RIP New College

My sister Kathy went to New College in September 1970. Kathy was queer, which made life in our small town difficult. She found welcome and home at New College for a brief time. She studied with Robin Morgan, who edited the groundbreaking anthology of the women’s movement published in 1970, Sisterhood is Powerful. She rode a motorcycle, wrote poetry, and edited a feminist newsletter at the college. 

New College really was new then, founded only ten years earlier. A private college for academically talented students, New College offered openness, academic freedom, and respect for students as they stretched their intellectual wings. 

The 1970s were a tough decade. Kathy didn’t make it through them. New College almost went under, but was saved by a deal that made it part of the Florida university system. Even as part of that system, New College remained a welcoming, open setting. 

My memory of Kathy’s time there makes reading about New College today all the more painful. This year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed new, highly conservative trustees, announcing plans to remake New College into something like the private, Christian, right-wing Hillsdale College. The new trustees promptly fired the college’s president and installed DeSantis ally and Florida education commissioner Richard Corcoran as president, despite his complete lack of education experience or credentials. Trustee Christopher Rufo tweeted, “We are organizing a ‘hostile takeover of a liberal college.’” This month, he boasted that 36 faculty members have left since the takeover. 

Rufo and DeSantis are leaders in a rightwing movement that aims to destroy not only academic freedom in universities, but schools and education at all levels. Their foot soldiers—in Florida and across the country—ban books, threaten teachers, and defund libraries. They want to ban mention of sex or gender in AP psychology classes. (Freud, anyone?) One Florida district forbids assigning Shakespeare plays because of concern over sexual content—only excerpts can be assigned for study, not entire plays. Racism is never far from the surface of this movement. In Texas, a trustee (local school board member) said a child “was traumatized by a poster showing different colored children holding hands and had to switch classrooms.”  

This week, New College moved to abolish its gender studies program, on orders from the board of trustees. Rufo bragged:

“The mission of New College of Florida is to restore classical liberal education and to revive the pursuit of transcendent truth—a mission ultimately incompatible with the disciplines of gender studies and queer theory, which are explicitly opposed to the classical conceptions of the true, the good, and the beautiful.” 

Not too hard to extrapolate from that: the study, the literature, the art, the lives of LGBTQ+ people are the opposite of “the true, the good, and the beautiful.” As are the study, the literature, the art, and the lives of women—or at least of those women who do not fit into the “classical conceptions” of their roles and nature. 

That fits right in with Florida’s new Black history curriculum for grade schools and high schools, which completely distorts and devalues Black history and Black lives. The curriculum requires that teachers instruct students about “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Popular Information’s Judd Legum notes that, despite immediate denunciation across a broad political spectrum, DeSantis continued to insist on this distortion of history:

“That provision was blasted by Black Republicans. ‘There is no silver lining in slavery,’ Senator and presidential candidate Tim Scott (R-SC) said. ‘Slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives. It was just devastating.’ Congressmen Byron Donalds (R-FL) and John James (R-MI) also spoke out against the curriculum. DeSantis responded by attacking the three Black Republicans, claiming they accepted Democrats’ ‘false narratives’ and ‘lies.’”

The same “hostile takeover” underway at New College threatens all public education, from grade school to grad school. In an essay about book banning, author Stephen King wrote:

“There are people out there who are deciding what your kids can read, and they don’t care what you think because they are positive their ideas of what’s proper and what’s not are better, clearer than your own. Do you believe they are? Think carefully before you decide to accord the book-banners this right of cancellation, and remember that they don’t believe in democracy but rather in a kind of intellectual autocracy. If they are left to their own devices, a great deal of good literature may soon disappear from the shelves of school libraries simply because good books — books that make us think and feel — always generate controversy.”

What he wrote about books applies equally to lesson plans and history curriculums. The job of education is opening minds, not closing them. 

If we care about the future of our children, grandchildren—or country—then it’s time to stand up and fight back. Caring means keeping your eyes and mind open and paying attention to the news, even when that keeps you up at night. Caring means voting against those who want to ban books and distort history.

Caring means sorting fact from fiction and truth from lies. Caring also means asking tough questions of candidates who are running for school board or library board or county commissioner. Caring might mean running for school board. It might mean talking to your neighbor or your niece, writing a letter to the editor, or baking cookies for a community meeting. Caring means action of whatever kind you can take. Inaction is not an option.