It just got harder to teach sociology in Florida. The board of governors, which runs the state’s public university system, has developed a new introductory textbook and syllabus for sociology that exclude many of the bedrock areas of concern within the field, including gender and sexuality, social stratification, systemic racism and other forms of social inequality. Robert Cassanello, an associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida and president of the United Faculty of Florida union, told Inside Higher Ed on Saturday that all of the state’s public colleges had received new guidelines that warn against teaching content that might violate state law.
In 2023 the Florida Legislature passed a bill that bans curriculum at state-funded schools that supposedly teaches identity politics or diversity, equity and inclusion, or that suggests racism, sexism and other forms of oppression are embedded in American institutions.
Florida’s new textbook excludes chapters not just on race and ethnicity and gender and sexuality, but also on media and technology, global inequality and social stratification.
Florida’s new 267-page sociology textbook is an abbreviated version of the 669-page free and open-source “Introduction to Sociology 3e” and excludes chapters not just on race and ethnicity and gender and sexuality — the usual targets — but also on media and technology, global inequality and social stratification. There is also a suggested course framework or syllabus that instructors were expected to adopt just days before the spring semester. The materials appear to have been hastily prepared. The Gainesville Sun reported that during a Feb. 18 webinar about the state’s new sociology materials, one instructor called attention to several typos in the textbook.
Sadly, a handful of faculty members helped the board create these censored materials, after Anastasios Kamoutsas, the state’s education commissioner, crowed on social media that he’d removed one sociologist from the sociology-course work group for continuing to teach forbidden “gender ideology.” I understand that many are concerned about the costs of speaking up and resisting these political encroachments, but let’s at least not help them strip away our academic freedom. Cassanello, the union president, fears Florida is coming for history and psychology courses next.
Because sociology aims to better understand “today’s most divisive issues,” it’s hard to imagine how any sociology course, especially an introductory one, can be taught without delving into topics that have been censored. And that appears to be the point for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies on the board of governors. It’s rational to conclude that they don’t want sociology taught at all, and that it’s not just particular topics but the discipline as a whole that bothers them.
In 2024, DeSantis called sociology a “very mushy” field that promotes “radical woke ideologies.” And the board of governors — primarily composed of DeSantis political appointees — gets to decide when an offense has been committed along with what the appropriate curriculum ought to be.
But why sociology? We have seen the right go after critical race theory and area studies like Black studies and gender studies. Sociology is one of the first traditional disciplines the right is targeting in its entirety — and for good reason, given its ideological aims and political interests. This type of political play and abuse of power is just the sort of action sociology is designed to help students understand.
Sociology is about broad patterns and trends, but it can feel very personal. And that’s what worries the far right. Unlike the Florida politicians-turned-armchair sociologists who want everyone to think like them, professional sociologists do not tell students how to identify socially or politically or what to think about any social issue. We’re not brainwashing students. We couldn’t even if we wanted to, because students are more complex and less passive than our critics give them credit for. But we are asking them to think critically about why society is organized the way it is, and which social norms and values hold us together and which ones keep pulling us apart.
Students inevitably end up thinking about themselves and where they fall in all this. That’s what happened to me when I took my first sociology class — all of a sudden, I was questioning everything around me. This is evidence of budding “sociological imagination,” a classic principle that even the Florida-approved textbook highlights. It involves understanding how personal biographies intersect with history and how personal and social problems relate to one another.
Sociology is about broad patterns and trends, but it can feel very personal. And that’s what worries the far right.
Learning about social stratification — an area the board of governors wants erased — helps us understand how we are located differently in society according to any number of social categories, including gender, class, religion and age. Examining those “locations” helps us to not demonize each other but hopefully to recognize where people are coming from, even when we don’t like what they have to say.
No professor wants to sit around talking about students’ opinions and feelings without anchoring the conversation in research and scholarship. When I teach social methods, I tell my students I have my personal beliefs and I have my research: They are not unrelated, but they are not the same. Of course, our beliefs and backgrounds influence the topics we gravitate toward and the research questions we ask, but the whole point of sociology is not to take our own social locations for granted — not mine or anyone else’s, including my students’ or even Ron DeSantis’. President Donald Trump boasted after a Republican primary victory 10 years ago that he “loves the poorly educated.”
It’s clear that Florida’s push to invent and teach some kind of patriotic sociology is designed to do just that: educate poorly. Sadly, Florida’s public university graduates, those who major in sociology or just take classes in the field, won’t only be less prepared than other students, they’ll be left in the dark, without the unique tools that sociology offers to make sense of the world. As union president Cassanello warned, we should expect more of these political incursions into higher education curricula across the board, and into faculty research, too. It might seem like the people pushing censorship have all the power, but our ability to resist and challenge their legitimacy is a source of great power, too. I learned that in introductory sociology.
