Education

Florida Is Scouring College Textbooks for Antisemitism

Published

1 year ago

January 27, 2025

Florida Is Scouring College Textbooks for Antisemitism

The test questions from a class at Florida International University enraged Randy Fine, a state lawmaker endorsed by President Trump.

One of the questions, uploaded onto social media by a student, said that Palestine was a country before Israel was created. Another seemed to suggest that Zionists invented terrorism. To Mr. Fine, they were proof that college textbooks and the test materials that accompany them were awash in antisemitism.

Mr. Fine said it made him wonder, “How many other Muslim terror textbooks are being used in our university system?”

The sprawling State University System of Florida, which educates more than 430,000 students, has been trying to find out.

Ray Rodrigues, the system’s chancellor, removed the textbook, “Terrorism and Homeland Security,” from use in the system, pending a review. Then in August, he announced a remarkable effort that has worried some professors and advocates of academic freedom: All 12 universities he oversees were to set up faculty panels to vet course materials, including textbooks, for antisemitism and anti-Israel bias.

To Mr. Rodrigues, the test questions Mr. Fine objected to were not only biased or antisemitic, they were also illegal under a 2024 Florida statute that defines some criticism of Israel as antisemitic.

The subject of the class that sparked the statewide effort might seem unexpected. It was not in one of the disciplines, like sociology, that right-leaning lawmakers have targeted in recent years, arguing that they were bastions of left-leaning ideology.

Rather, the course was on terrorism and homeland security, taught by an instructor who had served in the Marines. And the primary author of the textbook is a longtime security researcher who oversaw local antiterrorism training efforts in a Republican administration.

“This is such a random, inappropriate choice,” said Martha Schoolman, an English professor who has spoken out against the textbook screening effort. “But it also doesn’t matter. Because once you’ve decided it’s your job to vet everything for antisemitism, nothing’s going to pass.”

She added, “This is a policy being made based on screenshot.”

The statewide vetting effort is unfolding at a time when academia is still reeling from the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas and the military response from Israel. Campuses that were roiled last spring by demonstrations protesting Israel’s bombing of Gaza have quieted. But under pressure from lawmakers, many colleges and universities have tightened their rules governing protests, expelled students for conduct violations and scrutinized classes.

The Florida effort stands out. At the K-12 level, conservatives have long pushed school districts to ban books and publishers to examine curriculum for inappropriate material. In higher education, though, such scrutiny had been relatively rare. The vetting of course materials has been squarely in the domain of professors and their departments.

Mr. Fine, who is Jewish and calls himself “the Hebrew Hammer,” is a rising star in the Republican Party. Mr. Trump endorsed him in November for the seat in Congress that Mike Waltz resigned to become Mr. Trump’s national security adviser.

To Mr. Fine, the test questions posted on social media in June were examples of anti-Israel bias. One question read: “In which country did the Zionists purchase land to create their new homeland?” The answer was Palestine. But Palestine was Ottoman territory before the First World War and administered by Britain after that; it was not a country.

Another test question appeared to imply that extremist Zionist organizations invented terrorism. But terrorism existed long before the Middle East conflict.

Mr. Fine began searching for accountability. At first he looked to the course instructor, Mario Reyes, an adjunct professor. Mr. Fine wrote on social media that Mr. Reyes “shouldn’t buy green bananas for his office,” suggesting that his days in the job were limited. But after learning that Mr. Reyes, a Marine veteran who works for the Department of Defense, did not write the test questions, he turned his attention instead to the textbook and its authors.

The primary author of the book, Jonathan R. White, has credentials hardly seem associated with a pro-Palestinian bias. He served in the George W. Bush administration after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and taught about terrorism and homeland security for decades at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. He conducted counterterrorism training for police and military forces, according to his biography.

Dr. White, who recently retired and became a pastor, did not respond to requests for comment.

In an interview, Mr. Fine acknowledged that he had not read the textbook that he described as “pro-Muslim terror.” But he said he was assured by university officials that the book was problematic.

Mr. Rodrigues, who said in an interview that he had reviewed the book, was more tempered. He said the book contained “anti-Israel bias,” though he did not cite specific examples.

