Philosopher Nicolas Delon at New College talks about how these developments are affecting the faculty; an excerpt:
We have seven or eight tenure-track candidates coming up for tenure this year. Everyone has a positive recommendation for tenure. The next step is supposed to be the Board of Trustees, which in April will approve or deny tenure. Traditionally, the Board of Trustees just rubber-stamps the tenure based on the recommendations that are made. Now, recently, President Corcoran has met with the president of our union to recommend that the candidates withdraw their files before it’s too late. My interpretation is that Corcoran suspects there’s probably a non-negligible proportion of the trustees who want to make an example out of those people and deny them tenure. The trustees as a whole, Corcoran and DeSantis want to turn our institution into something different. And in order to do that, they need to hire new faculty. The best way for them to hire new faculty is to get rid of the faculty who they can fire without breaching contract. So that means firing the tenure-track faculty.
They can’t fire tenured faculty like me without breach of contract, but our collective bargaining agreement is not eternal—it’s up for renegotiation in June 2024. And with DeSantis’s higher-education bill, which is basically trying to overhaul tenure, there’s a possibility that it will be very easy for the president to fire many of us even with tenure. He has said they have currently no plans to fire tenured faculty. But should we trust him?
The most likely thing to happen is that they’re going to impose some changes on the curriculum. It’s not clear exactly what form and with what faculty input, but they’re getting rid of gender studies and critical race theory—they have said that publicly many times. The law, HB 999, is hopelessly vague. There’s so many things that could fall under the umbrella of gender studies and critical race theory, and we don’t know what programs, classes or parts of a given syllabus are likely to be illegal if it passes. We don’t know if that will mean we will have to submit our syllabi to the provost or the president or the board, or what authority they will have.
I’m a philosopher, and this semester I’m teaching a combination of a fairly classical course in political philosophy with some more contemporary/applied topics. Part of my syllabus would, I think, be deemed controversial by the new trustees and new president. Before the break, we discussed Martin Luther King and nonviolent resistance and social change, which seems like the kind of thing that should be allowed, but now I’m not so sure. This week, we’re going to talk about feminism and liberalism, and prison abolition and policing later in the semester. There’s no side I’m taking. I’m just going to put up what I think are the good arguments, and I’ll hear out the students who have counterarguments. But if I had to teach political philosophy again, under the new administration, I’m no longer sure I would write the same syllabus.
Recent Comments