Joint Statement Denouncing Florida HB 999
The following statement of endorsement was drafted by the MLA Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities. The Executive Council approved it as an MLA statement in March 2023.
The MLA joins the AAUP, the ACLS, and other organizations in condemning Florida HB 999, legislation that promises to undermine academic freedom in that state’s public higher education system and particularly aims to suppress voices and perspectives of marginalized and underrepresented groups. College and university campuses should be sites of vibrant, broad, and open dialogue, of testing divergent and often opposed ideas. By concentrating faculty hiring power in the hands of trustees, creating coercive post-tenure reviews, and eliminating majors in many areas concerned with questions of race and gender, Florida would quash pedagogically productive debate and replace it with ideological uniformity.
In March 2023, the Executive Council approved adding the association’s signature to the following statement, drafted by the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Coalition Against Censorship.
Download the statement as a PDF.
The AAUP, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) issued the following statement condemning the introduction of Florida HB 999.
With the introduction of HB 999, the Florida legislature—at Governor DeSantis’s urging—has doubled down on its attacks on academic freedom with a bill that would effectively silence faculty and students across the ideological spectrum and purge whole fields of study from public universities. This bill substitutes the ideological beliefs of those in power for the freedom that is necessary for colleges and universities to serve the common good and function as intellectual centers where young people succeed and where the ideas that drive our country’s economy and democracy are ignited.
Florida’s HB 999 would destroy academic freedom, tenure, shared governance, and university independence in the state’s public higher education system. The bill would place control of core curricula and institutional mission statements entirely in the hands of political appointees. It would limit or ban students’ ability to pursue certain majors or areas of study. Simply put, it would make Florida’s colleges and universities into an arm of the DeSantis political operation.
Historically, autocratic regimes have set their sights on cultural centers, the arts, and colleges and universities, because they see these places as threats to their power and control. The events unfolding in Florida are state-sponsored efforts to stifle ideas, silence debate, and limit the autonomy of educational institutions whose faculty, staff, students, or administrators may disagree with the party in power. Faculty, advocates of academic freedom and anyone interested in preserving our democracy must fight these draconian measures with everything we have—in Florida and in every other state where they appear.
Irene Mulvey, American Association of University Professors
Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers
Chris Finan, National Coalition Against Censorship
Organizational Endorsers
AAUP Oregon State Conference
Association of University Presses
University of Southern California AAUP Chapter
AAUP Connecticut State Conference
United Academics of the University of New Mexico, AAUP/AFT
Canadian Association of University Teachers
Modern Language Association
If your organization would like to endorse this statement, please email gbradley@aaup.org.
Publication Date:
Monday, February 27, 2023