Usually, a public university system’s decision to drop one required undergraduate course would not trigger fears about the ideologically driven destruction of American higher education. Unless, of course, the public university system in question was located in Florida. Unless, of course, those spearheading the plan were Florida Republicans. And unless the class in question was “The Principles of Sociology.”
Florida has voted to drop this introductory course as a general education requirement. It will be replaced by a history offering. Sociologists are, justifiably, disconsolate.
The administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis, conversely, is ebullient. In a tweet, Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz Jr. affirms:
Sociology has been hijacked by left-wing activists and no longer serves its intended purpose as a general knowledge course for students.
— Manny Diaz Jr. (@PresMannyDiazJr) December 8, 2023
Under @GovRonDeSantis, Florida’s higher education system will focus on preparing students for high-demand, high-wage jobs, not woke ideology.…
This strike at sociology is very on-brand for the Florida GOP. We know about DeSantis’ ongoing crusade to commandeer all leadership positions at New College of Florida. Elsewhere, a proverbial Florida Man (with the checkered past and absence of relevant credentials that such an identity entails) has been installed as the leader of South Florida State College. The American Association of University Professors chronicled this and other outrageous Sunshine State power grabs in a report so full of absurd details that it reads like a campus novel.
Those attacks on schools and professors have involved a very top-down approach. De-platforming a gateway sociology course, by contrast, is awfully bottom-up. Why wage this particular micro-battle?
The right is gunning for sociology because it believes the discipline inculcates left-wing ideology. This is incorrect.
In one sense, the right is simply following its script. Movement conservatism is (paradoxically) determined to demonstrate that it can disrupt any long-standing American tradition, be it the peaceful transition of power, settled SCOTUS case law, or a college course your grandma likely took. Sociology 101 has been a staple of college liberal arts curricula since the 1950s. Millions of undergrads have taken some iteration of it over the past eight decades.
I was one of them. My quirky college instructor could see the hidden causes of complex social problems the way a clairvoyant could see dead people. Did that guy really claim that sociology — and only sociology — could make sense of the Salem witch trials?
He did! All those accused of sorcery, he observed, were related to mercantile capitalists, and all their accusers were related to agrarian clans. The agriculturalists of Salem Village mistook the members of a rising (and destructive) economic class for the devil himself. (I later learned he was riffing on the brilliant thesis of Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum in “Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft.”)
Unable to get the craggy melody of sociology out of my head, I later pursued a doctorate. I taught introductory sociology, inflicting my own clairvoyance upon the youth. And, I respectfully submit, while the Florida GOP is completely mistaken about this discipline, it has good reason to be afraid.








