DeSantis, Rufo Gutted New College Of Florida, But At Least The Coffee Cups Have Bible Verses Now
They painted over murals and replaced lawns with astroturf. So there's a metaphor.
It’s been eight months since Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decided it might be fun to let far-Right culture warriors dismantle New College of Florida, the state’s honors college, transforming it from a home for freethinking but high-achieving hippie and LGBTQ+ nerds into a bastion of conservative indoctrination liberal arts study, with an emphasis on “Western Civilization,” should any be found.
With the fall semester starting soon, it looks like the tearing-down phase of the project is going just great, as we learned from Scott Lemieux at Lawyers Guns Money, who calls attention to a pair of distressing articles detailing the damage already done by the new “leadership” at New College. Yeah, this is going to be one of those pieces where I urge you to go read the whole things if you can.
In the spring, DeSantis appointed an all-new Board of Trustees to govern New College, led by professional shit-stirrer Christopher Rufo, the Seattle-based propagandist who did more than anyone else to drive the moral panic over "critical race theory" and helped spearhead the Right’s ongoing panic over LGBTQ+ folks. The goal, DeSantis’s administration enjoyed saying, was to transform New College into a “Hillsdale of the South,” as if anyone but rightwing wienerheads thinks Hillsdale, a rightwing fundamentalist school in Michigan, is a beacon of serious academic work. But DeSantis only wants to appeal to rightwing wienerheads in his presidential campaign, so that’s fine.
Among other changes the wrecking crew have already wrought (ooh, alliteration!), the new trustees fired the college president, Patricia Okker, and replaced her with former Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran, who served as Education Commissioner under DeSantis, as interim president. (Prior to that appointment, he had no experience in education, but his politics were in the Right place.) The trustees eliminated the diversity, equity and inclusion office, and denied tenure to five well-credentialed professors, claiming their work was substandard, which simply means they’d been hired under the college’s old order. The board is now planning to eliminate New College’s gender studies program starting in 2024, although students currently in the program will be allowed to graduate before every trace of their having been there is sandblasted. Rufo bragged on TwitteX that “We are the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of queer theory and gender pseudoscience into academic life.”
The fuckers also closed the popular Pride dorm and painted over student murals this summer, because a fascist aesthetic demands straight lines and bare walls, not unsightly (and dangerously ethnic) colors and exuberance.
But as this piece at Inside Higher Education (you may need to sign up for a free account to read it) reports, the dismantling of wokeness — or at least of New College as it once was — seems to be going much more swiftly than its remaking in Ron DeSantis’s image. When the new semester starts, New College will have lost 40 members of its faculty, leaving huge gaps in the course catalog that will likely delay some continuing students from getting the classes they need to graduate:
The course catalogue was already sparse when students first began looking at classes last spring. Dani Delaney, the mother of one former New College student who is transferring to Hampshire College in Massachusetts—which guaranteed admission to all New College students in good standing—said her son could only find two classes that counted toward his “area of concentration” (which is what New College calls majors). When he contacted the institution about the lack of relevant courses, she said, he was told the course catalogue was “in flux” and to “choose something else.”
As Delaney said, when you’re finishing the coursework for your major, it’s not exactly like choosing high school electives and deciding that since chorus is full, you’ll just take art instead. Can’t imagine why her son transferred out.
The story goes on to interview Dr. Elizabeth Leininger, who taught biology and neuroscience at New College before she left for a new position at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She noted that the course cancellations have left several of her former students stranded; with her departure, New College has gone from having three faculty members in the neuroscience program to just one. Leininger even agreed to teach neurobiology over Zoom in the coming fall semester (we assume for adjunct instructor pay), but the arrangement fell apart two months after she got initial permission, and after 11 students had signed up.
The email telling her she wouldn’t be allowed to teach the class didn’t say why, but
She suspects it may have something to do with her outspoken opposition to the direction DeSantis and the board are taking the institution, which has included speaking to the media about her decision to leave and reposting criticisms of the administration on X.
That’s disturbing enough even before the article uses “X” instead of Twitter. We’ll probably give in eventually too.
The departure of faculty has also led to concerns that graduating students will have a hard time completing their “senior capstone, a project that all graduating students present to a committee at the end of their final year.” It’s a lot of work and independent research on a focused topic, not unlike a graduate thesis. But it’s a hell of a lot of work for faculty.
