The closing of the Florida mind

Samuel Joeckel has been teaching a unit on racial justice in his writing class at Palm Beach Atlantic for twelve years. This year, a student complained about the unit to his parents, who complained to the university president. Joeckel is now out of a job. White Christian nationalist Florida Governor (and presumptive presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis visited the university the very evening he was terminated.[1]

A representative of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, of which Palm Beach Atlantic is a member, said she was familiar with the case [of Samuel Joeckel] but, citing “an ongoing investigation and an [human relations] issue,” declined to comment on its specifics. “The CCCU supports our member institutions and their individual missions as they carry out the Lord’s work on their campuses,” Amanda Staggenborg, the council’s chief communications officer, said in an email to The Chronicle. “The CCCU does not make decisions dictating curricula or how it is taught at our campuses. Knowing that all truth is God’s truth, we trust that our students will graduate with a better understanding of themselves and the world around them having been exposed to and challenged by a broad spectrum of academic theories.”[2]

Joeckel is suing and appears to have a substantial case.[3] It will be no surprise that my sympathies lie with Joeckel.

There is a naïve imagination that the humanities can easily be separated from politics. Go to a museum, see endless still life paintings of bowls of fruit. As a critical theorist, I roll my eyes: Why is this artist painting bowls of fruit? What is the artist not saying when they paint such subjects? Why do they constrain themselves to something so utterly mundane? What expression is so controversial, so dangerous that they dare nothing more than a bowl of fruit?

And spare me any fascination with the interplay of light and color. Photographers deal with this all the time; indeed, it was a reason I refrained from taking some photographs as I passed the rock formations in northern New Mexico, southwestern Colorado, and southeastern Utah last year. Fundamentally, you do the same with any other subject. And sorry, no, that interplay in bowls of fruit is not that interesting and never was.

As a critical theorist, I’m supposed to see the omissions. A bowl of fruit omits so much as to be beyond staggering. The emptiness of such paintings is painful.

Joeckel’s class was on research writing.

The racial-justice unit is one of four in [Samuel] Joeckel’s class; the others focus on comedy and humor, gothic and horror, and gender equality. Across two class sessions in late January and early February, according to his syllabus, Joeckel gave a lecture on racial justice, covering such topics as the shifts in popular opinion of Martin Luther King Jr. over time, how usage of the term “racism” had evolved as a tool in political strategy, and racial disparities in in-school suspensions, interactions with police, and incarceration, according to materials he shared with The Chronicle.

Students also discussed the introduction to The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism, a 2019 book by Jemar Tisby, a professor of history at Simmons College of Kentucky. In the last of the three class sessions in the unit, students wrote an in-class essay in which they were asked to cite the lecture or the Tisby reading. (Each of the four units followed a similar format.) . . .

[Joeckel] deliberately paired two more “intense” topics — racial justice and gender equality — with two “lighter” topics — comedy and humor and gothic and horror — for that reason. “I was just trying to have a balanced approach in terms of topics and themes so that students, regardless of their personalities and intellectual predispositions, could find something in those four units that they can say, ‘I want to write a research essay on that topic,’” Joeckel said.[4]

Such essays are not supposed to be paintings of bowls of fruit. They are supposed to be on matters of some controversy, advancing scholarly knowledge. This is what research is about.

We cannot learn where we do not look. Academic freedom is fundamentally about the freedom to set preconceptions aside, to look honestly, to explore honestly, and then to speak honestly about what one finds. In a positivist paradigm, a moral evaluation of findings can only come after the findings themselves.

Palm Beach Atlantic is a Christian school.[5] To be accredited, however, it must in some degree accept a positivist approach, which is not by any means to say it must accept positivist conclusions or even the paradigm as a whole. It is a particular approach to knowledge that is at issue here, which, at any religious school, will lie in uneasy juxtaposition with a faith-based approach.[6]

That this juxtaposition poses a dilemma makes the work of religious institutions harder, not easier, is no excuse for retreat. Such indeed is the path of knowledge beyond the superficial. We praise scholars for tackling the difficult. We absolutely do not fire them.

  1. [1]Megan Zahneis, “A Florida Professor Lost His Job After Complaints About His Lessons on Racial Justice,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 17, 2023, https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-florida-professor-lost-his-job-after-complaints-about-his-lessons-on-racial-justice
  2. [2]Megan Zahneis, “A Florida Professor Lost His Job After Complaints About His Lessons on Racial Justice,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 17, 2023, https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-florida-professor-lost-his-job-after-complaints-about-his-lessons-on-racial-justice
  3. [3]Megan Zahneis, “A Florida Professor Lost His Job After Complaints About His Lessons on Racial Justice,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 17, 2023, https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-florida-professor-lost-his-job-after-complaints-about-his-lessons-on-racial-justice
  4. [4]Megan Zahneis, “A Florida Professor Lost His Job After Complaints About His Lessons on Racial Justice,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 17, 2023, https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-florida-professor-lost-his-job-after-complaints-about-his-lessons-on-racial-justice
  5. [5]Megan Zahneis, “A Florida Professor Lost His Job After Complaints About His Lessons on Racial Justice,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 17, 2023, https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-florida-professor-lost-his-job-after-complaints-about-his-lessons-on-racial-justice
  6. [6]David Benfell, “A theory of conservative epistemology,” Not Housebroken, February 7, 2023, https://disunitedstates.org/2022/08/06/a-theory-of-conservative-epistemology/

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