#New College of Florida

[victusinveritas]

[odinsblog]

The right wing radicalization of education in Florida:

👉🏿 https://www.aclufl.org/en/press-releases/civil-rights-organizations-condemn-signing-bill-stifles-academic-freedom-higher

[contemplatingoutlander]

The above is a gift link 🎁 for this excellent report/commentary by Michelle Goldberg about what is happening at the New College of Florida under Ron DeSantis. If you click on the link, you can read the entire article, even if you do not subscribe to The New York Times.

DeSantis has replaced the president of the college and the board of governors with right-wing partisans (including the far right culture warrior Chris Rufo), who want to remake this small, highly-ranked, public liberal arts college into a copy of the private, Christian, conservative Hillsdale College. 

Given the above, one of my primary questions is how can a state college be allowed to be turned into a “Christian” college? 

It’s like DeSantis thinks it is fine to just completely ignore the First Amendment’s Establishment clause, not to mention ignoring the First Amendment’s free speech protections (by attempting to limit what can be discussed/ taught at public colleges and universities).

Below are some excerpts from the article:

When I spoke to [Chris] Rufo in early January, he said that New College would look very different in the following 120 days. Nearly four months later, that hasn’t entirely come to pass, but it’s clear where things are headed.

The new trustees fired the school’s president, replacing her with Richard Corcoran, the Republican former speaker of the Florida House. They fired its chief diversity officer and dismantled the diversity, equity and inclusion office. As I was writing this on Friday, several people sent me photographs of gender-neutral signage scraped off school bathrooms. [...] Whatever New College’s administration does, this will likely be the last year classes like the ones [student Sam] Sharf is taking are offered, because a bill making its way through the Florida Legislature requires the review of curriculums “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.” The sense of dread on campus, however, goes beyond what’s happening in Tallahassee.

Eliana Salzhauer, whose 17-year-old son is a New College economics student, compared the seemingly inexorable transformation of the school to Twitter under Elon Musk: It looked the same at first, even as it gradually degraded into a completely different experience. “They are turning a top-rated academic institution into a third-rate athletic facility,” she said.

Salzhauer was referring, in part, to the hiring of Mariano Jimenez, who previously worked at Speir’s Inspiration Academy, as athletic director and head baseball coach, even though there’s no baseball diamond on campus. In the past, New College hasn’t had traditional sports teams, but the administration is now recruiting student athletes, and Corcoran has said he wants to establish fraternities and sororities, likely creating a culture clash with New College’s artsy queer kids, activists and autodidacts. Before Wednesday’s board meeting, about 75 people held a protest outside. “We’re Nerds & Geeks, not Jocks & Greeks,” said one sign.

[See more under the cut.]

For many, the board of trustees meeting was the clearest sign yet that this is the last semester of New College as they know it. The pivot point was the trustees’ decision to override the typical tenure process. New College hired a large number of new faculty five years ago, and this year was the first that any of them could apply for tenure. [...] Corcoran, however, had asked all the professors up for tenure this year to withdraw their applications because of the tumult at the school. Two of the seven agreed. The rest — three of them professors in the hard sciences — held out for the board’s vote. This was widely seen as a referendum not just on the individual candidates, but on faculty independence.

Fifty-four people registered to speak at the meeting. All but one of them either implored the trustees to grant the professors tenure or lambasted them for their designs on the school. Parents were particularly impassioned; many of them had been profoundly relieved to find an affordable school where their eccentric kids could thrive. Some tried to speak the language of conservatism: “You’re violating my parental rights regarding our school choice,” said Pam Pare, the mother of a biology major. One student, a second-year wrapped in a pink and blue trans flag, was escorted out of the meeting after cursing at Corcoran, but most tried to earnestly and calmly convey how much the professors up for tenure had taught them.

