If era-defining episodes that do not agree with the ruling party's conception of Bharat are censored from school textbooks in India, far across the Pacific in Donald Trump's America, the axe of orthodoxy has fallen on progressive teachers.

Vinita Prabhakar, an English teacher of Indian origin in America's Florida, was terminated from service for offering students what in normal times is considered the right guidance: Explore challenging contemporary fiction. In Prabhakar's case, American novelist Ottessa Moshfegh's acclaimed short story 'Bettering Myself'. It won the Plimpton Prize for Fiction in 2013. (Her law firm told Onmanorama that she was from Bengaluru.)

The president of South Florida State College (SFSC), where she taught, was repelled by the Moshfegh story and ordered Prabhakar's instant dismissal. In the complaint she filed before the United States District Court, Vinita Prabhakar recalls what Fred Hawkins, the president of SFSC, told her. "Let me be clear: I don't ever want to see this story again. I have kids, I wouldn’t want my daughter reading this, and she’s in college," Prabhakar quotes Hawkins as telling her. Hawkins ends the conversation with her saying, "this is political".

'Bettering Myself' is a carefree first-person narrative of an anarchic school teacher, the irreverent twin of a yarn nuns would encourage girls to read. "My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nuns' lounge. I used their bathroom to puke in the mornings," is how it begins.

Students call her "Miss Mooney", and she seems like a teacher created by an AI model that is fed utterly false information. She is a romantic as the name 'mooney' suggests, but eternally drunk. "You couldn't get fat from being ejaculated into" is the smartest piece of wisdom she has for a troubled girl student.

As for boys, it is as if her very presence instigates the vilest instincts in them. From the story: "He’d take the chalk out of my hand and draw a picture of a cock-and-balls on the board. This cock-and-balls became a kind of insignia for the class. It appeared on all their homework, on exams, etched into every desk. I didn’t mind it. It made me laugh."

In her complaint, Prabhakar says that she employed the Moshfegh story "to help students analyse narrative voice, tone, perspective, characterisation, and style, including by comparing its female first-person narrator with male narrative voices from authors like Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver." Prabhakar has been teaching this story for over a decade without incident. Many other schools in various other states of America, too.

However, last February, one child told her over e-mail that "the story made me a bit uncomfortable. Do I have to do the reading notes for it?". Prabhakar responded: "I agree this can be a challenging story; why don’t we talk more about this in class tomorrow?"

The very next day, there was a discussion in class. After the session ended, Prabhakar went over to the student and asked how she felt. She quoted the student as saying: "We don’t read anything in high school. I know I'm in college now, and I have to get used to it."

Interestingly, there was not even a written complaint against Prabhakar. It is still not clear how the matter reached the president. A professor or administrator the student would have confided might have registered a complaint with SFSC administrators about the assignment.

Prabhakar's complaint quotes a text sent her by Verna MacBeth, the chair of the English Department. "Maybe the student didn’t actually want to complain, and maybe the student didn’t authorise them [the staff member] to talk about this situation," the text says.

Here is the irony. Prabhakar lost her job for doing the right thing. And Miss Mooney in 'Bettering Myself' held on to hers even after she illicitly inflates the marks of her students so that she is not thrown out for inefficiency.

Prabhakar seems to be the victim of a fresh wave of orthodoxy sweeping Trump's America. The college president, Fred Hawkins, is said to be a close ally of Florida's ultra-orthodox Republican governor Ron DeSantis.

Hawkins himself is a former Republican legislator who voted for the Stop W.O.K.E Act piloted by DeSantis. The Act is an unconcealed attack on the need to remain alert against all kinds of discrimination (woke) and yet has a deceptive expansion for the word 'woke', Stop (Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act.

The US Court of Appeals said in 2024 that the law was too vague to be enforced and that it was unconstitutional because "it targeted ideas". The court emphasised that "the First Amendment trusts students to figure it out for themselves" and rejected Florida’s claim that it may control professors' speech because it pays their salaries.

The FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) Legal Network, which now represents Prabhakar in court, has been fighting to block provisions of the Stop WOKE Act. In July, the US Court of Appeals ruled in FIRE’s favour and upheld an injunction blocking the state of Florida from enforcing the law against university students and faculty.

"Florida's restrictions are, as the State admits, an attempt to force uniformity of thought on students by curtailing the free exchange of ideas in universities — the very environments traditionally regarded as laboratories for expression and truth seeking," the Court said.

This offers hope that Prabhakar's termination could be withdrawn.
(Onmanorama could not get in touch with Vinita Prabhakar, but FIRE Legal Network, which represents her in court, provided the details.)