[Over a third of the faculty members have left. Many of last
year’s students are continuing their education elsewhere. ]
[[link removed]]

AT A COLLEGE TARGETED BY DESANTIS, GENDER STUDIES IS OUT, JOCKS ARE
IN  
[[link removed]]


 

Michelle Goldberg
August 14, 2023
New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Over a third of the faculty members have left. Many of last
year’s students are continuing their education elsewhere. _

Chris Rufo, a New College board member, in May at the college, where
he signed a measure banning initiatives to improve diversity, equity
and inclusion., Damon Winter/The New York Times

 

In two weeks, the new school year will begin at Florida’s New
College, the progressive public liberal arts school singled out by
Gov. Ron DeSantis for cultural transformation. Returning students will
find an institution that is increasingly unrecognizable.

Over a third of the faculty members have left. Many of last year’s
students are continuing their education elsewhere. Hampshire College,
a small private liberal arts school in New England, has offered
financial aid to New College students so they can transfer without
tuition increases. Thirty-five plan to attend Hampshire this fall, and
30 more have inquired about doing so in the spring, a large number,
given that last year New College had fewer than 700 students. Last
week, New College’s leadership announced that it was moving to
abolish the gender studies department. Chris Rufo, the culture warrior
whom DeSantis put on New College’s board of trustees, boasted
[[link removed]] that it would be
“the first public university in America to begin rolling back the
encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory on its academic
offerings.”

The dismantling of gender studies is striking because of how closely
it follows a playbook for the ideological transformation of higher
education pioneered by Hungary, which banned gender studies in 2018.
Given that Rufo frames the New College takeover as a demonstration
project to be repeated by red states nationwide, I’d expect attempts
to scrap gender studies to spread. (Already, some Republicans in the
Wyoming Legislature have tried
[[link removed]],
unsuccessfully, to defund such programs.) But having followed the
right-wing remaking of New College all year, I think it’s worth
paying attention not just to what is being destroyed but also to what
is being put in its place.

Rufo speaks a lot about academic excellence and the virtues of a
classical liberal education. But as Steven Walker of The Sarasota
Herald-Tribune reported
[[link removed]] in
a damning July story, the incoming class recruited by the new
administration has lower average grades, SAT scores and ACT scores
than last year’s class. “Much of the drop in average scores can be
attributed to incoming student-athletes who, despite scoring worse on
average, have earned a disproportionate number of the school’s
$10,000-per-year merit-based scholarships,” wrote Walker.

As of July, New College had 328 incoming students, a record for the
school. Of the group, 115 are athletes, and 70 were recruited to play
baseball, even though, as Walker reported, New College has no real
sports facilities and has yet to be accepted into the National
Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. By comparison, the
University of Florida’s far more established baseball team has 37
student-athletes.

The accommodations offered to New College’s new student-athletes
will be better than those provided to many existing students. Walker
reported that the incoming class will be housed in newer,
apartment-style dorms that in the past were reserved for upperclass
students. Returning students are being moved to older, more decrepit
buildings, two of which recently were declared uninhabitable because
of a mold problem. (New College has said
[[link removed]] it
won’t put students in mold-affected rooms.)

Some new students may well end up immersing themselves in the great
works of the Western canon. But last week, 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.”

Rather than reviving some traditional model of academic excellence,
then, it looks as though New College leaders are simply trying to
replace a culture they find politically hostile with one meant to be
more congenial. The end of gender studies and the special treatment
given to incoming athletes are part of the same project, masculinizing
a place that had been heavily feminist, artsy and queer. When I spoke
to Rufo last weekend, he offered several explanations for New
College’s new emphasis on sports, including the classical idea that
a healthy body sustains a healthy mind. But an important part of the
investment in athletics, he said, is that it is a way to make New
College more male and, by extension, less left wing.

In the past, about two-thirds of New College’s students were women.
“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.

But gender parity is not necessarily compatible with a pure academic
meritocracy, which Rufo claims to prize. Women are outpacing men in
education in many parts of the world, including Saudi Arabia
[[link removed]] and Iran
[[link removed]].
In Hungary, nearly 55 percent of university students are women,
leading the government to warn about the “feminization
[[link removed]]” of higher
education. Selective American colleges tend to have more female than
male applicants; to maintain something approaching a gender
balance, some
[[link removed]] have
adopted lower standards
[[link removed]] for
men. In other words, it often takes deliberate intervention — one
might call it affirmative action — to create a student body in which
women don’t predominate. New College isn’t jettisoning gender
ideology. It’s just adopting a different one.

_Michelle Goldberg became an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times in
2017 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for
public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues._

 

* New College of Florida
[[link removed]]
* Ron DeSantis
[[link removed]]
* Christopher Rufo
[[link removed]]
* Right-wing agenda
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]