It was all futile. A majority of the trustees voted down each of the candidates in turn as the crowd chanted, “Shame on you!” That’s when [faculty chair Matthew] Lepinski quit, walking out of the room to cheers. [...] “Some faculty members have started to leave already, and obviously some students are thinking about what their future looks like,” Lepinski said right after quitting. A few days later, we spoke again. “There’s a grieving process for the New College that was, which is passing away,” he said. “I really loved the New College that was, but I am at peace that it’s gone now.”

Rufo couldn’t attend Wednesday’s meeting in person, because he’d been delayed coming home from Hungary, where he had a fellowship at a right-wing think tank closely tied to Viktor Orban’s government. (This seemed fitting, since Orban’s Hungary created the template for Rufo and Desantis’s educational crusade.) Instead, he Zoomed in, his face projected on a movie screen behind the other trustees.

After Lepinski quit, Rufo tweeted that “any faculty that prefer the old system of unfettered left-wing activism and a rubber-stamp board are free to self-select out.” Turnover, he added, “is to be expected — even welcomed. But we are making rapid, significant progress.” He and his allies haven’t built anything new at New College yet. They are succeeding, however, in tearing something down.

It makes sense that Chris Rufo, the activist who spearheaded the right-wing anti-CRT crusade, has recently been taking notes on how to create a very conservative college based on a “template” from the neofascist Viktor Orban’s Hungary.

I hope that lawsuits will be filed against DeSantis and the New College president and board of governors for their assault on First Amendment freedom of speech protections and the Establishment clause by Florida’s attempts to turn New College into a state funded conservative “Christian” liberal arts college.

[catalystrelay]

Petition for Emory University to reconsider the tenure of Mark Bauerlein, one of the DeSantis appointed Board of Trustees members of New College. The details on why his tenure should be reconsidered are contained in the letter.

Please consider signing it, it is a chance to strike back at one of the people aiding in the destruction of academic freedom in Florida.

[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.

[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:

[tomorrowusa]

Hitler burned books. Florida's Ron DeSantis saves on lighter fluid by just tossing books into the dumpster.

Specifically, DeSanctimonius (as Weird Donald calls him) had state run New College of Florida (NCF) throw out thousands of LGBTQ+ books. The "don't say gay" governor continues his homophobic rampage of state censorship.

Thousands of books were dumped into the trash by the New College of Florida in Sarasota, including the library for the defunct Gender and Diversity Center inside the Hamilton building for student services. That has some students outraged over why it would throw away books they say could have been donated, a move that is part of a year-long transformation for the small public college in Governor Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke.” Last October, the school said it was getting rid of its gender studies department. Thursday, the school cleared out the Gender and Diversity Center, or GDC, tossing decades of accumulated books. Incoming senior Natalia Benavides couldn’t believe her eyes when stacks of books were tossed into a large dumpster outside NCF’s library. “I saw that dumpster full of books from the library,” she says. “And I said, ‘This is horrendous.’ Plenty of people could re-home those books and take care of them, and they're just sitting there.” New College says most of the books were from its library and were tossed because they are no longer serving the needs of the college, adding “gender studies has been discontinued as an area of concentration at New College and the books are not part of any official college collection or inventory.” Some of the books ended up at the Social Equity Through Education Alliance, known as SEE, which rushed to recover a few hundred books left on the ground.

“This is just a new low,” says SEE executive director Zander Moricz. “It also, beyond being evil, beyond being stupid, is wasteful and does not make sense.”

Ron DeSantis is not up for election this year. But all members of the lower house of the Florida legislature and half of the upper house of the legislature are up for election in November. Floridians should express their displeasure with bigoted GOP legislators by tossing them out of office the way the DeSantis-run NCF tossed out LGBTQ+ related books.

[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.

[girlhorse]

help new college. donate here

we can't let desantis have this win

[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…

[yarnnerd]

Not the usual genre of arts and crafts that I post about, but I was having a nostalgia/ angst moment today. It’s not about the current goings-on...but also, it is.