A review of the textbook by The New York Times found that it was more nuanced than the three test questions. The textbook does not say or imply that Palestine has been an independent country in modern times, nor that Zionists invented terrorism.

In a book passage that appears to be the basis of one of the test questions under scrutiny, the author provided an Israeli perspective that terrorism in the region was associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization. It also included a Palestinian perspective that Israelis had used terrorist tactics until they developed a conventional military force.

But it appears that the textbook author was not behind the test questions, either.

Cengage Group, the book’s publisher, said in a statement that it had used a third-party vendor to write questions intended to quiz students on the material contained in the book. The company said that the questions “did not live up to our standards” and that it had halted digital and print sales of the book while it conducts a “full academic review” to ensure the content is free of bias.

Brian Connolly, a history professor at the University of South Florida, said the questions were poorly constructed, but flowed from the textbook’s more nuanced writing.

“If we’re going to focus on poorly written multiple-choice questions,” Dr. Connolly said, “then it’s going to take the state university system the rest of their lives to address that.”

The book remains under review by the state university system.

In August, Mr. Rodrigues gave marching orders to the college presidents to look for other examples of textbooks and teaching materials that contained antisemitism or anti-Israel bias.

He said that the materials to be reviewed would be identified by keyword searches of course descriptions and syllabuses. The search words included “Israel,” “Israeli,” “Palestinian,” “Middle East,” “Zionism,” “Judaism” and “Jews.”

Mr. Rodrigues said that antisemitism would be identified using a definition put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Under that definition, calling the creation of Israel a “racist endeavor” or holding Israel to a “double standard” would qualify as antisemitic. The definition has been criticized on college campuses by some who argue that it protects Israel from legitimate criticism.

Academic freedom groups like the American Association of University Professors have blasted the state textbook-vetting effort, calling it “thought policing” that “deepens Florida’s increasingly authoritarian approach to higher education.”

Faculty members have said that it may violate their collective-bargaining agreement, which grants professors the right to “determine pedagogy.”

And the Association of Jewish Studies said the effort disproportionately singles out for scrutiny instructors who teach Jewish Studies and related fields.

Laura Leibman, the president of the group, said the effort represented good intentions gone awry. She said she worried about having people without subject-matter expertise vetting course materials based on murky criteria.

“That struck at the heart of academic freedom,” she said.

Professor Schoolman, who is Jewish, said the entire exercise might seem like a farce. “The whole system has to be turned upside down to find antisemitic needles in a haystack,” she said. But she also worried that it may signal more political battles to come over what professors can say and teach.

In the interview, Mr. Rodrigues said that faculty members would conduct the reviews and send their findings to the university system’s Board of Governors before the board meets this week. If bias is identified, he said, experts would be brought in to examine the materials further.

“We need to identify whether this was an anomaly,” Mr. Rodrigues said about the homeland security test questions, “or whether it’s part of a broader problem.”

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Education

Art Abounds on Campuses Outside of New York City

Published

1 hour ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

Art Abounds on Campuses Outside of New York City

The Princeton University Art Museum recently made Time magazine’s top 100 list of The World’s Greatest Places of 2026. James Steward, director of the museum that reopened on Halloween in an acclaimed new building designed by Adjaye Associates, said of the ranking, “It normalizes the idea that we are a world-class destination.”

In its first five months alone, the museum has received 250,000 visitors — more than half from outside campus (Princeton’s old museum averaged 200,000 annually).

The surge of public interest in the Princeton museum’s new home, spotlighting a global collection of more than 117,000 objects, is a timely reminder that university and college art museums are filled with unexpected treasures — often showcased in architecturally significant buildings — and are free and accessible to all. Here are several standout exhibitions at academic museums in range of New York City that are worth a visit this month, when campuses are looking their spring best for reunions and graduations.

The glorious modernist home of the Yale Center for British Art — Louis I. Kahn’s last design, completed in 1977 after his death — reopened in March 2025 after a two-year architectural conservation. In the year since, the museum has welcomed 100,000 visitors and almost 300 class visits to study its collection of more than 100,000 works from the 15th century to today that present an expansive understanding of British art and its imperial history.

