I favor fighting the politicization of academia--from either side.
However...the left completely controls universities and misuses its power to advance its radical ideology at virtually every opportunity. Universities have virtually become progressive-left indoctrination camps.
So perhaps you can understand my skepticism about going after one of the few serious efforts to push back against the left's all-out war on objective, rational inquiry and teaching...
The Stop Woke act is *nothing* compared to the politicization and thought-control being infused into universities, root and branch by the progressive-left.
You write:
"At North Florida College, for instance, the college’s attorney warned that a professor “teaching a class on U.S. History and Jim Crow laws could not tell students the historical fact that ‘white people were responsible for enacting’ Jim Crow laws.” It could violate the seventh concept on the Stop WOKE Act’s blacklist, which prohibits instruction that advances the notion that a person “bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” for past actions committed by people who share their same racial background. "
That is absurd. The argument makes no sense at all. Teaching that past whites were responsible for doing x cannot possibly be construed as teaching that contemporary whites bear personal responsibility (etc.) for x.
I don't necessarily disagree with you in all the particulars. But I'm perhaps irrationally cranky about nit-picking against an overall decent effort to slow the destruction of academia being prosecuted by the left.
Prohibiting the teaching of CRT entirely--insane as that would be--would be *less* insane than the current situation in which its precepts are taught from every lectern as fact. (Note: an exaggeration for rhetorical effect.) CRT is not even an influential view--except on the political left. It's basically a joke, a poorly-thought-out, poorly-defended sub-fad that has gained notoriety because it is leftist, not because it is inherently of interest.
My own university was caught outright indoctrinating student Resident Advisors with CRT/progressive nonsense about e.g. all whites being oppressors. Again: what *could* reasonably be taught as one outre theory was taught as if it were fact. When busted, the university hid the video and only gave it up after a FOIA request.
The wise and witty SCOTUS Justice Brandeis, to dissent against the opinion of the majority of SCOTUS Justices in Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1928), wrote words that many justices have incorporated into many subsequent opinions:
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. . . . The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
Ibram X. Kendi: The only remedy for racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination.
Ron DeSantis: The only remedy for anti-racist speech policing is racist speech policing.
Neither of these two posers seems to have ever learned that two wrongs do not make a right.
I favor fighting the politicization of academia--from either side.
However...the left completely controls universities and misuses its power to advance its radical ideology at virtually every opportunity. Universities have virtually become progressive-left indoctrination camps.
So perhaps you can understand my skepticism about going after one of the few serious efforts to push back against the left's all-out war on objective, rational inquiry and teaching...
The Stop Woke act is *nothing* compared to the politicization and thought-control being infused into universities, root and branch by the progressive-left.
You write:
"At North Florida College, for instance, the college’s attorney warned that a professor “teaching a class on U.S. History and Jim Crow laws could not tell students the historical fact that ‘white people were responsible for enacting’ Jim Crow laws.” It could violate the seventh concept on the Stop WOKE Act’s blacklist, which prohibits instruction that advances the notion that a person “bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” for past actions committed by people who share their same racial background. "
That is absurd. The argument makes no sense at all. Teaching that past whites were responsible for doing x cannot possibly be construed as teaching that contemporary whites bear personal responsibility (etc.) for x.
I don't necessarily disagree with you in all the particulars. But I'm perhaps irrationally cranky about nit-picking against an overall decent effort to slow the destruction of academia being prosecuted by the left.
Prohibiting the teaching of CRT entirely--insane as that would be--would be *less* insane than the current situation in which its precepts are taught from every lectern as fact. (Note: an exaggeration for rhetorical effect.) CRT is not even an influential view--except on the political left. It's basically a joke, a poorly-thought-out, poorly-defended sub-fad that has gained notoriety because it is leftist, not because it is inherently of interest.
My own university was caught outright indoctrinating student Resident Advisors with CRT/progressive nonsense about e.g. all whites being oppressors. Again: what *could* reasonably be taught as one outre theory was taught as if it were fact. When busted, the university hid the video and only gave it up after a FOIA request.
The wise and witty SCOTUS Justice Brandeis, to dissent against the opinion of the majority of SCOTUS Justices in Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1928), wrote words that many justices have incorporated into many subsequent opinions:
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. . . . The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
Hey, Amna, what's the status of the litigation? Its been about six months?