On October 10, Florida Governor Rick Scott threatened to move state funding away from the liberal arts and into more “practical fields.” The Republican asked, “You want to use your tax dollars to educate more people who can’t get jobs in anthropology?”Scott argued specifically that something like anthropology was not worthy of public support “because, you know, we don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, math degrees. That’s what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on. Those type of degrees. So when they get out of school, they can get a job.”
Official response was immediate. In an October 11 letter, AAA President Virginia Dominguez wrote that it “was very unfortunate that you would characterize our discipline in such a short-sighted way,” and asked to meet with him. Meanwhile students at the University of South Florida responded with a web Prezi (a zoomable canvas presentation) called “This is Anthropology,” featuring student work investigating homicides, protecting groundwater and improving medical care. Brent Weisman, the department chair, responded with a letter to the St. Petersburg Times that said, “Anthropologists at USF work side by side with civil and industrial engineers, cancer researchers, specialists in public health and medicine, chemists, biologists, and others in the science, technology, and engineering fields that the Governor so eagerly applauds (Melendez 2011).”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/25/student-loan-fury-in-the-occupy-movement/