The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has called on the Chancellor of the State University System of Florida to retract his directive requiring public university campuses in Florida to identify all courses that might have “antisemitic material and/or anti-Israel bias.”
“This latest example of the state’s authoritarian approach to higher education dictates that university leaders screen all undergraduate and graduate-course descriptions and syllabi for the words Israel, Israeli, Palestine, Palestinian, Middle East, Zionism, Zionist, Judaism, Jewish, and Jews and turn over all “related instructional material” for state review,” said AAUP officials. “This political intrusion into the classroom should concern all who care about higher education.”
AAUP has said that academic freedom is under attack and pointed to its 2023 Special Report on Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System to where the association argued that “academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US history.”
AAUP said that Chancellor Ray Rodrigues’s latest action only “deepens Florida's ongoing higher education crisis.”