Our campus is undergoing a hostile takeover. Exactly two years after the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol building, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s office issued a statement announcing six gubernatorial appointments to New College’s 13-member board of trustees. The new appointees include vocal opponents of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and curricula that includes critical race theory (CRT) and gender studies. These appointments stunned students, faculty, staff, parents, and alumni of New College, and sent shock waves through the local community of Sarasota.
More specifically, the new board includes: Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who has distorted the meaning of the academic framework that is critical race theory and spearheaded ongoing attacks on teaching CRT in schools; Eddie Spier, the cofounder of the Christian charter school Inspiration Academy in Bradenton, Florida, who, when doing so, had no background or training in education; and Matthew Spalding, a professor and dean at Hillsdale College, a private, conservative Christian school in Michigan.
What the DeSantis administration is trying to do, in brief, is force a conservative Christian model of education onto our public college, attempting to choke out hard-won academic freedom. Of course, this agenda is not lost on the critically thinking students of New College. During the first meeting with new board members, a student who chose not to reveal their identity, accused new trustees such as Rufo and Spier of having a “dogmatic conservative ideology.” The student boldly called out the hypocrisy that undergirds their stated support of academic freedom and a classical liberal education:
Rufo’s response, which we found demeaning and rude, reinforces that he is unsuited to working in higher education. He replied at length, but seemed unwilling to take up the substance of the student's comment, concluding, “Your opinion, while it’s wrong, would be welcomed.”
Given the epidemic of mass shootings, notably in schools and institutions of higher education, and most recently at Michigan State, a line of students demanded freedom to explore all fields of thought in a safe environment. The new board members again showed that they are the wrong people for the job at hand. Asked repeatedly how the board of trustees would ensure the physical safety of students, Spier unabashedly claimed, “We cannot sacrifice our freedoms for safety — that’s American,” while the shocked audience protested, “Whose safety?”
Subsequent social media posts and interviews have demonstrated that these new trustees are here to rule rather than help us thrive in our existing environment, where all fields of study are open to debate and discussion. This new, primarily cis-male board of trustees forced the first woman president out and installed as our interim president Richard Corcoran, a friend of Spalding and a DeSantis ally, which exemplifies the overall attempt here to conjure an era of patriarchal rule. They’ve also voted to abolish our office that handles diversity and equity and inclusion programs.
It seems clear that this small group intends to implement what Spier termed DeSantis’s “mandate” over and against the wishes of the existing New College community. What we really need is a board of trustees that will support the continuation of vitally important programs, which this community has already agreed upon collectively. We argue that a real mandate comes from the community of educators and students, further determining together what our learning community should look like.
Historically, access to Black studies and gender studies was won by students through campus movements across the country, including demands for courses and departments, often with support of faculty. The same is true for women’s studies departments and, more recently, gender and sexuality studies. These programs help us understand our world and to act within it to build community. Today, as the attacks mount, particularly here in Florida with DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” act, the “Stop Woke” act, and rejection of the proposed AP African American studies course, students will have to work with faculty and staff to defend our hard-won victories.
DeSantis packing the New College board of trustees is a targeted effort to dismantle a 60-year-old experiment that, by all accounts, has produced a successful model of education. Even by the standards of traditional models of education, New College graduates succeed. As our faculty wrote in an official statement, our students include “a Federal Reserve Bank president, a Fields Medalist in mathematics… Fulbright award winners (86 and counting!), Gillman International Scholars, high earners (median salary >10 years post-graduation >$100,000)... a Marshall Scholar, NSF Graduate Research Fellows, scholars (among public universities, we have the highest per-capita percentage of graduates who go on to receive doctoral degrees)... Udall Undergraduate Scholars… and much more.”
But students and faculty have also built an institution here that provides a home and community for a population where two-thirds of the students identify as female — which the incoming board of trustees noted as a problem — many students identify as queer or trans, and where many students have expressed a desire to get something different from their education. New College is unique in its structure, using narrative evaluations in place of grades, empowering students to design an individual degree plan, and supporting intensive independent studies to prepare students for writing a senior thesis. Students and faculty have built an impressive alternative model of education that should be an inspiration for others, not one that is attacked and disparaged by the governor and the new board of trustees.
The history of this institution, too, says a great deal about how invested our community is in the struggle for a better society. As detailed in Furman C. Arthur's book about the history of New College, just a few years after its founding, three students traveled to Alabama in 1965 to join the Selma to Montgomery march. The march, precipitated by the police killing of a 26-year-old Black man named Jimmie Lee Jackson, has special resonance in this moment. Those three students ended up in jail, apparently for refusing to obey an officer, showing off some of their independent thinking. In the years that followed, students at New College supported a group of Black high schoolers in the community as they fought the local school board's decision to close their school. New College students helped organize Freedom Schools on campus for the week of action that was called in opposition to the closing.
At the same time, female students agitated for a female gynecologist to be added to college health services and, in 1970, for access to abortion services and contraception. Eventually, over 20 women occupied the president's office, which led to a standoff that, while unresolved, created the space for continuing negotiations.
Faculty also took initiative, engaging in the struggles of the day. They voted to suspend “business as usual” on October 15, 1970, encouraging students, faculty, and staff to join the national moratorium demanding an end to the US war in Vietnam. Students organized vigils. Visiting speakers and community members joined the campus activities. That same year, students organized to mark Earth Day on campus, and, in response to the student murders at Kent State, pushed faculty to suspend classes for three days. The faculty agreed to delay evaluations for any students working in the movement against the war in Vietnam.
It will take this kind of work and community engagement to defend the gains made by movements of students and faculty who came before us. Perhaps in this struggle we might also create new horizons for what we want and need on campus today. As faculty, though only visiting, we are committed to the defense of our gender studies program and the embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion as community standards. The contributions of the faculty and staff who do this work should not only be defended, but praised and multiplied amid the hostile environment created by the state government and new members of the board of trustees.
Of course, this struggle extends well beyond the bounds of our campus, moving across the state, and throughout the nation. We encourage students, faculty, and staff to unite and learn the history of your institutions, the particulars of how beloved programs, offices, and departments were established on campus, and to imagine what else we might win if we take initiative to build more in the face of these blatant attempts to turn back the hands of time.
As the Black history and Black studies scholar Khalil Gibran Muhammad has pointed out, “Florida is a laboratory of fascism.” Fighting this move toward fascism will take students, faculty, and staff working together with the broader community and alumni.
We are here to defend the freedom of students to learn in their chosen environment, with programs and classes that align with the school in which they enrolled. We are here to defend the freedom of faculty members to teach what we have spent lifetimes studying and were hired to help students understand. And we are here to defend the freedom of staffers to organize in support of the diversity, equity, and inclusion that stand as a central community agreement — one that we desperately need in this state and country.
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