The Gainesville-based university is planning to offer the "Data Feminisms" course in the upcoming semester within the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. The course is designed to help students develop "critical tools of inquiry need to approach data within a context of racialized, gendered, colonial, and classed systems of power." Little more is known beyond that – because according to Matt Lamb, associate editor of The College Fix, the university isn't sharing a current syllabus.
"Well, the class appears to be applying gender studies/gender ideology to data," he shares with AFN. "We can only gather that from what's already out there because the University of Florida refused to provide us with a current syllabus, even though their own policy says that information is supposed to be public."
Lamb said the school's reason for not sharing the syllabus is the course "has not been formalized" for the Fall semester and hasn't been taught for a year and a half. Yet the course is listed on the Gender Studies Department web page and in the Fall catalog.
"I would assume one reason the syllabus is supposed to be publicly available is so students can make a decision about whether they want to take that class," Lamb explains. "So, by not making it available they're not only withholding that information from us, but they're withholding that information from their students who pay the tuition."
The College Fix posted links to syllabi from the 2021 and 2022 years:
"In this course, we center how racial capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy define who is the subject or object of data collection, cleaning, analysis, and management." (Excerpt from 2021 syllabus)
"How do systems of anti-blackness, settler colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism effect data and science" – and "Is data justice possible? (Excerpts from 2022 syllabus)
Lamb finds it unfortunate there are many classes like this. "… In fact, I saw another university in Chicago that studies the intersection of feminism and critical race theory, and digital rhetoric …. This is unfortunately happening a lot," he states.
He also finds it disappointing that this class is being taught at a public university. He points out Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has made a lot of strides against the woke agenda in higher education.
"This is a university run by Ben Sasse, who is a Republican, who seems like a reasonable commonsense guy – and yet the public university is hiding this information from the media," he concludes.
Sasse, who became president of the University of Florida in early 2023, was twice elected to the U.S. Senate by voters in Nebraska. Prior to his time in the Senate, he served as president of Midland University, a private Lutheran university in Nebraska.
