by Neil H. Buchanan
The University of Florida, my home institution, is in serious damage-control mode. As I explained in a
column last Friday, the administration of the state's flagship campus recently decided that several of my faculty colleagues could not testify in lawsuits that have been brought to challenge policies enacted by Florida's current group of ruling politicians. Late last week, the administration then partially reversed course after receiving tons of negative attention and condemnation from around the U.S. and the world.
I say "partially" because there is still some uncertainty as to what is and is not allowed at this point, with some possibly-expansive prohibitions against using "university resources" apparently still in place The university's administration has created a task force to try to come up with a better policy, which should not be especially difficult, given that there are longstanding best practices at the top public universities in the country. Even more simply, we could go back to the way things were before the politicians stepped in and messed things up this year -- although, as I will emphasize below, that will only work if it is part of a credible commitment to reassure everyone that this will not happen again.
In last week's column, I made two major points. First, a university spokesperson had tried to justify the outrageous limitations on faculty activities by saying that testifying in cases where the defendant is the State of Florida is a matter of an employee of the state government doing things that are "adverse to the state." I argued that "the state" for which my colleagues and I work is not personified by the current occupants of various political offices, and when any of us work to reverse or modify a state law -- most importantly the state's new voter-suppression law (substantially similar to the recent Georgia and Texas anti-voting laws) -- we are not being adverse to the state. We are, in fact, doing exactly what the people should want us to do: using the expertise that made us worth hiring in the first place to point out when the state's politicians have made mistakes.
In other words, l'état n'est pas le roi. Yes, I know. Invoking a French term in a country where many politicians insisted on renaming pommes frites "Freedom Fries" is a risky move. Seriously, however, just as the oath that military service members recite is a commitment to the Constitution rather than the President, so is a university professor's job the pursuit of the truth, not mindless support for the politicians currently in power.
My second major point in last Friday's column is where I want to pick up today. I argued that the state's politicians who pressured UF's administrators to make this mistake -- unless, as one commenter on my column suggested, this is a matter of the administrators anticipating what the politicians wanted, without being asked -- now have a serious problem. They have put a major blot on the reputation of this university, undermining the progress that was made possible by the university's supporters in and out of government, who for years have provided the resources necessary to allow UF to rise in the all-powerful rankings. That damage, I argued, is very difficult to reverse.
Building on that argument, it is important here to take the next step and ask what the politicians in the state will do next. As the title of the column suggests, this could paradoxically end up being good for the university. If not, however, things could take a very bad turn.