#New College of Florida

[victusinveritas]

[pummelos]

THE INVENTOR OF THE TROLL FACE WENT TO NCF???

sorry for the late reply!! @weirdmageddon

YES and the catalyst did an absolutely bonkers interview with him after he got trespassed from campus for harassing SA victims

the craziest part was at the end:

[kimboo-york]

Not my usual fare on this site, I tend to keep posts like this to bsky and fb overall, but importantly I am a New College of Florida alumna so this matters to me personally, and should matter you YOU politically.

This is a long-form investigative piece by Kathryn Joyce, the author of the book Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement which is an outstanding read itself.

In this piece she digs into why what happened to my teeny tiny alma mater should matter to ALL of us. This isn't just a special interest piece about a whole-ass college of 700 students (my entire graduating class was less than 100 people), it highlights how this fits into the right-wing fascist agenda. It's a test case scenario, y'all, and it's awful.

Please read the whole thing, it is important.

"While the Right doesn’t admit it, the vision of higher ed they’re advancing is one where the lucky few have access to a rich liberal arts education, others get a ​“classical” right-wing imitation and the majority receive utilitarian instruction designed to fill holes in the labor market."

[unwelcome-ozian]

[188533241]

New College of Florida was a safe haven for me as a transgender student. I spent 19 years growing up in the conservative Midwest, constantly being reminded of how my differences made me less than others. My high school teachers would start class discussions about the legitimacy of transgender lives and bodies, almost always met by the students around me with disrespect for queer people. My doctor had come to my doorstep, my own home, telling me that I was wrong and sinful for trying to seek out gender-affirming care through him, which would be the catalyst for my suicide attempt at 16 years old. In the year of my high school German teacher's retirement, he targeted my trans peers by giving them letters explaining why they were Godless for their decision to transition, with each letter including candy and a DVD about religion. I knew two trans kids in school who would end up killing themselves from bullying. Throughout all of these injustices I've experienced, no one has faced repercussions.

When I finally graduated high school, I was excited about the possibility of leaving the state for somewhere more accepting. I found a sense of actual community at New College of Florida, where I was looked at and treated as an equal despite my gender identity. New College is known for its openly queer and outspoken student body, and after years of having no friends, New College is the place where I finally developed a friend group that I felt understood me.

Just as soon as I had found some semblance of community, it was ripped from me. Towards the tail end of my first year, the governor of Florida had begun to specifically target New College in hopes of changing the culture of the student body, both scared of Florida's honors college being associated with leftist ideas and wanting a college takeover as a chip to gamble in the upcoming presidential election. Ron Desantis has passed multiple anti-LGBTQ laws in Florida, has banned gender studies and critical race theory, and has openly made it clear that we -- queer students -- are no longer welcome on campus. From tossing dozens of books out of our campus library to painting over student-made murals, Desantis' team as our new administration is actively trying to push out queer students from New College.

New College offered both queer and non-queer students an alternative and accepting education that is hard to find anywhere else. Even with offers being made to help New College students such as the Hampshire tuition match program, many students can not afford to leave Florida, especially without the amazing scholarships, financial aid, and other general opportunities that New College has provided its students in the past. These types of anti-LGBTQ laws aren't just happening in Florida. Without active resistance to conservative education reform, there will be fewer and fewer spaces for transgender students to feel welcome and safe.

If you are interested in learning more about the disadvantages affecting transgender students pursuing education, please visit #TransgenderFirst.

If you're interested in learning more about New College and how you can help, visit Save New College.

[vietnyamese]

. . . what former president Bernie Machen of the University of Florida referred to as a “little jewel in the state of Florida”—was no more. What remained uncertain was what would replace it.

[bethanythebogwitch]

My Alma Mater has been the subject of a government-sponsored hostile takeover by christofascists and the town it's in is now having a malaria outbreak. I'm so glad I'm not in Florida anymore

[ncfcatalyst]

NCSA Senate Meeting recap

The New College Student Alliance (NCSA) functions as a three-branch student government. All New College students are automatically part of the Senate, where campus-wide voting and announcements take place. The first Senate meeting of the 2023-24 school year was held on Wednesday, Sept. 13. The meeting opened with a vote to approve fourth-year Cynthia Lucas as Senate President Pro Tempore. She…

[sophiasharp]

BOY OH BOY IT’S TIME TO COMPLAIN ABOUT MY SCHOOL AGAIN

So hi everyone, hey, how are ya, if you’ve been following me for the last year you’ll know that I go to New College of Florida and we have a very specific history about our mascot, particularly our lack of one.

See, when New College was still, well, new, there was this stray dog on campus named Brownie. He was absolutely beloved by the student body, so much so that when the student government first drafted their Constitution, they listed Brownie as the school’s mascot.

