Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns blasts Florida higher education bill banning DEI, certain curricula

Florida once again finds itself in the spotlight over controversial legislation, this time targeting higher education.

Filmmaker Ken Burns, known for his documentaries chronicling American history and culture, is weighing in on Florida bill (HB 999) that would ban funding for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at state colleges, give boards of trustees more power on hiring and firing, ban critical race theory and remove gender studies classes from curricula.

“America’s greatness stems not from its suppression of our complicated history but our willingness to engage and understand it,” Burns tweeted.

“Each generation has helped further bring to life the values articulated in the Declaration and made more perfect in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Our contribution should not be to silence those trying to understand the past more fully. By trying to dictate what teachers can and cannot teach, Florida House Bill 999 is an assault on the very liberties articulated by the Founders and something that all Americans should speak out against.”

By early Tuesday morning, Burns’ tweet had been shared 321 times, quote tweeted 16 times and liked 1,400 times. Some 77,000 people had viewed it.

The bill, filed by Republican Rep. Alex Andrade in late February, furthers Gov. Ron DeSantis’ higher education priorities, including calls to ban DEI, critical race theory “and other discriminatory programs and barriers to learning.”

“In Florida, we will build off of our higher education reforms by aligning core curriculum to the values of liberty and the Western tradition, eliminating politicized bureaucracies like DEI, increasing the amount of research dollars for programs that will feed key industries with talented Florida students and empowering presidents and boards of trustees to recruit and hire new faculty,” DeSantis said in a Jan. 31 statement. 

The bill drew swift condemnation from a number of higher education groups, including the American Association of University Presidents, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Coalition Against Censorship, that all collectively said the measure would “destroy higher education as we know it.”

“Florida’s HB 999 would destroy academic freedom, tenure, shared governance, and university independence in the state’s public higher education system” the organizations’ statement said, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “Simply put, it would make Florida’s colleges and universities into an arm of the DeSantis political operation.”

Forbes Senior Contributor Michael T. Nietzel, a former university President who writes about higher education, described the bill as a “full-on attempt to make Florida higher education serve the right-wing agenda” DeSantis is “trying to implement for the state’s public universities and colleges.”

And some professors have expressed concern that the bill would create “state-mandated censorship” and erode academic freedom, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a leading national college campus advocacy group, wrote that the latest higher education legislation is “a dangerous expansion of the unconstitutional ’Stop WOKE Act,’” which prohibited education in schools and workplaces that, essentially, teaches race relations or diversity in a way that implies a person or group is inherently racist.

A federal judge blocked parts of the law from being enforced, calling it “positively dystopian.” 

The latest bill, FIRE wrote, “is laden with unconstitutional provisions hostile to freedom of expression and academic freedom,” according to the group.

The group’s analysis points out that the bill does not define critical race theory, meaning “faculty teaching courses on history, philosophy, humanities, literature, sociology, or art would be required to guess what material administrators, political appointees, or lawmakers might label ‘identity politics’ — no matter how pedagogically relevant the material is to the course.”

By adding his name to the chorus of discontent, Burns is further elevating Florida Republicans’ efforts to reform higher education on a national stage.

Burns has been making documentaries for more than 40 years. He’s the brains behind numerous documentaries covering a wide range of historical events, figures or periods including the Holocaust, the Central Park Five, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Gettysburg and more. His frequent use of a film technique that pans and zooms still imagery was named the Ken Burns effect. 

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