At a time in our history when hundreds of thousands of young Americans have been deployed to Iraq, and thousands of them have died there, a 2006 National Geographic survey revealed that only 37 percent of young Americans ages 18-24 can point to Iraq on a world map. This survey also reported that just five years after 9/11 less than half the young people in their sample could even find New York! Considering this deficit in American geographic literacy, doesn’t this seem like a brilliant time for the Florida Legislature to cut university budgets so severely that FSU will be forced to eliminate it’s Geography Department?

Geography is just one of dozens of Florida State University programs that will be violently slashed or eliminated altogether should the House version of the Higher Education budget become law. Also on the FSU chopping block are such essential programs as Geological Sciences (ever heard the expression "dumb as dirt?"), Oceanography (no need for THAT program in a place like Florida), Physical Education and Recreational Management (there goes half the football team), Software Engineering (who needs computers in the 21^st Century anyway?), just to name a few.

Some might say this lame-brained proposal is due to the economic crisis we’re in. It’s true that revenues at every level of government have been affected by it. Others might suggest that the Legislature’s spending priorities are out of whack. Surely the State’s appropriation for an airplane hangar in the former House Speaker’s home district, and calling it an "educational facility," speaks to the wisdom of that. Or you could say that the Legislature has for years been burying it’s head in the sand with it’s ludicrous exemptions to Florida’s comparatively modest sales tax (the exemption for ostrich feed comes to mind).

My personal hypothesis though, in addition to everything listed above, has to do with the anti-intellectual political ideology of the Republicans who control our state government.

Professor Colleen J. Shogan of George Mason University defines anti-intellectualism partly as "disparagement of the complexity associated with intellectual pursuits". For years, dating back to the McCarthy Era, Republicans, in an attempt to seem populist, have pushed the rhetorical notion that all of society’s ills can be blamed on educated folk. This clownish, anti-intellectual rhetoric reached it’s peak in the last decade with our past president, a misunderestimated graduate of Yale University who taught us the meaning of "fuzzy math" and asked that timeless, eternal question, "Is our children learning?"

Don’t get me wrong! We know from experience that political extremists, of the left AND the right, reject intellectual complexity in favor of the easy answers their preconceived ideologies dictate. Most Republicans I know are not anti-intellectual ideologues of that sort (I believe the Governor to be one of those) -- in fact quite the contrary. Most of them are smart enough to realize that the vibrant, multidisciplinary environments of our state universities are good for the business climate and essential to the economy of our region. Unfortunately these "reasonable Republicans" are not the ones in charge of the Florida Legislature. There, the rigid political ideology of so-called "movement Republicans" prevails, to the detriment of education and critical thought.

Beyond education and ideology, some of the smartest people I know are self-taught tradesmen and craftsmen who never went to college, yet are smart enough to know that healthy universities create jobs and are good for the economy. College educated or not, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that keeping our brightest young scholars at home supports our state’s economy, while forcing them out of state to find the college programs they need is penny wise but pound foolish.

Although the downward spiral of government by the ideologically dumb has been reversed at the national level, Florida still lags behind on the political "dumbness" curve. Now, in a time when a little creativity and smarts could come in handy, ideological, "movement" Republicans drunkenly wave the meat cleaver over Florida’s institutions of higher learning, along with many other essential state functions designed to preserve civil society.

It’s a shame the cuts they propose would force FSU to completely eliminate it’s internationally respected Anthropology Department. What an interesting study it would be for the scholars of that program to document civilization’s descent as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals in the Florida Legislature club our state back into the Stone Age.