In the later years, when attempts were made to come up with a new mascot after Brownie died, the student body found themselves unable to come up with a replacement and instead just listed “[ ]” as the mascot, meant to be a placeholder until someone could come up with a better one.

Only no one ever did, and instead the brackets, later attributed to be a null set on digital copies of the constitution, became a point of pride for the student body, a kind of tongue-and-cheek joke that really fits with campus’s unique academic and social life, especially considering we had have real sports teams aside from rowing and sailing.

(Not to say that we don’t have athletics here! Our power lifting team has gone to nationals several times and our past Aikido club was well regarded. Tennis is also a popular club and just last year we got an archery team. So, in short, we do HAVE athletics, just not much in official circles.)

That brings us to this year when, for reasons completely outside of any sense of educational integrity, who else but Florida Governor Ron DeSantis himself decided to appoint a bunch of his own personal choices to our Board of Trustees, making them the majority of who is now deciding what goes on at our school.

Now CNN just made an article today covering the broad strokes of the absolute chaos going on in the wake of this new board, which you can read here if you so choose. There is also this article by Insider Higher Ed that goes into more detail on the current issues and this opinion piece in the NYT that reflects a lot of the returning student’s fears on the incoming cultural shift.

However I’m not here to talk about those fires, at least not explicitly. This is about mascots.

This last spring semester, the new board made moves to give the school a new official mascot due to the pushes they’re making to give the school more official sports.

(which, just for the record, we don’t have the accommodations for. Our sports field barely has a baseball Diamond and no one in their right mind goes out there cause it’s crawling with fire ants)

They gave us a student survey to fill out with just the most ridiculous suggestions to vote on- including, I kid you not, The Leaders, The Team Players, and The Conquistadors -along with an option for students to suggest their own.

Naturally, the whole school’s response was “fuck you and fuck your sports team, null sets for life,” but that didn’t stop the new Board of Trustees!

They managed to find one freshman willing to make them a design (and honestly no shade to her, that’s a hell of a resume booster), and so after school ended in June, our new official (and unwanted) mascot was announced, and I genuinely cannot express to you the amount of bizarre it is so I’m just gonna show you.

BEHOLD:

Regarding my last post on the subject:

ok at this point I'm mildly curious so i wanna ask

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Daniel Villarreal at LGBTQ Nation:

The once progressive New College of Florida has trashed hundreds of books—including numerous LGBTQ+ titles from its now-defunct Gender and Diversity Center—instead of giving the books to students or re-selling them as allowed by state law, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported. The college, which Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has tried to make more conservative, threw out the books on Tuesday afternoon. Students were neither on campus nor notified of the books’ removal, even though students have been given opportunities in the past to purchase books removed from the college’s library collection. In this case, local activists retrieved some of the books before they were taken off campus.

Photos showed feminist and LGBTQ+ books among the trashed titles, including Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe by John Boswell, When I Knew by Robert Trachtenberg, and Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey by Martin Duberman.

New College spokesperson Nathan March called the aforementioned reporting about the books’ removal false. March said that the books were trashed as part of the campus libraries’ “routine maintenance” and because the college’s gender studies program no longer exists. The college’s board of trustees eliminated the program shortly after DeSantis appointed numerous conservatives board members. March said that Florida Statute 237 forbids books purchased with state funds from being donated or sold. However, the statute states that the college can dispose of state-funded property by transferring it to a private nonprofit agency or selling it openly to the public.

[...] DeSantis said he planned to turn New College into the “Hillsdale of the South,” a reference to the private and infamously conservative Christian college in Michigan.  In January 2023, DeSantis appointed six new members to the New College’s board of trustees who were loyal to him and his ideology – including far-right anti-LGBTQ+ activist Christopher Rufo. The college had a reputation for being progressive and queer-friendly, but Rufo said earlier this year that the goal of what has been described as a “hostile takeover of a liberal college” was to “provide an alternative for conservative families in the state of Florida to say there is a public university that reflects your values.” “If we can take this high-risk, high-reward gambit and turn it into a victory, we’re going to see conservative state legislators starting to reconquer public institutions all over the United States,” Rufo said.

The Rufo-ization of New College of Florida continues to yield disastrous results, this time by throwing away hundreds of books (most of which had feminist and/or LGBTQ+ themes) that were formerly housed in the now-defunct Gender and Diversity Center.

[ivory--raven]

everything i do, I do with a little piece in my chest burning for ncf

[tomorrowusa]

If you were an academic, would you remain in a state which is willing to prosecute you if you deviate from the governor's political line?

