The fight against Tallahassee's tightening grip at UF: lessons learned and next steps

• In Event: DeSantis’s Higher Education Agenda, Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), and Student Protest

Proposal

Since its founding in Fall 2021, the University of Florida chapter of the YDSA has collaborated with labor unions on campus to oppose the political interference of the state legislature.
In Fall 2021, the administration of the University of Florida prevented several professors from testifying as expert witnesses in legal cases against the state government and discouraged two professors from teaching courses on Critical Race Theory. Following the news, our chapter organized a large protest with the faculty union, the graduate student union and other campus groups. This was followed by an on-campus Teach-In on academic freedom with students, faculty, and staff. These protests were ultimately not successful in ending the continued political interference at UF from Tallahassee. In 2022, when the Board of Trustees announced that the conservative Republican Senator Ben Sasse, was selected as the sole finalist in the search for our university’s new President, our YDSA chapter joined the unions and progressive student groups on campus to occupy a hall where Sasse was speaking. Despite the size of this and follow-up protests, Ben Sasse was still appointed President of UF. I argue that these experiences reveal
that traditional pressure campaigns aren't effective at winning demands or changing the behavior of the state/administration in Florida. Nevertheless, pressure campaigns are able to
mobilize students, raise militancy, and grow the membership base of our chapters.

These experiences have also shown that for many structural reasons, the energy in fighting the administration and state is more pronounced among the student body than the faculty. However, while more enthusiastic about fighting the administration, students have less power to oppose the state than do faculty who have the power to withhold their labor and cause a crisis for the state. For this reason, I argue that the goals of student-led protests and other actions should be (in addition to recruitment, leadership development, and spreading socialist perspectives) to draw stronger links between educators and their students/community members and to increase/support the rank-and-file activity of educators. Additionally, pressure campaigns present an opportunity for socialists to educate militant students on the power of labor and recruit students to become educators and future union members. The long-term goal is the creation of more militant rank-and-file led education unions which, with the support of students and community members, can lead the fight against fascism in Florida and elsewhere.

Author

• Oscar E Alvarez, Young Democratic Socialists of America at FIU