Fla. Lawmakers Aim to Give Boards Power to Amend Gen Ed

The state boards governing Florida’s public colleges and universities showed this spring that they’re willing to change curricula statewide—and to publicly cite “ideology” as their motivation—when both ordered their institutions to remove sociology from the courses that could fulfill general education requirements.

State University System of Florida chancellor Ray Rodrigues said in March, when his Board of Governors axed the Introduction to Sociology offering for universities, that “sociology as a discipline is now social and political advocacy dressed in the regalia of the academy,” The Miami Herald reported. The Board of Education followed suit in April for state colleges, with board chair Ryan Petty saying in a news release that “general education courses must be grounded in rigorous scholarship and the accurate teaching of history. They cannot be mired in ideology or used as vehicles for indoctrination.”

Now, the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature has passed legislation to give these boards more power to shape gen ed requirements. The boards currently can approve or reject institutions’ gen ed course lists. House Bill 5601E would give them the power to amend those lists as well.

It’s another example of red state legislatures’ growing willingness to intervene in curricular matters that were traditionally left to higher ed institutions and their faculty to decide.

The bill now just needs the signature of Gov. Ron DeSantis—a Republican who’s made his state a poster child for conservative higher ed overhauls—to become law. Robert Cassanello, president of the United Faculty of Florida union, said he thinks “we’re going to see a wholesale amending” of gen ed statewide.

“I don’t need a map to tell me what’s going to happen,” Cassanello said, pointing to what happened to sociology. He said the bill “represents yet another attack on the part of Florida lawmakers” on the “institutional autonomy of the state public colleges and universities.”

Over the weekend, legislators added the provision bolstering the boards’ power over gen ed to the House bill, which then overwhelmingly passed both the state House and Senate. Some Democrats joined Republicans in voting for the overall bill, which deals with much more than gen ed. Among other things, it would also transfer the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee campus to New College of Florida, which has been taken over by DeSantis’s conservative Board of Trustees appointees.

Democratic Rep. Anna Eskamani voted against the bill. She told Inside Higher Ed in an email that “decisions about academic curriculum belong in the hands of educators, subject matter experts, and institutional leaders, not political appointees.”

She said the gen ed change “represents another step in a troubling agenda by far-right politicians to erode academic freedom, sideline faculty expertise, and concentrate political control over higher education. Our colleges and universities exist to foster critical thinking, intellectual inquiry, and civic engagement, and those values are weakened when politics dictates what students can learn.”

Amy Reid, director of the free speech group PEN America’s Freedom to Learn Program, told Inside Higher Ed in an email that the “last-minute” change “raises concerns that they are placing politics over principle. Students are best served when faculty are able to make curricular decisions based on their expertise and classroom experience—not when politicians bend education to their ideological will.”

Spokespeople for the Board of Governors, Board of Ed and DeSantis didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment. Higher Education Budget Subcommittee chair Demi Busatta, a Republican who sponsored the altered version of the legislation, also didn’t respond, but she told The Gainesville Sun, “This is one of the ways that we can provide flexibility to our higher education system to make sure that they can do regular course of business every day without unnecessary barriers.”

Rodrigues, the state university system chancellor, told The Gainesville Sun that the change corrects an oversight from 2023’s Senate Bill 266, sweeping legislation that required the boards to review gen ed requirements. That state law banned public colleges and universities from spending state or federal money on activities that “advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion, or promote or engage in political or social activism.”

SB 266 further banned gen ed courses from including topics that “distort significant historical events,” teach “identity politics” or are “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent” in U.S. institutions “and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.” Later that year, the Board of Governors passed regulations for universities to comply with the law.

In early 2024, the board removed sociology from the state’s approved core course requirements, but allowed universities to keep it in their own core course requirement offerings. In 2025, the Board of Governors and Board of Ed both approved gen ed lists submitted by colleges and universities that collectively removed hundreds of classes—many related to race, gender and sexuality—from gen ed offerings.

Finally, this year brought the boards’ decision to force institutions to remove sociology from gen ed. Now, Cassanello, who’s an associate history professor at the University of Central Florida in addition to the UFF president, said he fears they will use the new power the Legislature is giving them to infuse teaching of morals and virtues into U.S. history and government courses. He said he expects “veneration of the founders,” “teaching of patriotic history,” lessons on the “genius of the free markets” and “a lot of the conservative reform language” dubbed “civics.”