With the start of the 2023-24 academic year only six weeks away, senior officials at New College of Florida (NCF) made a startling announcement in mid-July: 36 of the small honors college’s approximately 100 full-time teaching positions were vacant. The provost, Bradley Thiessen, described the number of faculty openings as “ridiculously high”, and the disclosure was the latest evidence of a brain drain afflicting colleges and universities throughout the Sunshine state. Governor Ron DeSantis opened 2023 with the appointment of six political allies to the college’s 13-member board of trustees who vowed to drastically alter the supposedly “woke”-friendly learning environment on its Sarasota campus. At its first meeting in late January, the revamped panel voted to fire the college president, Patricia Okker, without cause and appoint a former Republican state legislator and education commissioner in her place. Over the ensuing weeks, board members have dismissed the college’s head librarian and director of diversity programs and denied tenure to five professors who had been recommended for approval.

Essentially, the DeSantis education gestapo is killing off the institution — or at least making it very unattractive to students to the left of Mussolini. Of course it's not just NCF that's been affected.

The new laws have introduced a ban on the funding of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at Florida’s public colleges and universities, withdrawn a right to arbitration formerly guaranteed to faculty members who have been denied tenure or face dismissal, and prohibited the teaching of critical race theory, which contends that inherent racial bias pervades many laws and institutions in western society, among other changes. In the face of that and other legislation backed by DeSantis and Republican lawmakers that has rolled back the rights of Florida’s LGBTQ+ community, many scholars across the state are taking early retirement, voting with their feet by accepting job offers outside Florida or simply throwing in the towel with a letter of resignation. [ ... ]

The prevailing political climate in Florida has complicated efforts to recruit qualified scholars from outside the state to fill some vacancies. Kenneth Nunn served on a number of appointment committees during the more than 30 years he spent on the faculty of the University of Florida’s law school. He said the task of persuading highly qualified applicants of color to move to Gainesville has never been more difficult under a governor who, earlier this year, prohibited a new advanced placement course in African American studies from being taught in high schools. DeSantis came under renewed criticism this month when the state department of education issued guidelines recommending that middle school students be taught about the skills slaves acquired “for their personal benefit” during their lifetimes in bondage.

DeSantis is so fond of slavery that every public college and university in Florida is now an anti-woke plantation run by a DeSantis overseer.

Degrees from public educational institutions in the state may henceforth be looked upon like those from Trump University.

[gwydionmisha]

The Republican/Christo-fascist war on knowledge continues.

[worldofwardcraft]

The ruination of higher ed.

November 2, 2023

Not only are right-wingers obsessed with seizing control of local school boards and demolishing our system of public education, their ambitions extend to colleges and universities as well. And since the radical right believes the purpose of schooling to be indoctrination not edification, the results have been predictably destructive.

Need an example? Come along with us to the fascist utopia of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, where he is currently wrecking New College of Florida, one of America's foremost small liberal arts colleges. Founded in 1960, New College was known for its progressive values and welcoming atmosphere, especially for LGBTQ+ students. As Florida’s designated honors college, it allowed students to design individualized majors, boasted an average class size of 11 students, and produced an impressive number of Fulbright scholars. That is, until DeSantis got his pudding-encrusted fingers on it.

In January, he replaced six of the 13 members on the college’s Board of Trustees with unqualified political hacks, including Christopher Rufo, a leader in the conservative movement against critical race theory. The new board in short order fired the college's president, replaced her with a DeSantis crony, axed the diversity, equity and inclusion office and denied five instructors tenure. As faculty flee in droves, classes are being removed from the course catalogue daily. One departing professor described Florida as “the state where learning goes to die.”

Meanwhile, up north in Lynchburg, VA, Liberty University, the so-called Christian college founded in 1971 by televangelist Jerry Falwell, is having troubles of its own. Despite the university's denials and coverups, stories are spilling out exposing how it has long mishandled and ignored sexual assault cases. Here's ProPublica with the deets.

Interviews with more than 50 former Liberty students and staffers, as well as records from more than a dozen cases, show how an ethos of sexual purity, as embodied by the Liberty Way, has led to school officials discouraging, dismissing and even blaming female students who have tried to come forward with claims of sexual assault.

Even the campus cops warned victims not to say anything. In a report issued in May, the Department of Education referred to Liberty's longstanding practice of "punishing sexual assault survivors rather than helping them.” The DOE also found considerable evidence that computer hard drives had been wiped and records shredded.

The brute-force ideological restructuring of Florida's New College and the flagrantly misogynist policies at Liberty University are blatant instances of ultra-conservatives deliberately trashing an institution of higher learning. But don't think these two cases are by any means unique.

[bethanythebogwitch]

Thanks to Ron DeathSentence I will forever have to add an asterisk to my resume explaining that yes I did go to New College of Florida, but that was before it was taken over by christofascists