New College of Florida began making history from the day it opened its doors to its first incoming class of 101 undergraduate students in 1964. It was the primary institution of upper education in Florida – which was once a part of the slave-owning Confederacy – to pioneer an open admissions policy committing the college to not discriminate based on “race, creed, national origin, or cultural status”.
The founding principles of the faculty emphasized freedom of inquiry and the eminent historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee was lured out of retirement to hitch the fledgling institution’s charter faculty. Latest College – which became a public institution when it joined Florida’s state university system in 1975 – soon established itself as certainly one of America’s premier liberal arts schools.
Now Latest College may again be on the verge of constructing history – but of a really different sort.
Its picturesque seaside campus in town of Sarasota, Florida, finds itself within the crosshairs of rightwing Republican state governor Ron DeSantis’s latest culture wars crusade, on this instance to destroy its unofficial popularity as a haven for about 650 generally progressive-leaning students, about half of whom discover themselves as non-heterosexual.
Widely expected to challenge Donald Trump for the Republican party’s presidential nomination for the 2024 election, DeSantis famously declared “to the woke mob” on the night of his re-election victory last November that “Florida is where woke goes to die.”
To that end, he has taken on Disney for its chief executive officer’s announcement last March that the corporation would pause all political donations inside Florida after the state legislature enacted a so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill that banned the teaching of lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity to public school students within the third grade or younger.
The 44-year-old DeSantis has also these days focused increasing attention on educational issues. Last 12 months he unsuccessfully tried to bar University of Florida faculty members from testifying in criminal court trials as expert witnesses for defense attorneys. Earlier this month, he banned the teaching of a complicated placement African Studies course in all public high schools within the state because a few of the course material allegedly used Black history to push a political agenda that he said was tantamount to “indoctrination”.
And Latest College can be firmly in his sights.
DeSantis’s office issued an announcement on the primary Friday of the brand new 12 months announcing six gubernatorial appointments to Latest College’s 13-member board of trustees, and a few of the names stunned students and college members alike.
They included Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who has spearheaded the continued attack on the supposed teaching of critical race theory in primary and secondary schools; Matthew Spalding, a professor and dean at a personal, conservative Christian school in Michigan called Hillsdale College that was often touted by the late Rush Limbaugh on his popular radio talk show because the form of university his listeners should send their teenagers to; and Charles Kesler, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in southern California and editor of the conservative publication the Claremont Review of Books.
Almost nobody on the campus saw that one coming. “I used to be completely blindsided,” said Steven Shipman, a professor of physical chemistry and president of the faculty’s faculty union. “I mainly thought that we’re such a small institution that the governor would produce other priorities.”
Rufo, a senior fellow at a conservative thinktank called the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, all but declared war on Latest College in a barrage of tweets and press interviews within the initial days of 2023. In an interview with a Latest York Times columnist, the 38-year-old alumnus of Georgetown University set out his goals and people of his fellow DeSantis-appointed trustees in unequivocal language: “We would like to supply an alternate for conservative families within the state of Florida to say there may be a public university that reflects your values.”
Rufo gleefully invoked military metaphors on Twitter to explain his tactical plans as a future trustee of Latest College. He announced plans to tour the campus soon with “our landing team”, and on 6 January when DeSantis’s office issued the bolt-from-the-blue statement in regards to the future membership of the College’s board of trustees, Rufo tweeted that “we’re over the partitions and prepared to rework higher education from inside”.
Some academics specializing in issues related to higher education say they’ve never seen a scorched-earth assault on a university or university for apparently political reasons that remotely approaches what’s facing Latest College today.
In his first campaign for the governorship of California in 1966, Ronald Reagan reserved a few of his ire for the University of California’s flagship campus, which he described as “that mess at Berkeley” where the novel free speech movement had flourished. He fired the president of the University of California’s board of regents at the primary meeting of the panel Reagan attended in 1967 because the state’s freshly inaugurated governor.
But Berkeley survived that episode with its popularity intact, and the events of 56 years ago are small beer in comparison with what’s currently unfolding within the Sunshine State, in response to one scholar.
“DeSantis makes Reagan appear like an advocate for tutorial freedom,” said Brian Rosenberg, a visiting professor on the Harvard Graduate School of Education and president emeritus of Minnesota’s Macalester College. “I’ve never seen a case of a governor, who’s constructing a political platform around being a social warrior, send in a team with a mandate to vary every thing from the college’s curriculum to its departments and its faculty.”
Some Latest College alumni are amongst its biggest boosters. X González, who uses they/them pronouns, graduated in May 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts, and cherished the college’s tolerance of diverse gender identities and the liberty to design their very own area of concentration if not one of the greater than 50 existing majors on offer suited their academic curiosity and ambition.
González also really liked the incontrovertible fact that as an alternative of giving students a grade, faculty members produce detailed evaluations in writing of every student under their supervision. “It was so dynamically higher than every other situation I could have encountered,” said the 23-year-old survivor of the Parkland school shooting, which killed three staff members and 14 students. “Latest College is such a transparently trans and queer school, and that’s certainly one of the the explanation why DeSantis decided to stage this hostile takeover.”
The starkly contrasting views of what Latest College should stand for got here to a head on campus last Wednesday when Rufo and one other DeSantis-appointed trustee met with faculty members and students in separate sessions. Wearing a well-tailored blue business suit and sporting a neatly trimmed beard, Rufo drastically toned down his rhetoric and forged himself as a lifelong apostle for a liberal arts education.
“I don’t want my views to be the brand new stifling orthodoxy on campus,” he told faculty members amid some audible snickering within the auditorium. “We would like to create space for conservative students, liberal students, Marxist students. We have now to have the courage to disagree with one another and live out the democratic process.”
But some faculty members and students indicated they weren’t going to be drinking that Kool-Aid anytime soon. “Their rhetoric focuses on pushing their Christian and anti-science agendas while pretending to be fighting totally free speech and variety of opinions,” said Riley Wood, 19, a second-year computer sciences student who posed a matter to Rufo.
Wood added: “Their belief in open debate is in reality only a convenient frame for the forcible introduction of rightwing ideology into the college – and it would be dropped as soon because it fails to serve that goal.”