A Florida professor said the university where he teaches has delayed renewing his contract until an investigation can determine if he has been “indoctrinating students.”
Sam Joeckel, an English professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University (pictured), told WPBF he was informed by the school’s dean his “contract renewal [had been] delayed pending an investigation into the material I use.”
The material in question is “a unit on racial justice” he has been teaching “for many years,” he explained to CNN. He now says that topic has landed him in “hot water.”
“I was told that the concern is that I’m indoctrinating students,” he said, per WPBF.
An employee handbook from the university indicates all of its employees work on an “At-Will” basis.
Joeckel told CNN he believes the investigation is “definitely related to a hostile political culture” referring to a series of actions on education by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).
“Of course I can’t say with certainty the connection, but things like this do not happen in a vacuum,” he told CNN.
These actions include “eliminating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) bureaucracies,” as Breitbart News noted in January, quoting DeSantis:
“If you look around the country — and Florida is not immune to this — there’s really a debate going on about what is the purpose of higher education, particularly publicly funded higher education systems,” he said.
“And I think you have the dominant view, which I think is not the right view, but the dominant view is the use of higher education under this view is to impose ideological conformity to try to provoke political activism, and that’s what a university should be, that’s not what we believe is appropriate in the state of Florida,” he continued, detailing his proposals.
In an Instagram post, Joeckel again seemed to suggest a connection between his contract renewal delay and DeSantis’s higher education policies, writing in the caption, “I had to laugh when the Dean cut short the meeting so that he could prepare for the arrival of Ron DeSantis and his speaking engagement on campus.”
A representative of the school declined to comment on the matter, per WPBF.
You can follow Michael Foster on Twitter at @realmfoster.