Pylimitics

The latest irritating, disappointing, and astonishing story coming out of Florida is about Vinita Prabhakar and Fred Hawkins. And others.

Prabhakar is a professor of literature who has taught for years at “small, private liberal arts schools in Upstate New York.” By all reports, she’s quite good at it. She moved to Florida to be closer to her aging parents, giving up a job at Ithaca College to teach at South Florida State College. She says she shares the college’s stated values: the free exchange of ideas in an environment that embraces honesty, fairness, personal responsibility, and ethical leadership.

Hawkins is a local politician who resigned his elected position in the Florida legislature because he had been chosen to be the new president of South Florida State College. Chosen in what way, I don’t know, but it appears Florida governor Ron DeSantis made the decision. Interesting also because DeSantis suspended Hawkins in 2020 from his position on a County Commission because Hawkins “impersonated a law enforcement officer.”

The interesting thing about the decision process that resulted in “choosing” Hawkins is that it clearly didn’t include any consideration of experience or domain knowledge. Hawkins is not an academic, and holds only a Bachelor’s degree, which is in political science. There is no evidence that after he graduated from the University of Akron he spared a single backward glance at academia or education.

For years Prabhakar has been using the short story Bettering Myself by Ottessa Moshfegh to teach students about how to break through an initial emotional reaction to literature (the story features unpleasant scenes and characters) to arrive at an ability to critically examine the value of the story and the insights reading it can provide. When I say “for years,” this includes using it for six semesters at South Florida State College, during which she received quite positive feedback and reviews.

Nevertheless, Hawkins, who has presumably never attended a college-level class that taught critical thinking in the context of literature, didn’t like the story, and declared that it was “political.” Then he summarily fired Prabhakar, over the objections of Prabhakar’s dean and a vice president.

Maybe you’re familiar with the phrase “Florida man.” It’s an internet meme from a few years ago about the alleged prevalence of people performing irrational, ridiculous, and maniacal actions in the state of Florida. As an internet meme, you can’t assume it’s anything more than amplification of unrelated items and events, but there really are a lot of irrational things going on in Florida, for whatever reason. A lot of them have to do with their state government, which from the distant perspective of Massachusetts looks…well, odd, if not patently dysfunctional.

So what’s going on there, anyway? Too much sun baking their brains? Too much pollution winked at but now seeping into their bodies and addling their senses? I’ve visited Florida a few times, to see the tourist attractions. And maybe that’s part of it; an appreciable portion of their economy is based on shams. Things that provide an attractive, amusing appearance, but behind the scenes are something else altogether. It’s a mystery. It’s like the characters in an Elmore Leonard novel walked off the pages and are continuing their inanities in reality now.