What Tenure-Track Professors at UF May Expect

The NYTimes has an extensive piece on Ron DeSantis's choice for president of Florida's flagship public university, and there's lots to consider, particularly if you are teaching in a tenured or tenure-earning position.  Here's a taste: 

Sasse’s words sometimes tumble out in a kind of techno-futurist patois that can be hard to follow. In response to a question about his perceived invisibility on campus, he veered off into something about the future of pedagogy. “And that requires us to unbundle cohorting, community and synchronicity from co-localities,” he said. Later, he added, “What will today’s generic term ‘professor’ mean when you disaggregate syllabus designer, sage-on-the-stage lecturer, seminar leader, instructional technologist, grader, assessor, etc.?”

When you cut through Sasse's murky McKenzie-inspired malarkey, what remains is a clear aspiration to apply a fragmentation grenade to the professoriate, so that what remains are exploded pieces to be swept up by gig workers doing epistemological piecework. This 21st Century Taylorism is the stock and trade of the philosophical eunuchs at McKinsey, who have a $4.7 million contract with Sasse to develop and impose a strategic plan that uses 21st Century tech talk to impose 19th Century business practices and cultural values upon an institutions once devoted to unencumbered human learning and inquiry.

While fixated on the glories of STEM education, Sasse has not forgotten that part of his assignment is to transform the teaching of history at UF.  It took Sasse only three months to turn over space on campus to create what appears to be the foundations for an alternative history department. 

 About three months after Sasse took over, the Republican-controlled Legislature allotted $10 million in recurring annual funds for the recently established Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education and an additional $20 million to renovate its building on the U.F. campus, a former infirmary. The entire budget for the school’s history department is about $4 million. No one at the university had requested the funds or even suggested the creation of the center. The idea came from a little-known organization called the Council on Public University Reform. The name attached to the “local funding initiative request” was Josh Holdenried, who has worked in Washington for the conservative Heritage Foundation and for Napa Legal, which assists faith-based nonprofits. He appears to have no links to the university or the state of Florida. (Holdenried could not be reached for comment.)

A proposal sent to U.F. administrators by the group’s lobbyist, Adrian Lukis, a former DeSantis chief of staff, made it clear that the center was not intended as a complement to what already exists at the university. Instead, the center is to “provide choice for Florida’s students and their parents dissatisfied with the present offerings.” (The proposal was originally obtained by The Chronicle of Higher Education.) According to the center’s website, there’s an additional mission, too: to participate in the implementation of the K-12 civics curriculum in Florida’s public schools. The curriculum is to include Portraits in Patriotism, featuring the stories of Floridians who fled leftist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela.

As other news outlets have documented, Sasse has a record of turning his faculty-smashing aspirations into reality. At Midland University, where Sasse served as President from 2009 to 2014, Sasse went to work immediately to blow up faculty tenure at the school. Sasse put together buyout contracts for tenured faculty, with the clear intent to replace them with part-time or adjunct faculty.

Sasse was up-front with them [tenured faculty members]: They could take the buyout or continue at the university with an uncertain future after he got rid of tenure.

Bracker remembers groups of five or six faculty members at a time would lose their tenure, she said. She was one of the last to finally lose it.

“You can usurp power, and then you can do certain things because you usurp power,” Scott told Mother Jones. “But there might have been a kinder, gentler way to do that than to say, ‘These are the new rules; this is what we’re gonna do.'” 

Longtime, established faculty members who took the buyouts were replaced with low-cost, part-time adjunct professors in a cost-saving move, some former faculty members said. 

If you are a tenure track assistant professor hoping for tenure a few years down the road, you should know that that track is sure to be bristling with mines that were not there prior to the arrival of Sasse. You may expect, too, that an invisible ideological gauntlet is being constructed that could require your syllabi, your research, and your truth to be compromised if tenure is to be granted.  

One thing is for sure: tenure is no longer the arduous journey that it once was but, rather, the arduous journey with the addition of professorial judges who must answer to a university administration approved by Florida's most prominent fascist politician.

The Evolution of Propaganda and the Dangerous Lies from PragerU

Back in the old days of the early 2000s, education reform propagandists and other enemies of the unfettered pursuit of knowledge through learning (democratic schools) depended upon conservative think tanks for the ammo to conduct their propaganda campaigns aimed to alter the realities both inside or outside of people's heads.  The "researchers" at the Fordham Foundation, Manhattan Institute, and the Hoover Institution were on the payroll to massage statistics, bend rhetoric, and to limit research questions in ways that produce the illusion of disinterested research that just happened to coincide with all the preconceived conclusions that undergird the neo-conservative political and social agendas. 

That was the way that "conservative" social steering was justified for those whose sought to return America to a golden age that never was--when white was right.  

Now that's all changed.

Shaped by the toxic bloom surrounding the entry of Donald T----- into our political moment, today's policy influencers opt for much coarser tactics and strategies to bend Americans to the will of liberated unabashed fascists and unashamed racists.  Spurred on as they are by their national spokesman for everything crude, rude, and previously unacceptable (either socially or politically), today's propagandists do not couch their lies in semantic niceties, charts, or turgid text.  It's all out front and in your face, in bald-faced lies captured with the cheapest, soul-expunged computer generated animation tools of the billionaire-funded ideological chop shop called Prager U.  

Take five minutes to learn some basics about these bare-knuckled social influencers and intellectual abusers of children and adults. Here is the intro from an excellent piece from The Guardian:

A rightwing media outlet promoting climate-change denialism and other “anti-woke” staples to young students and adults via social media has become a fundraising Goliath, raking in close to $200m from 2018 to 2022 with big checks from top conservative donors, tax records reveal.

Founded in 2009 by the conservative talkshow host Dennis Prager, the eponymous Prager University Foundation is not an accredited education organization. But via online media its PragerU Kids division has become a key tool in spreading false claims to young people with short videos aimed at undercutting widely accepted science that climate crisis disasters are accelerating due, largely, to fossil-fuel usage.

PragerU’s influence in pushing false narratives about climate change and other far-right shibboleths such as airbrushing the brutal reality of American slavery gained ground when the Florida board of education in July gave the green light to using its videos and other materials in classrooms, a move that PragerU is trying to capitalize on in Texas and other states. On Tuesday, Oklahoma’s school system also approved the use of PragerU’s materials. . . .

Read on here.