The State University System of Florida will be conducting a review of all Florida public university syllabuses for anything that might be considered antisemitic or anti-Israel.
Staff will use a keyword search on all available online course descriptions and syllabuses to find words like, “Israel, Israeli, Palestine, Palestinian, Middle East, Zionism, Zionist, Judaism, Jewish, or Jew.”
If these words come up, courses will be flagged for review by university administrators and professors who teach the content, and materials potentially pulled.
Robert Cassanello is a history professor at University of Central Florida. He’s worried this is another way to police free speech on college campuses in Florida.
“But at some point, you know that entire system can be used to search for things like gender, race, institutional racism and things like this. And I think this is where people are concerned that it's going to start here, but where does all this end? And then at what point are we all impacted,” asked Cassanello.
Cassanello said it’s actions like these that are causing many faculty to give up on teaching altogether, at least at Florida universities.
“We spend all this money to get a Ph.D. and we take jobs that pay us much less than our education. We should at least be allowed to have academic freedom and the right to free speech in the classroom, and to take that away is taking away our dignity,” said Cassanello.
The review will begin after the fall semester starts. The rules were put in place after a Florida International University textbook and accompanying online quiz were called out for possible antisemitism.
The test question asked, “When Israelis practice terrorism, they often refer to it as (blank).” Answers included proactive attacks and terrorist defense strategies.
Brevard Republican state Rep. Randy Fine called the book “Terrorism and Homeland Security” antisemitic. The book was pulled, with all other Florida universities confirming they don’t use the book in class.
The action also comes months after the Legislature voted on a new, more wide-ranging definition for the word antisemitism to include, “a certain perception of Jewish individuals which may be expressed as hatred toward such individuals. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish and non-Jewish individuals and their property and toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
At the end of the last school year, protests broke out on college campuses across the country, including in Florida, over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered schools to expel or even deport students who were antisemitic during these protests.
The U.N. estimates more than 35,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed in Gaza because of the fighting. Now, people are fighting a different war: a polio outbreak, which could hurt unvaccinated children disproportionately.
Read the new definition of antisemitism the Florida legislature adopted:
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