This week, I took a bit of time to read Chistopher Rufo’s piece in the City Journal, the magazine of the conservative Manhattan Institute, attacking Florida State University. In the article, Rufo argued that at my university a diversity, equity and inclusion ideology “has embedded itself everywhere in the university”.
After I finished reading the article, I went back to work trying to make sure that FSU’s students have high quality opportunities to learn the physics they need to become excellent scientists, engineers and medical professionals.
Rufo is best known among people like me who pay only a token amount of attention to the political environment for transforming the term “critical race theory” from an academic term to become a catch-all term for any teaching that asserts there is systemic race discrimination in American society. The phrase has become one of the most visible talking points for conservative education activists. Rufo was recently appointed to the Board of Trustees of New College, Florida’s public liberal arts college. As a member of the new conservative majority on that board, he joined that majority in firing the college’s president. FSU seems to be the second target (after New College) of what Rufo has called his “counterrevolutionary response” to what he sees as the leftist bias of Florida’s – and the nation’s – public colleges and universities.
In comparison, I am a nobody. I’ve been on the faculty of the FSU Physics Department for 36 years, and I’m presently the Associate Chair of the department. I teach a studio-style introductory physics course for 60 students majoring in engineering, physics, computer science and other math-intensive fields. Teaching using a studio-style instructional model, which focuses class time on collaborative laboratory and problem-solving exercises, is sort of the opposite of a lecture class. Therefore, I am in some sense countercultural pedagogically. I do some outreach to middle and high school parents around the state begging them to have their students take chemistry, physics and calculus (or at least pre-calculus) in high school so that they are prepared to succeed in college STEM majors. And I even do some nuclear physics research.
But at least I have some idea how complex the challenges are that the leaders and faculty of my university face every day. The students in my studio physics class come from a wide range of backgrounds, and optimizing the learning environment for all of them requires constant attention and recalibration, which I do imperfectly. Most semesters, only one-third of my students are women, and the number of Black students is frustratingly small. Making sure they are all in groups where they are actively engaging is important to their physics learning.
As Associate Chair, I am tasked with figuring out how to provide the capacity to accommodate the exploding number of students who want to pursue careers in the life and health sciences and must take two semesters of a physics class tailored to their needs. Fortunately, I have colleagues who are deeply committed to making these courses – one of which may enroll 800 students this coming fall – the best learning opportunities they can possibly be using technology and redesigned laboratory exercises.
Our undergraduate physics majors and graduate students, who will be some of society’s most valuable economic and scientific players when they complete their studies, are faced with a society that has an uncertain future.
Our students have been affected by the pandemic. Their high school years were disrupted so that many of them do not have the study skills and physics preparation that students did before the pandemic. The social shocks of the pandemic have left a larger percentage of them with mental health challenges to overcome than was the case before the pandemic. And students no longer trust the future as they once did.
And that’s just in physics and STEM fields. Scale that up to include the students who aspire to be accountants, psychologists, performing artists, social workers and so many others, and you start to get a feel for the complexity of our university’s mission.
Yet this is what Rufo says: “Knowledge, it seems, has been displaced as the core mission of this university. At Florida State, the diversity commissars have busied themselves making radical politics—administrated by the bureaucracy and imposed downward on students, faculty, and staff—the highest principle.”
As a long-time resident of the bottom of the academic food chain, I would know if radical politics were being imposed downward by the bureaucracy because they would land on me with maximum kinetic energy. Heck, I might even be more sensitive to it as a Catholic with an “R” next to my name on the voter registration list. But instead, we are all busy trying to give our students at all levels the best possible opportunities to learn and achieve with limited resources.
Perhaps Rufo is right that knowledge has been displaced as the core mission of the university. But if that is so, then our new core mission is grant-getting so that we can achieve the exalted goal of doubling our university’s external research funding. Or at least that’s what I think in my more cynical moments.
If you have concluded that I am frustrated, then you are correct. I am frustrated that an individual with so much political influence has reduced our university’s enormous effort to help students achieve at the highest levels to a slogan that is useful only for pandering.
If Rufo is really interested in making positive change, he should come to our campus (and the campus in Panama City) and spend some days seeing what we do. Yes, he’d be welcome to visit my physics classroom if that’s what he’d like. Heck, Randy Fine (a conservative firebrand state legislator) visited my studio physics class in the fall of 2019. He liked it. It reminded him of his case study classes at Harvard Business School.
But I’m not holding my breath waiting for such a visit. Instead, the faculty at FSU (and Florida’s other colleges and universities) will have to buckle down and keep our focus on the goal of helping our students fulfill their potential. We will try to block everything else out.
Bridge to Tomorrow 