Joe Ricketts is one of those billionaire shit-gibbons who got spectacularly lucky with one business venture (founding TD Ameritrade) and thinks that makes him some sort of super-genius in other areas (owning the Chicago Cubs, government, knowing whether Barack Obama was a secret Muslim and thus an enemy of America). You know, insulated grotesquely-wealth-guy stuff.
So it must have been an absolute shock to his wizened heart when he stood up to give the commencement address at New College of Florida last Friday and learned pretty decisively that the youngs are not impressed.
From The Sarasota Herald-Tribune:
As the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade spoke, the student section would erupt in boos, chant “free Palestine” and expletives. Students also wore stoles bearing the flag of Palestine, following a national trend of higher education protests against the war in Gaza.
“They don’t care,” Ricketts said to [New College President Richard] Corcoran on stage after stopping his speech. “I hate it, but they really don’t care what I have to say.”
Ha ha, he didn’t get to finish his speech and then whined about it within range of the microphone. He probably hasn’t heard boos like that since he traded Kris Bryant to the Giants.
It was an easy bet that New College students would not want to listen to a multi-billionaire they associate with the reactionary right-wing takeover of their school read the menu of available toppings in a frozen yogurt shop, much less the usual platitude-laden commencement speech. Considering what these kids have watched the adults do to New College the last couple of years under the leadership of Ron DeSantis and Chris “Fascist Howdy Doody” Rufo, having to listen to Ricketts probably felt like one final insult on the way out the door.
There is also some backstory here about Ricketts’s association with the school.
Ricketts, it turns out, is one of those old conservatives who thinks today’s college students are getting too much liberal instruction in their colleges, most likely from Communist hippie professors who no longer teach them about the great literature and thinkers of Western civilization. Rather, the hippies are obsessed with that dread word “diversity,” so now universities are churning out graduates who the Joe Rickettses of the world complain have been indoctrinated. And by indoctrinated, they mean “hates Aristotle and architecture involving Doric columns.”
So a few months ago, New College announced it was launching a virtual liberal arts degree program, with scholarship funding from Ricketts. The degree will be classics-centered, by which we mean it will be geared towards reassuring old white people who flip their shit at the thought that somewhere a 19-year-old is reading Toni Morrison instead of Plato that they are still the dominant culture.
The program incorporates material from the Ricketts Great Book Curriculum, which New College described as “empower[ing] students with a liberal arts education adapted for life in an ever-changing world by providing curriculum based on essential teachings from the greatest thinkers in history.” Students will “learn how to think – not just what to think,” according to the Curriculum’s website, which promises courses in ground-breaking areas like “Greek drama” and “medieval philosophy.”
Basically this is the same spirit animating Bari Weiss’s University of Austin grift, designed to give conservatives that frisson of excitement that they are reading secret texts that could get them thrown into prison, like Soviet dissidents passing around illegal copies of Boris Pasternak novels.
Shockingly — or not, if you’re not the sort of moron who thinks Joe Ricketts is correct — faculty at New College are not thrilled about this venture. Some of them at a meeting a few months ago voted against the program 25-1:
According to some faculty members who spoke with 10 Tampa Bay, the online curriculum falls short for a variety of reasons including what they describe as a lack of transparency. […]
"We were not a part of the conversation of how to make it so that it's properly linked to the current program, and is a well-done and well-structured idea," she added.
It’s adorable that this New College faculty member thought for one second that the school’s new wingnut leadership gives a shit about whether a billionaire racist sugar daddy’s handpicked college curriculum meshes with current requirements.
This is the second year in a row that New College students have used commencement to make known their feelings about what DeSantis and company have done to their school. Maybe next year the school could invite someone who is not a skeevy MAGA wingnut to speak to the graduates. In fact, yr Wonkette hereby volunteers. But we’re pretty sure that the New College administration will not like what we have to say.
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Well, no love for this guy, but wouldn’t the student protest have been more effective by highlighting their concerns about the idiotic right wing curriculum requirements? How this guy is in any way related to the grave situation Palestinians are facing is unclear to me.
Medieval philosophy is essential if you want to understand today's fast moving and ever changing supreme Court rulings.