Ron DeSantis condemned as Florida removes sociology as core college class
Educators are warning that college enrollment in Florida will plummet after
the state removed sociology as a core class from campuses in the latest round of Ron DeSantis’s war on “woke ideology”.
The Republican governor’s hand-picked board of education voted on Wednesday to replace the established course on the principles of sociology at its 12 public universities with its own US history curriculum, incorporating an “historically accurate account of America’s founding [and] the horrors of slavery”.
The board faced a backlash last summer for requiring public schools to teach that forced labor was beneficial to enslaved Black people because it taught them useful skills.
The removal as a required core course of sociology classes, which Florida education commissioner and staunch DeSantis acolyte Manny Díaz insisted without evidence had “been hijacked by leftwing activists”, follows several other recent “anti-woke” moves in education in Florida.
They include the banning an advanced placement class in African American studies, and last week’s board ruling crystalizing a plan by DeSantis, who dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination over the weekend, to abolish diversity, enquiry and inclusion (DEI) programs in Florida’s universities and colleges.
The American Sociological Association said there was no evidentiary basis for replacing the sociology course.
“This decision seems to be coming not from an informed perspective, but rather from a gross misunderstanding of sociology as an illegitimate discipline driven by ‘radical’ and ‘woke’ ideology,” the American Sociological Association said in a statement to the Guardian.
“Sociology is the scientific study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior, which are at the core of civic literacy and are essential to a broad range of careers.