[catalystrelay]

After dissolving the Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence and quietly firing the Dean of Diversity Yoleidy Rosario-Hernandez, the NCF Board of Trustees’ next major move was to deny tenure to the five faculty who had applied, having each reached the end of the tenure track.

In doing this, they undermined the five years of hard work that each faculty member dedicated, and their willingness to devote them selves to a low-paying, difficult job. Untenured faculty have been one of the most at risk parties since the DeSantis’ first new appointees arrived, and so those rejected on April 26th are left with insecure positions. Two of the faculty are a part of the chemistry AOC, which was already in a shaky position. Other AOCs rely on chemistry, and yet it is unclear how the required courses will be taught next year.

BOT members claim to work in the interest of the institution, and yet they threaten its foundations, because they are here only to control higher education.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jason Wilson at The Guardian:

New College of Florida, which has been the subject of a rightwing takeover that has reversed its previous reputation as a liberal arts school, has hired ideologically aligned rightwing faculty and staff for a range of positions, in a process that an internal open letter said “often replaced faculty expertise with administrative fiat”. New College of Florida (NCF) was targeted by the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who made transforming the liberal institution into a conservative one a centerpiece of his ill-fated presidential campaign that sought to take on liberal causes. Its board of trustees is now dominated by DeSantis allies, triggering campus turmoil and the exodus of some staff.

Some in the Republican party see the effort to transform New College as a model in a wider battle to take on American higher education, which the rightwing sees as dominated by left-leaning institutions and leaders. With Donald Trump returning to power after winning the presidential election last week, many rightwing activists could seek to replicate what has happened to New College across the US.

The Guardian has identified several faculty members who have a history of connections with rightwing media, far-right thinktanks and the so-called “New Right”. The hires are of a piece with the hard-right drift at the college since DeSantis appointed new members to the governing board of trustees including the culture warrior Christopher Rufo, which in turn appointed a new administration led by Richard Corcoran, a longtime Republican activist and former political candidate in Florida. In an internally circulated open letter to Corcoran written by the chairs of a key committee, staff members have complained that hiring processes now involved the “arbitrary replacement of searches in specific fields with open-field searches, searches with no requirement for a PhD in the field, insertion of candidates with no rationale, and job offers made without a recommendation from the search committee”. The Guardian emailed NCF for comment but received no response.

Rightwing hires

New College has appointed a raft of faculty and staff with a history in rightwing politics since Corcoran assumed control. The most prominent appointments – previously reported on by local news media and the college’s Catalyst student newspaper – are the new presidential scholars in residence, which are visiting appointments made at Corcoran’s direct discretion.

[...]

Pushback

Inside New College, faculty have pushed back on hiring processes for new faculty, which they allege have been subject to undue interference from Corcoran and his administration. The Guardian obtained a 31 May open letter from David Gillman and Nova Myhill, co-chairs of New College’s education committee, which relayed the faculty’s “deep concerns over changes at New College in the conduct of faculty searches”, which they say has “resulted in some hires that negatively affect the ability of programs, including interdisciplinary programs which depend on faculty hired into various disciplines, to fill the needs of students”. Without naming any specific hires, the letter said: “We see a breakdown of established processes with no new processes to take their place.”

The letter further alleges: “This has resulted in insertion of new lines with no rationale, arbitrary replacement of searches in specific fields with open-field searches, searches with no requirement for a PhD in the field, insertion of candidates with no rationale, and job offers made without a recommendation from the search committee.” Since Corcoran assumed control of New College, it has plummeted in national rankings of liberal arts schools; attracted controversy for dumping library books and materials from a gender and diversity center that the administration closed; and invited controversial speakers to campus. Last week, Inside Higher Ed reported on a brewing clash over changes to the core curriculum, which critics say is being “driven by conservative ideologues”.

The Guardian has an insightful report on how a former left-wing college campus turned sharply to the right under Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

That college is New College of Florida, and DeSantis helped turned the college far to the right as a linchpin on the war on all things “woke”.