Now that he's safely reelected, DeSantis is continuing his war on public ed in Florida. His next target is the New College of Florida, a small (about 700 students) public liberal arts college that is ranked #5 in the nation among public liberal arts colleges by U.S. News (#76 among national liberal arts colleges). The college has long had the reputation of being a bastion of progressive political and cultural thinking, and very LGBTQ friendly.
"DeSantis press secretary Bryan Griffin said by email that New College of Florida “is a public institution with a statutorily stated mission of ‘provid[ing] a quality education.’ Unfortunately, like so many colleges and universities in America, this institution has been completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning."
This week DeSantis appointed six conservatives to the college's Board of Trustees, among them Christopher Rufo of "CRT in schools" fame, and "[Matthew] Spalding, a dean at Hillsdale College, and [Charles] Kesler, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, were both part of the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission, which produced a widely panned rebuttal to
The New York Times’s “1619 Project.” 4 of the trustees don't even live in Florida. "Their self-proclaimed mandate is to transform the small, public institution into a facsimile of the private, Christian university in Michigan [Hillsdale College] that has rejected federal funding,
guided the Trump administration and sought a national footprint by
launching a chain of charter schools."
Rufo has been particularly outspoken in his plans for the college, tweeting “We are now over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within. Under the leadership of Gov. DeSantis, our all-star board will demonstrate that the public universities, which have been corrupted by woke nihilism, can be recaptured, restructured, and reformed."
While his ability to immediately make massive changes was unclear, Rufo
told the
New York Times he would be carrying out a “a top-down restructuring” and that the college’s programs would “look very different in the next 120 days.” In the Times article, Rufo said he plans to “design a new core curriculum from scratch” and “encode it in a new academic master plan.” Given that Hillsdale, the template for this reimagined New College, worked closely with the Trump administration to create a “patriotic education”
curriculum, this master plan will likely be heavy on American triumphalism....When we spoke, [Rufo] compared his plans to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter."
Speaking of current New College students who chose it precisely for its progressive culture, Rufo said “We’re happy to work with them to make New College a great place to continue their education. Or we’d be happy to work with them to help them find something that suits them better.” So basically the current students can just leave.
Link:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/01/11/desantis-seeks-overhaul-small-liberal-arts-college
Link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/opinion/chris-rufo-florida-ron-desantis.html
Link:
https://newrepublic.com/article/169937/new-college-desantis-rufo-crackdown