Academic madness invades tiny campus in West Palm Beach

The works of Christian theologian C.S. Lewis helped make Samuel Joeckel an author. A Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University helped make him a professor.

One call from one anonymous parent of one Palm Beach Atlantic University student made him a suspected left-wing-racialism indoctrinator.

Joeckel was in his classroom last week when a dean and the provost showed up bearing bad news, paperwork, and a little frisson of fear.

His teaching contract could not be renewed until the university had an opportunity to review his classroom materials on racial justice. Someone had complained.

The academic crime: racial indoctrination.

Every university celebrates Black History Month in its own way, I suppose.

Joeckel is a full professor. He has been teaching a unit on racial justice as part of his classes for 12 of his 20 years with PBAU. This is the first complaint.

“I can only speculate that the political winds are blowing across the educational landscape, and PBAU is being influenced by those political winds,” he said.

Palm Beach Atlantic is a small private Christian university tucked away in downtown West Palm Beach. It gets some state financial aid money for students, but its fiscal future is not beholden to Tallahassee politicking the same as, say, public schools such as New College of Florida and Florida State University.

(RIP, New College. Good luck, FSU.)

But apparently, PBAU has been caught up in Tallahassee’s yappydog frenzy about warping young minds with news of racism.

It is a frenzy. Madness is on display everywhere in a lawsuit challenging the state crackdown on university professors. Page 54: “Instructors are not allowed to teach that white privilege exists, but they are allowed to teach that it does not exist.” And page 25: It’s not only that teachers have no right to speak. Students, the state suggested, may have no right to hear, no “right to receive this information.”

All the while, state officials and lawmakers are working mightily to make sure you do not see what you are seeing. Only last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis scoffed at the idea that a biography of Roberto Clemente had been banned.

In fact, it was one of more than 200 books about children of color, or children of religions other than Christianity, kept off Florida school shelves in the 2021-22 school year, according to PEN America, an anti-censorship nonprofit. Hank Aaron and Jim Thorpe got pulled, too. Some were eventually put back.

But not all. In Jacksonville, a Duval County spokeswoman told ABC News 1.6 million books will need to be reviewed before they are deemed safe for children’s eyes.

No right to speak, no right to hear and no right to see makes it official: Three monkeys are writing state education policy.

They aren’t the only ones working in the dark. Joeckel isn’t certain who he offended, or how.

Reviewing the suspect classroom materials with a dean, Joeckel said he was asked only about three questions pertaining to race. One was about a writing prompt used in his freshman composition class: Argue, pro or con, whether racism is systemic.

What if a student wants to write an essay saying racism is not systemic, he was asked.

“My answer is, go for it,” said Joeckel, who had helped a student do just that, sitting next to his desk and working through ways to make the student’s argument more cogent.

And would Joeckel be able to fairly grade a paper that argued systemic racism does not exist?

Of course, he said. “My job is to help you construct the strongest possible argument … to defend the claims you have staked out.”

Joeckel’s fate has yet to be decided. But his syllabus is not the problem. The lessons PBAU needs to be talking about are just outside its West Palm doorstep.

In 2013, the American City Liberties Union found Black residents of Palm Beach County were five times more likely to be charged with pot possession than whites. A 2021 suit filed against the Palm Beach County School District argued that between 2016-2020, 68% of 5-, 6-, and 7-yearolds forcibly subjected to a psychiatric examination were Black, even though Black students overall made up just 28% of the school population.

The school has since changed its policy. Marijuana possession is much less likely to lead to jail.

But maybe you haven’t heard a lot of public discussion about it? Or long-term consequences for Black men saddled with drug records and Black children left with school-day memories of forced psych exams?

There is, Joeckel said, “a very strong voice in the culture that says we don’t like having difficult conversations about racism. It makes white people feel bad. It makes white people feel uncomfortable.

“We need … to have those hard and difficult conversations about racial justice. If that can’t happen at a Christian university, there’s not much hope.”

Seeking racial justice, he said, “is the most Christian thing we can do.”