Tampa Bay Times
Fear of upsetting state officials is pervasive among faculty at the University of Florida, to the point that race-related references have been edited out of course materials and researchers felt pressure to destroy COVID-19 data, according to a report released Monday by a Faculty Senate committee.
The six-person panel was convened three weeks ago to investigate academic freedom issues after the university decided to bar three political science professors from testifying in a lawsuit against the state.
But its findings go well beyond that episode and were so disturbing — especially regarding COVID-19 research — that the group decided to speed up its work, said Danaya Wright, a constitutional law professor and former Faculty Senate chairperson who served on the committee.
“We knew it was much more widespread,” Wright said in an interview Monday. “We knew there was more silencing and pressure coming from above. The Big Above.”
UF restricted five other professors’ participation in legal cases against the state.
The committee received a flood of input from faculty, from stories about attempts to serve as expert witnesses to instances that dealt with race and COVID-19 research across disciplines.
The report discusses several “challenges” faced by UF researchers who were working on COVID-19 with an unidentified state entity. It describes “external pressure to destroy” data as well as “barriers” to accessing, analyzing and publishing the numbers. Taken together, the report said, those problems “inhibited the ability of faculty to contribute scientific findings during a world-wide pandemic.”
The report further states that UF employees were told “not to criticize the Governor of Florida or UF policies related to COVID-19 in media interactions.” It says they were told not to use their UF titles or affiliation in written commentary or to give oral presentations.
And faculty at UF Health expressed concerns over funding being in jeopardy if they did not adopt the state’s stance on pandemic regulations in opinion articles, the report says.
The allegations related to data destruction added a sense of urgency to the committee’s work, Wright said.
“COVID research, it is life and death to not be able to do your job,” Wright said. “To have your research that you’ve trained for so many years to be able to do, to have that research tabled, put on the shelf and ignored and not get it out there to the academic community to get it out there and see if it’s going to do any good.”
The report also details other allegations, including that “websites were required to be changed, that course syllabi had to be restructured, and that use of the terms “critical” and “race” could not appear together in the same sentence or document.”
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As a tenured faculty member, Wright said she feels a duty to speak up, though she said she wishes the issue was not perceived as faculty versus administration.
“We’ve reached a point where many faculty feel that wherever this pressure is coming from, it is interfering with our duty and loyalty and commitment and responsibility to seek the truth and make that knowledge available,” she said. “Faculty desperately want to do our jobs.”
The source of the pressure remains unclear, she said.
Just before the Thanksgiving break, a task force convened by the university reached a different conclusion on the issue of academic freedom, saying in its own report that “the University of Florida Board of Trustees ensures that the institution is free from undue influence by external persons or bodies through clear and consistently enforced policies and procedures.”
Asked to comment on the Faculty Senate report, a representative for the university declined to do so.
This Tampa Bay Times story was distributed by Tribune News Service.
