Schools were told to check all courses with descriptions or syllabi with words such as Israel, Palestine, and Zionism.
The head of Florida’s state university system has ordered all 12 public universities to review their teaching materials for content that may contain anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli bias.
“We are going to conduct a keyword search on course descriptions and course syllabi,” Chancellor Ray Rodrigues, a former Republican lawmaker who oversees the public university system, told the universities’ presidents in an Aug. 4 email. “Any course that contains the following keywords: Israel, Israeli, Palestine, Palestinian, Middle East, Zionism, Zionist, Judaism, Jewish, or Jews will be flagged for review.”
“This process will ensure that all universities are reviewing the same courses, and nothing falls through the cracks,” reads the email reviewed by The Epoch Times.
“Each university should then initiate a faculty review that will need to be completed by the conclusion of the fall semester,” Rodrigues wrote. “This review should flag all instances of either antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias identified and report that information to my office.”
The quiz was given in June at Florida International University (FIU). It came from an online course textbook called “Terrorism and Homeland Security,” and included a question that read, “When Israelis practice terrorism, they often refer to it as [blank],” with multiple-choice answers including “proactive attacks” and “terrorist defensive strategy.”
While Rodrigues’s email didn’t specify what counts as anti-Semitism or anti-Israeli bias, Florida does have a definition enshrined in state law.
It also includes long-understood examples of anti-Semitism, such as calling for death or harm on Jews or denying the scope of atrocities committed against European Jews during the Holocaust.
The state definition, which was developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, further expands to opinions critical to Israel. For example, it would be considered anti-Semitic under state law to “claim that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” or to “require of the Jewish state of Israel a standard of behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”
Rodrigues’s order, as well as Florida’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, has raised concerns among First Amendment advocates.
“Censoring teaching material to enforce political conformity is unconstitutional on a public campus in the United States of America,” the group said.