Nazi, Schmazi

A very well crafted reflection by Silke-MarieWeineck about the refusal of two separate University of Florida administrators to allow faculty members under their jurisdiction to testify in a Florida voting rights case. In eerily similar language, they maintain that university employees cannot be involved in activity which is adversarial to the state, as the university is a state agency. As one put it, "UF will deny its employees’ requests to engage in outside activities when it determines the activities are adverse to its interests. As UF is a state actor, litigation against the state is adverse to UF’s interests."

 

Think about the implications of this and it won't take you more than a few seconds to see 

 

a) the "state," in this instance, means Governor Ron deSantis and the Republican controlled legislature. Whether overturning some specific restrictions on voting is "against the state" depends on what you think the interests of the state are, which are not necessarily concordant with the authority of its current leaders. That's the whole point of the litigation.  

b) The formulation would also encompass any form of political activity including public speaking, writing op-eds, magazine articles or letters to the editor, giving interviews, campaigning for political candidates, lobbying legislators, or, taken literally, voting against incumbents.

 

c) If  "outside activities"  adverse to the interest of the ruling party are verboten, why are "inside activities," such as researching, publishing academic papers, and teaching students allowed? Logically, they should be even more strongly prohibited.

 

As Weinecke puts it, "Gleichschaltung is the process by which institutions are brought under the control of totalitarian ideology. It is frequently rendered as “coordination” or “synchronization,” but those terms lack the terrifying connotation of switches flipped, one by one, until the same ideological current flows through every previously independent institution." It goes on:

The implications of the assertion that the faculty must not act in a manner adverse to the regime’s interest — “activities that may pose a conflict of interest to the executive branch of the state of Florida create a conflict for the University of Florida” — are staggering. If you are not allowed to bear witness against voter suppression in court, why would you be allowed to study the effects of voter suppression in the first place, or to teach your students about them? Such research and such teaching are not in Ron DeSantis’s interest, either, and by the logic of Richardson’s denial, any activity that is not in Ron DeSantis’s interest is not in the interest of the University of Florida. Neither, one assumes, is research into the environmental toll of his climate policies, the human toll of his welfare policies, or the death toll of his Covid policies. A university declared an arm not simply of the state but of its partisan government ceases to be a university.

But that's where we are. That's the Republican concept of freedom.