Florida Lawmaker Wants to Ban Gender Studies and Hold Tenured Professors Accountable

TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA — A Republican lawmaker is bringing out the artillery for the Florida GOP’s ongoing war on “wokeness” with a new bill that would disintegrate Leftist strongholds in state colleges and universities.

Last week, Rep. Alex Andrade (R-Pensacola) filed HB 999, which would require public universities to remove “any major or minor in Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor of these belief systems.”

Many of the bill’s reforms are similar to those proposed by Governor Ron DeSantis on January 31. The governor coined the now popular slogan: “Florida is where woke goes to die.”

EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT

In addition to abolishing the Left-wing degree programs, Andrade’s legislation would also prohibit general education courses that “suppress or distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics, such as Critical Race Theory, or defines American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”

Andrade also wants to ban universities from using “diversity, equity, and inclusion statements, Critical Race Theory rhetoric, or other forms of political identity filters” when hiring or promoting employees – including university presidents.

Additionally, his bill would chip away at the job security of tenured faculty members by permitting school leadership to initiate a post-tenure review “with cause.”

MOCKING THE MELTDOWN

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and the American Association of University Professors declared that the bill “would destroy higher education as we know it.” Speaking at the New College of Florida board meeting last week, one Left-wing protester said the bill “should be numbered 666.”

Andrade mocked the outrage in a sarcastic tweet: “Given the meltdown over HB 999, I’m beginning to wonder how American Democracy survived for over 200 years without publicly funded courses on gender studies & CRT.”