Gov. Ron DeSantis’ hostile takeover of New College of Florida is offering up a case study of what Republican governance looks like. After DeSantis installed six partisan trustees to remake the liberal arts college in his image, they replaced the college’s president with an interim president at double the salary. Faculty fled. Before the college could staff all the courses that needed to be taught, Christopher Rufo — perhaps the most notorious of DeSantis’ new trustees—started moving to abolish the gender studies program at the college. All of that is part of the DeSantis plan, and it’s terrible on its own, but it’s left New College in chaos, showing the degree to which Republicans don’t care about anything but pushing their ideological agenda.
Faculty continue to leave, leading to ongoing course cancellations. Some students say they haven’t been notified when classes they were enrolled in were canceled. In some cases, the cancellations make it difficult or impossible for students to find the classes they need to complete their majors. Rufo recently wrote in the New York Times:
“For most of the classical liberal tradition, the purpose of the university was to produce scholarship in pursuit of the true, the good and the beautiful. The university was conceived as a home for a community of scholars who pursued a variety of disciplines, but were united in a shared commitment to inquiry, research and debate, all directed toward the pursuit of the highest good, rather than the immediate interests of partisan politics.”
Aside from the ludicrous sight of Rufo, of all people, claiming the mantle of “the pursuit of the highest good, rather than the immediate interests of partisan politics,” it’s an interesting question about how the highest good is served by college students being unable to take neurobiology.
“These are young adults who are not looking to fill up a semester with high school electives. It’s not like, ‘Oh, chorus is closed, let me just go take that art class,’” the mother of a student who is transferring to Hampshire College told Inside Higher Ed. “There are classes [students] need to take to continue to propel [their] studies forward … that was just an absolute stunning thing to have a college tell us, just pick something else. No.”
Just as faculty are leaving, students are leaving: Hampshire College allowed students in good standing at New College to transfer at their existing rate of tuition, and the New York Times’ Michelle Goldbert reported that 35 students were transferring for the fall and another 30 had inquired about spring semester. That’s out of fewer than 700 students at New College prior to the DeSantis attacks—and we don’t know how many have left for other alternatives.
Oh, but New College is getting bigger despite the departures. The interim president’s goals include increasing attendance and building an athletics program, and he’s doing both at once by bringing in a large number of new athletes. New College admitted 100 student athletes for this fall despite having no real athletic facilities and not being a member of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. For some reason, 70 of the athletes are baseball players. In contrast, the University of Florida’s Division I team has 37 players. It’s really not clear what the plan is for sports at New College: “Women’s basketball and men’s soccer had only one athlete apiece, while women’s soccer had six athletes enrolled, according to public records,” the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s Stephen Walker reported last month.
The athletes got a disproportionate number of $10,000 merit scholarships, Walker reported, while contributing to the incoming class having lower GPAs and SAT and ACT scores than the previous year’s class. Goldberg added,
“[In mid-August], New College’s interim president, Richard Corcoran, a longtime Republican politician who served as DeSantis’s education commissioner, sent a memo to faculty members, proposing new majors in finance, communications and sports psychology, ‘which will appeal to many of our newly admitted athletes.’ As Amy Reid, a New College professor of French who directs the gender studies department, said when I spoke to her last weekend, ‘Tell me how sports psychology, finance and communications fits with a classical liberal arts model.’”
Merit scholarships and a set of new majors are not all the athletes are getting. There’s a sudden housing shortage at New College, with housing contracts that had been finalized in April being canceled over the summer and juniors and seniors in particular being denied apartments they were supposed to live in. Contrary to what you might expect, it’s not that Rufo decided the campus housing was too woke, and shut it down—it’s that the administration decided to prioritize its treasured new cadre of student-athletes over existing commitments to returning students. To handle the squeeze, the college has actually rented out the entire Home2 Suites by Hilton Sarasota Bradenton Airport. If living in a hotel as your college dorm sounds nice, consider the following: It’s an airport hotel a mile from campus, forcing students to either walk along a busy highway in an area where crime is considered a concern, or take an hourly shuttle that will stop running at 11 p.m. and won’t have very much room anyway. There will be no food served at the hotel and no cooking is allowed in rooms—students will have to go to campus for meals. No more than two people will be allowed to be in a room at a time, so forget about study groups. All so athletes can get the best New College has to offer.
Why the big focus on athletes? It’s pretty clear they won’t be raising New College’s national profile by bringing home trophies anytime soon. Goldberg got part of the answer from Rufo: The athletes are more heavily male than New College’s recent student population, and he sees a more male student population as likely a more conservative one.
“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.
This is literally affirmative action for male athletes as a partisan move. And Rufo, DeSantis, and their gang will continue to talk about how they’re trying to elevate learning and remove ideology from Florida colleges and universities. Absolutely nothing these people say should ever be believed—except when Rufo goes all B-movie villain and decides to brag about exactly what he’s doing. When Rufo is telling you that he’s going to rebrand everything about race as “critical race theory” as a strategy, believe him. When he’s claiming to care about “the classical liberal tradition,” laugh and say “you mean white, conservative domination.” And anytime he or DeSantis try to claim effective leadership or even bare minimum competence, laugh and point to New College students walking down the highway to get breakfast at a school that doesn’t offer the courses they need to finish their majors.
Laura Clawson is assistant managing editor at Daily Kos, where this appeared.
From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2023
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