“British art isn’t an island story, it’s a global story,” said Martina Droth, the center’s director. A contemporary installation by Rina Banerjee, a recent acquisition on view for the first time through Sept. 13 in the museum’s entrance court, and the exhibition “Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850,” up through June 21, both speak to a deep connection to India.

“If British art is shaped by movement and exchange, then in ‘Painters, Ports, and Profits’ you see British artists who traveled to India because of the East India Company and found themselves working alongside Indian artists,” Droth said. “New things happen in terms of the aesthetics of the work, and you can really see that in the exhibition.”

The 115 works are mostly drawn from the collection and almost half are by Indian artists and workshops, including “Lucknow from the Gomti,” a 37-foot panoramic scroll of life along the river in that city in Northern India and a star of the show.

Banerjee, who was born in Kolkata and lived in London before moving to New York, has remade the form of the Taj Mahal in hot-pink semi-translucent plastic. Visible from the street through the glass doors and dangling from the ceiling, her playful floating sculptural palace allows visitors to enter and discover all sorts of colonial relics and commercial baubles embedded within.

The Johnson Museum opened in 1973 in an I.M. Pei-designed building, which rises seven stories and frames spectacular views of the landscape with its expansive vertical and horizontal windows and fifth floor cantilevered over an open porch. The global collection numbers more than 40,000 objects, with particular strength in Asian art, and college classes made 335 visits in the last academic year.

Students from Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences have spent considerable time with the exhibition “Naples: Course of Empire,” a series of seven panoramic canvases by Alexis Rockman on view through June 7, according to the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Andrea Inselmann. Over the last four decades, Rockman has been a leading voice in the art world raising awareness about climate change through his paintings focused on all forms of life on Earth.

The works in this show were “inspired by Thomas Cole’s 19th-century cycle ‘The Course of Empire’ about the rise and fall of civilizations,” said Inselmann, who organized the exhibition. Taking Naples as a case study of a port city vulnerable to rising waters, Rockman used his signature style of deeply researched and lyrically rendered history painting to reimagine this landscape over geologic time starting from the Mesozoic Era. Paintings depict animals fleeing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.; a rat flying over Naples spewing a noxious plume during the bubonic plague of the 1650s; and a whale breaching before the ruins of the city in a speculative post-human future.

“I thought this would be a very appropriate show for a college context,” Inselmann said. “Especially for younger generations, I think it provides a context and an environment to talk about climate change and to express their anxieties or their hopes for the future.”

On Skidmore’s campus in Saratoga Springs, famous for its horse racing and natural mineral springs, the Tang punches above its weight for a small liberal arts college museum with an ambitious exhibition program in a striking building designed by Antoine Predock. The museum generates about a dozen shows annually — often from its collection of nearly 20,000 objects, with strengths in contemporary art and photography — and drew more than 220 class visits from across disciplines this school year.

Anchoring the Tang’s 25th anniversary season this spring is “Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes,” a three-decade retrospective of the artist’s playful, inventive and sometimes jarring small-scale ceramic sculptures on view through July 26. “Kathy bridges the generation of Robert Arneson and Viola Frey, who were her teachers and innovators that moved ceramics from a purely craft environment to a museum and art conversation, and the world we’re in today where we see ceramics in lots of different ways all over gallery exhibitions,” said the Tang director Ian Berry, who organized the show. “Kathy is a real inspiration and key figure for this current moment.”

Forty-five of her eccentric vessels — miniature three-dimensional canvases for experimental glazes and textures, often crumpling expressively on their bases — are grouped chronologically across three huge platforms serving as the “rooms” of the show. Within the constraints of small shifts in scale, from four to eight inches say, “an entire universe changes,” Berry said. The title of the show comes from one of Butterly’s works. “‘Assume’ adds a little twist to the exclamation point of ‘Yes’,” he said. “It’s optimistic, it’s upbeat, but also it has a complexity to it.”

Alongside Princeton’s encyclopedic collections, displayed throughout the museum’s stunning complex of nine interlocking modernist pavilions, is “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945-50” — the first temporary loan exhibition in the new building — on view through July 26.

