BRAIN DRAIN
violations of people’s “expressive rights” at colleges and universities and allowed students to record class lectures as evidence. It also required schools to conduct surveys gauging whether people on campus felt free to express their beliefs and ideas.
Then last year came the Individual Freedom Act, also known as the Stop Woke Act, aimed at topics like systemic racism. It prohibited workplaces and schools from promoting concepts that make anyone feel “guilt, anguish or other psychological distress” related to race, color, national origin or sex because of actions “committed in the past.”
Irizarry said the two measures forced her to add language to her syllabus and review her course materials. During classes, she became vigilant to make sure no one said anything that violated the law.
She said she grew increasingly concerned that someone would take a video recording and post something out of context that would get picked up by Fox News. She had seen colleagues in the ethnic studies field experience harassment and receive death threats. Students she’d taught previously – both liberal and conservative – grew more reticent.
It was difficult to think about applying elsewhere. Irizarry had bought a home. She had gotten involved in service projects, been a mentor and imagined herself building a career at USF.
But when she got an offer last year from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the choice was made easier. By then, Florida lawmakers were considering more legislation, this time with the potential to root out entire subjects, limit diversity efforts and further restrict faculty tenure.
The measures were passed easily by the Republican-dominated legislature and signed into law by DeSantis.
“It was difficult to choose to give up things that I had worked very, very hard for,” Irizarry said. “But it was an easy decision because I felt I literally would not be able to do my job. I simply could not see a way to do the job I was hired to do under the Gov. DeSantis regime.”
Carolyne Ali-Khan, who came to the University of North Florida in Jacksonville to teach social justice in education 12 years ago, made a similar calculation.
In 31 years of teaching, she hadn’tseen a climate like this. And it was rapidly unfolding in front of her.
After the Individual Freedom Act passed, she and her colleagues scrambledto figure out what it meant.
The law said no person should be made to feel guilt for actions committed in the past. Ali-Khan wondered how she could be responsible for how someone felt.
“All of a sudden, I’m not just thinking about what the research says in my field and how best to convey that to students and how to bridge that gap between what the research says and how they can apply what the research says in their lives and in their classrooms, which is what I’m trained to do,” she said. “My focus was that, plus, ‘Am I going to lose my job if I talk about what the research says? Am I going to come under attack? What is the university going to do? What can the university do?’”
In January, the state required all universities to list expenditures related to diversity, equity and inclusion, a major focus for DeSantis this year. AliKhan heard from a journalist that UNF had included her course in its report. No one at the university had informed her.
She felt increasingly vulnerable as laws targeting unions and easing gun restrictions were proposed and passed. She knew of colleagues who were planningwith their spouses and kids what to do in case they lost their jobs.
“It’s not safe here anymore on so many levels,” Ali-Khan said. “It’s not physically safe. It’s not economically safe. It’s not professionally safe. It’s not intellectually safe. That was not true when I got here.”
This fall, she’ll teach at Molloy University, a small liberal arts college in New York. She said she is heartbroken to leave behind colleagues and students in Florida.
Sometimes she grapples with guilt, particularly about leaving behind underrepresented and LGBTQ+ students, who increasingly expressed uncertainty over whether their university would protect them.
“I can’t support them if I don’t have a job,” she said.
State Sen. Tina Polsky, D-Boca Raton, said she believed a variety of factors are impacting people’s decisions to leave the state, including Florida’s new abortion law and its climate toward the LGBTQ+ community.
It’s what prompted her to introduce an amendment to this year’s higher education bill that would have tracked whether those policies influenced faculty departures. She wanted the state to compile data on failed searches to fill university positions. Her proposal failed.
Hope “Bess” Wilson planned to spend the rest of her career at the University of North Florida, where she taught educational psychology at the school’s College of Education for the past 10 years.
But recently, as she packed her belongings into cardboard boxes for a move to Chicago, she paused to wonder: “How had things gotten so offcourse?”
It felt like the past few years had brought one blow after another, Wilson said. As she saw it, lawmakers were chipping away at her rights as a faculty member and a mother.
She said it became increasingly difficult to do her job: training the next generation of teachers without stepping into territory outlawed by Florida’s increasingly restrictive laws. Whenever she felt herself wading into contentious waters, she eyed students for anyone pulling out a cell phone to record her.
For a time, she thought staying in Florida was the right thing to do for her career and her family.
That changed late last year when Florida’s medical boards voted to prohibit the use of puberty blockers, hormone therapies or surgeries to treat gender dysphoria for anyone under 18.
Then a bill signed in March codified those restrictions, also allowing the state to take custody of a child if they are “subject to sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures.”
Wilson’s 14-year-old transgender daughter is considering whether to proceed with genderaffirming care. She worried that if she remained in Florida she could lose the sole custody that was granted as part of a divorce.
After receiving an offer to teach at Northern Illinois University, she accepted without a second thought.