Florida Public Universities Ordered to Review Courses for Anti-Semitic, Anti-Israel Bias

People attend a pro-Palestinian rally at Bayfront Park in Miami, Florida, on Oct. 13, 2023. (Marco Bello/AFP via Getty Images)

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.”

Responding to a request for additional information, the university system sent only a copy of Rodrigues’s email. But Rodrigues told the Miami Herald in an interview that the directive was prompted by a controversial incident involving an online quiz perceived as biased against Israel.

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.”

The quiz was publicized on social media by pro-Israel accounts and drew attention of state Rep. Randy Fine, the only Jewish Republican member of the Florida Legislature, who took issue with the FIU’s explanation that the question was randomly drawn from a pool of 1,500 questions, and that the professor teaching the course has never reviewed the textbook or those questions.

“The answer for how this happened lies somewhere between ‘incompetence’ and ‘anti-Semitism.’ It is likely a portion of each,” the legislator wrote on X. “I have told the FIU president that unintentional Jew hatred due to university incompetence isn’t going to fly. There will be accountability.”

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.

Under Senate Bill 148, which was filed just days after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack on Israel and became law this March, anti-Semitism is defined as “a perception of Jewish individuals which may be expressed as hatred toward such individuals.”

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.

“These subjective standards won’t help Florida address genuine discrimination. Instead, campuses must consistently enforce existing laws that prohibit discriminatory harassment and true threats, while respecting First Amendment laws and norms,” said the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit group focusing on free speech in higher education.

“Censoring teaching material to enforce political conformity is unconstitutional on a public campus in the United States of America,” the group said.