Imagine my shock and excitement when it turned out that Florida Atlantic University was looking for a director for its School of Criminal Justice.

It’s a beautiful campus, and an exceptional school.

A week ago, I excitedly put in my application. This is the second job I’ve applied for in 15 years, so it wasn’t a decision that I made lightly, but after discussing things with my wife and mother, we decided it was worth a shot.

I had heard from afar that DeSantis has problems with the teaching of certain subjects that I’m not sure he totally understands, but it didn’t affect me in my day-to-day life, so I put it aside.

I only have so much brain power to worry about so many issues, and this one just wasn’t going to make the list. That was until I realized that I was applying to be a part of a university system that is under attack by a man far more interested in looking good to a mass audience in his eventual bid for president in 2024 than he is in the education of the citizens he was elected to protect. It’s disturbing to think that I might be told how to do my job by someone who so obviously knows nothing about my job.

Universities, and especially university professors, seem to be really easy targets at the moment. Most people have a pretty simplistic view of who we are, something in the neighborhood of liberal eggheads who argue about angels dancing on pins all day. The truth is far from that. I have worked in criminal justice my whole career, which means that my students are often first-generation college students who are looking for a secure job with a pension when they finish their four years.

I have former students who are police officers, FBI agents and Secret Service agents. I have a former student whose father worked in the avocado fields in California for years so his son would have the chance to become a Marine and serve two tours in Afghanistan before getting his college degree and a scholarship to Northwestern University Law School.

Helping these students achieve their dreams has been my job for 20 years, not “ideological conformity.” In fact, I’ve told every class I’ve ever taught that I don’t care what they think, I only care that they think.

DeSantis’ supposed solution to our problems will actually shut down academic freedom and freedom of expression. He has moved on from telling teachers what they can and cannot say in the classroom to what they can and cannot teach. In doing so, he would force every public university to completely rework their requirements to include so-called Western Civilization, something we thankfully stopped teaching before I got my first job.

I agree that universities need to change. In fact, most professors agree with this. We are top heavy with administrators and not focused enough on what our students are getting with their enormous tuition bills. We spend entirely too much money making sure that the dorms offer the students a Club Med-like experience and not enough on the job of actual education. Fixing it is not an easy job. It takes time, effort and money to really make sure that our tax and tuition dollars are being wisely spent. For DeSantis, that difficult process isn’t part of the plan. He hopes to be far away in two years when the Florida State University System will have to actually scrape up the mess he left on its lawn while he was getting to Washington.