One student, Shelby Nagle, who uses she/her and they/them pronouns, at least while that’s still allowed, is doing their capstone on intergenerational trauma in Polish families after World War II. Or at least they want to, if only they can find a faculty member to work with. (In keeping with New College’s beautiful doomed hippie egalitarianism, capstone projects have faculty sponsors, not directors or chairs.)
“I made all these connections with professors, started to keep tabs on who could have sponsored my thesis or who could sit on that committee for me,” they said. “Every one of them left.”
The new regime is also just plain not any good at running a college, as the article points out, detailing the banal but infuriating problems students are having just finding a place to live, because the former junior-senior dorm is now full of student athletes — who make up about half of the incoming 2023-24 class. New College never bothered with sporps before, but now it has 70 baseball players — but no baseball field or any other athletic facilities, at least not yet. Maybe Brett Favre will help out there.
Why so many athletes? USA Today notes that University of Florida, which is in the NCAA’s Division I, only has 37 baseball players. It also points out that the new crop of jocks has brought down the college’s average GPA, so take that nerds. Maybe they just want to start a chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and wanted a big turnout for the first meeting. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with importing a lot of muscleheads with rightwing views to help modify the “student culture” at what until now has been a haven for nerds and queer kids, could it? Crazy conspiracy talk on our part, never mind.
Besides, Rufo already explained it to Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times: It’s affirmative action.
Says Goldberg:
The end of gender studies and the special treatment given to incoming athletes are part of the same project, masculinizing a place that had been heavily feminist, artsy and queer. When I spoke to Rufo last weekend, he offered several explanations for New College’s new emphasis on sports, including the classical idea that a healthy body sustains a healthy mind. But an important part of the investment in athletics, he said, is that it is a way to make New College more male and, by extension, less left wing.
In the past, about two-thirds of New College’s students were women. “This is a wildly out-of-balance student population, and it caused all sorts of cultural problems,” said Rufo. Having so many more women than men, he said, turned New College into “what many have called a social justice ghetto.” The new leadership, he said, is “rebalancing the ratio of students” in the hopes of ultimately achieving gender parity.
Fuck. Me. You think you’ve found the bottom of that man’s creepy rightwing idiocy, and then you fall through the rotted floor into even more cobwebs and rats.
The week’s other big article about the rightwing coup at New College comes from the Tampa Bay Times, and follows one of the school’s most senior faculty members, French and gender studies professor Amy Reid, over the last six months while the barbarians took over and sacked the place. The story details some of the big Culture Wars efforts to remake the college — like creating, for the first time in New College’s history, a core curriculum that all students must complete.
But it also points out all sorts of petty crap that seems to be very important to the Newtypes, like a memo telling all faculty to stop including their pronouns in emails and letters (Reid refused, and goddamn right). Or the removal of gender-neutral bathroom signs. The elimination of the Pride dorm and the African Studies learning community. The edict that graduating seniors will wear uniform caps and gowns, not the goofy array of costumes, drag, and casual everyday wear that had been traditional.
Or the coffee cups in the new privately owned cafe, emblazoned with the misspelled Bible reference “Phillipians [sic] 4:13,” which the school paper reports is a verse reading “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” Yes, at a public college.
Makes you wonder how long the school paper will remain independent. The New Leaders own it, you know, so the editors better watch their step. As scores of blue checkmarks on Xwit said in reply to a re-X of the Inside Higher Ed story, maybe it’s about time that the radical left commie nerds get a taste of how it feels to be openly despised, subjected to indoctrination, forced to conform, censored, and ideologically purged. Oh, boo hoo. You’re losing your socialist madrassa.
As one nice person wrote, “This is what you ordered. Eat it.” It’s revenge time at New College, the end.
[LGM / Inside Higher Ed (may require free registration) / Tampa Bay Times (one free article/month) / USA Today / WSLR / NCF Catalyst / NYT / Photo: Alaska Miller, Creative Commons License 4.0]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please subscribe, or if you prefer, you can make a one-time donation so we can try to keep the barbarians outside, please.
The new series of coffee cups will feature a verse from Paul's letter to Galactus. Or the Galaxians.
May I respectfully request that we adopt Marcy Wheeler's nomenclature of Xitter? Pronounced shitter.