Save sociology, save Florida’s State University System — from self-serving politics | Opinion

On Jan. 24, the Board of Governors of the State University System of Florida will meet at Florida State University to vote on whether to remove Introduction to Sociology from the social sciences section of the General Education Core Course options. The core course options are divided into five subject areas, with students required to pass one course in each area to ensure that they graduate with a broad, interdisciplinary education.

Last week, Florida’s education commissioner, Manny Díaz, Jr., pushed the removal of sociology from the Florida Colleges System through the State Board of Education, along with a ban on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programming. Díaz has celebrated his attack on sociology as a victory in Ron DeSantis’s counterproductive culture war, which has been fueled by unsubstantiated claims of “woke indoctrination” in state higher education.

Unfortunately, the commissioner’s crude misrepresentations of the sociology course and the core itself reveal that he and other unelected government bureaucrats are more concerned with scoring points with a conservative base than they are with the well-being of the university system.

As a proud professor of sociology who has taught the course to thousands of students in 15 years at Florida International University, I plead to members of the board to vote to keep the sociology course as part of core course options. In my personal opinion, removing the course is unnecessary and misguided top-down authoritarian censorship.

It completely ignores a recommendation to keep sociology in the core made by panel of state-wide expert faculty mandated by Senate Bill 266. It also goes against over 500 public comments, many by students, to keep sociology in the core. Removal of the course is a disservice to and is disrespectful of tuition-paying state university students. It denies students the freedom to choose the course from among seven options and assumes that they are incapable of critically assessing what they study.

In the course, students learn about the complex interactions between social institutions, groups and individuals. Díaz and colleagues have also misrepresented the role of theory in sociology, neglecting that a main objective of the course is to understand the relationship between theory and research. All foundational courses explore theories. One cannot pass Introduction to Sociology without critically understanding how robust and valid data is needed to support, challenge, and elaborate theories. This is a crucial skill for civic literacy in the current age of misinformation.

Sociology, as the foundation for other social sciences, focuses not only on how social life is shaped by race, class, and gender, but also examines a wide variety of social phenomena and dynamics like urbanism, aging, economic development, education, health, crime, immigration, environmental change and the like. Understanding how social institutions impact groups and individuals in varied ways is key to working effectively in a variety of professions such as business, social work, medicine, law, public administration and education. A sharp sociological imagination, grounded in data, is fundamental in tackling so many pressing real world problems in our state, such as how to ensure that all communities are prepared and safe in the face of natural disasters or how businesses can overcome organizational inefficiencies.

I request that the board vote to retain Introduction to Sociology for the benefit of students, the university system and the state. Removal of the course will serve a misguided political purpose and threaten to devolve the university system into a set of glorified trade schools.

These top-down threats to public higher education in Florida are already making it difficult to attract and retain talented students and faculty. Keeping sociology in the core will serve the broader purpose of continuing the growth of the SUS as nationally ranked institutions preparing students for a variety of professions with a well-rounded education. The university system should be a place where all Floridians can thrive, not be pawns for the ambitions of narrow-minded and self-serving bureaucrats and politicians.

Matthew D. Marr is associate professor of sociology in the department of global and sociocultural studies and the Asian studies program at Florida International University.