Will Bunch: Campus ‘Red Scare’ takes Florida back to the ’50s
Just two years ago, Florida state Rep. Evan Jenne introduced a resolution calling for what he called “a formal and heartfelt apology” to victims of one of the most shameful episodes in the modern history of the Sunshine State — a lengthy witch hunt by a legislative committee at the height of post-World-War-II McCarthyism that ruined the lives of university professors and members of the LGBTQ community, and targeted Black activists.
No apology was forthcoming, as the latest iteration of Jenne’s bill died in committee this spring. The Republicans who currently run America’s fourth-largest state — led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a 2024 White House front-runner — had a different idea about the notorious “Red Scare” of the 1950s. They want to bring it back.
Last week, DeSantis signed the latest in a series of measures aimed at chilling political conversation on college campuses and crimping what teachers in Florida’s classrooms can say about racism or other troubling aspects of America’s past. The new law mandates that Florida’s public universities conduct an annual survey of students’ views on “viewpoint diversity” — with the governor suggesting that campuses not open to right-wing ideas (like his own) could lose government funding. DeSantis said colleges that appear to be what he called “hotbeds of stale ideology” are “not worth tax dollars and not something we’re going to be supporting moving forward.”
The new law came just days after the Florida Board of Education — at the urging of DeSantis, who appointed most of its members and appeared before the panel to urge teachers to stop “trying to indoctrinate [students] with ideology” — moved to ban the teaching of what it called “critical race theory.” Educators say the ban will make them fearful of suffering consequences for any teaching around America’s historic racism.
On one hand, DeSantis and Florida are on the cutting edge of a powerful and alarming development in current U.S. politics, in which a Republican Party desperate to retake Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024 is grasping for incendiary devices. Party insiders say hysteria over discussions of race in classrooms — centered on a misuse of the once-obscure term “critical race theory,” which has been mentioned hundreds of times on the Fox News Channel — among white suburban parents is fast becoming a 2.0 version of the Tea Party revolt that propelled the GOP a decade ago.