The Florida legislature periodically considers laying the groundwork for a purge of academics of whose political leanings it disapproves. Usually, such nonsense dies on the vine.
This year, it's apparently gaining momentum. So at the risk of redundancy, I had to break out the annual "wow, that is a spectacularly bad idea" post.
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An unimaginably long time ago, I was a graduate student in normative political theory, also known as political philosophy. It wasn’t necessarily one of my better life choices, but I didn’t know that at the time. My small and scrappy group of peers and I tried to blast our way through the canon of Western political thought -- from Plato to NATO, as we said then -- along with the then-current layers of interpretation. I had to learn to do battle with Benjamin Barber on Rousseau, with Stephen Eric Bronner on Habermas, with Linda Zerilli on Judith Butler, with Jackson Lears on Eugene Debs, and with Carey McWilliams on John Dewey. (Peers included such current stars as Manfred Steger, known for his work on globalization; Cristina Beltran, known for her work on Latino politics and identify; and Patrick Deneen, known for his work on liberalism.) It was a different time.