More about UF courses

Another tangential piece to the story about the white nationalist seminar paper at UF:

Carliss Chatman visited at UF from SMU in the spring. She proposed to teach a course called "Race, Entrepreneurship and Inequality," but the school listed it only as “Entrepreneurship” in the course catalogue. The Times presents this as a politically tinged juxtaposition--student gets award for racist papers in the name of intellectual diversity while prof cannot teach class with race in the title in the name of institutional neutrality. 

Welcome to higher education in Florida under Ron DeSantis. But including it in the story confounds the narrative. Damsky's story is one of core academic freedom, which McAlister could and rightly did protect.

Chatman's story presents different issues, with different legal and practical results. The state has issued various decrees about courses, going to titles, syllabi, and content, with the implicit threat that a state DOGE will be combing through course catalogues, likely using AI for key words. Universities have responded by ordering units to scrub web sites and course catalogues of classes, programs, syllabi, etc. containing "bad" words, such as "race" or "inequality" or "diversity;" units are complying. No one knows what happens if they fail to do so--whether the state or the university will impose formal sanctions (loss of funds, firing administrators, whatever) or whether this seeks to preempt Chris Rufo from turning this into a political issue.

It is not clear how academic freedom protects things such as course titles--how could the prof or college defend if the state or university  sanctioned the school over what the course is called. Compare that with course content, which is more obviously protected. That is, if Chatman could teach the course she otherwise wanted to, academic freedom is mostly served. Just as it was served because the judge gave the grade he deemed appropriate.

In any event, I do not want to set Chatman's issue as some ideological counterpart to the student paper. And I do not want to blame the law school administration for the course title; they are working under real pressure in an uncertain area.