The show is built around Princeton’s own 1948 painting “Black Friday” — exhibited that year in de Kooning’s debut show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York after he had struggled there in poverty for 15 years.

“It emerged as one of the essential pictures in de Kooning’s career,” said Steward, Princeton’s museum director, who agreed to loan “Black Friday” to the Museum of Modern Art for its major de Kooning retrospective in 2011 organized by the chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield.

Now, in turn, Elderfield has co-curated this exhibition of 18 paintings, drawn from more than a dozen museums and private collections and focused on the pivotal period when de Kooning found his artistic voice and helped to pioneer Abstract Expressionism.

“It is just such an incisive project that is physically modest in scope, but not modest at all intellectually or artistically,” Steward said. “That’s a sweet spot I really want us to occupy as a great academic museum.”

Education

Today, In Short

Published

13 hours ago

May 7, 2026

Press Room

One of my favorite podcasts is “So True With Caleb Hearon,” hosted by Hearon, a comedian. He recently appeared in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” as Miranda Priestly’s assistant. Having grown up, as Hearon put it, “fat, gay and poor” in rural Missouri, he never dreamed of booking the role “a million girls would kill for.”

Here’s what you need to know

Middle East: Iran said yesterday that it was reviewing an American proposal to end the war. Washington is still awaiting Tehran’s response.
California: Last night was the final televised debate before the primary for the state’s governor. The face-off between seven candidates was tame at first, but they eventually furiously attacked one another. See what went down.
Hantavirus: Should you worry? Public health officials say the threat to the general public remains low based on what we know. Read more about the hantavirus.
Jeffrey Epstein: A federal judge released a suicide note believed to be written by the convicted sex offender that had been sealed for years.
Ted Turner: Turner, the media mogul, yachtsman and creator of CNN, died yesterday at his home in Florida. He was 87.

On an online note …

A few things you didn’t really need to know but now do:

It’s been nearly 20 years since Guy Goma’s BBC appearance became an early viral internet moment. Goma thought he was interviewing for a job when he suddenly he found himself on air. He pulled it off much better than I could have.
How are people getting their information about health and wellness? For at least half of U.S. adults under 50, it’s through influencers or podcasters, according to a new analysis.
Clavicular, the looksmaxxing influencer, has been charged with shooting at an alligator during a livestream.

The New York Knicks hung on to the series lead in a 108-102 thriller against the Philadelphia 76ers. Game 3 is set for tomorrow in Philadelphia.

Before you go, a quick recommendation

Nineteen books were recognized as winners or finalists of the Pulitzer Prize. I may add some to my reading list.

Education

How Did You Grow and Change This School Year?

Published

1 day ago

May 7, 2026

Press Room

How Did You Grow and Change This School Year?

The 2025-26 academic year is coming to a close, and we have a post describing 10 ways to reflect on these last months and learn from them. But the 10 ways aren’t just for students — we also hope teachers can benefit from them. In fact, we would be delighted if teachers and students did some of the exercises together and told us what happened!

We invite you to post a comment reflecting on any aspect of this school year that you would like to make public, and we have provided some questions below to get you started.

We hope, too, that you will not only post your own reflections but also comment on the thoughts of others. As always, our staff will moderate comments, and we can’t wait to learn from you.

Students and teachers, read our related list of reflection ideas from which the questions below are drawn and then answer any of them that resonate with you. Please identify yourself as a teacher or a student when you post.

What do you want to remember about this school year? Why?
What are you especially grateful for this year? To whom would you most like to write a letter of gratitude if you could?
What surprised you?
What successes are you most proud of?
What challenged you? What helped you face or overcome those challenges?
What did you learn that most matters to you, whether in or out of school?
What new skills, however small, did you acquire?
How have you grown — as a student, a friend, a community or family member or a person?
How could you build on that growth next year?
What would you like more of in your life? What would you like less of? Why?
What music would be on the playlist of your 2024-25 school year? Why?
What books did you read this year that you would recommend to others? Why?
About what, if anything, did you change your mind? How did that happen?
If you were to collect and graph some data about your life this school year, what would you choose to graph, and what do you think it might show? What could you learn from it?

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.

Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.