At the same moment that college and university instructors in Florida were grading our students’ final exams, members of the Florida Legislature launched their latest attack on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by passing House Bill 7, the “Stop WOKE Act.”

The mechanism for deciding that an instructor is violating HB 7 is completely subjective. The new law creates a mishmash of state-imposed speech codes that will harm academic achievement in Florida. By stifling the marketplace of ideas, the Stop WOKE Act will hamper the ability of our students to compete with their peers across the country for job placements and post-graduate professional programs.

I am not going to allow HB 7 to stop me from offering my students the most challenging scholarship on the Holocaust, eugenics, racism and related fields. The Stop WOKE Act will have zero impact on my research, public speaking or on my class lesson plans.

In the fall semester, I am teaching my “African Diaspora in the Americas” class, a course I have taught since I was an assistant professor. I invite Gov. DeSantis to audit or to visit my class anytime he is back in Florida. One caveat: The class requires a ton of reading, Mr. Governor!

BREAKING: Florida Auditor General Confirms Charges by Whistleblower Rebekah Jones Against FL-DOH

Gross mismanagement of COVID-19 data, including “inaccurate,” “Incomplete,” and “delayed” reporting, put millions of Floridians at risk and undermined state’s efforts to fight the virus

Two years after former Department of Health scientist Rebekah Jones told state officials she was asked to conceal and distort COVID-19 infection rates, the Florida Auditor General confirms that Department of Health (DOH) and other entities provided “inaccurate or incomplete data,” lacked “effective access controls in the systems used to gather data,” and “impacted the State’s ability to accurately report COVID-19 data at the beginning of the pandemic.”

Jones was terminated in May of 2020 after refusing to manipulate COVID-19 data as requested by her supervisors. Jones was the architect and manager of the DOH COVID-19 Data and Surveillance Dashboard, the primary resource by which Floridians could access the most accurate and up to date information. Jones subsequently filed a claim for wrongful termination with the Florida Commission of Human Relations (FCHR), where her case is still pending. Jones was afforded legal whistleblower protections in May 2021, a designation she still holds.

Over the past year, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies in the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature have been on a crusade against public universities, tarring them as “intellectually repressive” and “socialism factories.”

They have passed laws ordering community colleges and state universities to dig up details about the personal political beliefs of their employees, making it harder for professors to maintain tenure, interfering with university accreditation, and threatening funding for schools that don’t fall in line with the governor’s efforts to control the teaching of slavery, segregation and institutional racism.

And DeSantis may just be getting started.

Records obtained through a series of public-records requests show that DeSantis’ office recently developed a sweeping plan to overhaul higher-education oversight in Florida. The governor’s proposal would have centralized more power in boards run by the governor’s political appointees, made colleges and universities more dependent on money controlled by politicians in Tallahassee, and imposed more restrictions on what schools can teach.

The DeSantis plan would have even stripped university presidents of the ability to hire professors.