[ Naturally, Gov. DeSantis of Florida wants to demolish New
College, the most progressive public college in the state, at least as
it currently exists.]
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DESANTIS ALLIES PLOT THE HOSTILE TAKEOVER OF A LIBERAL COLLEGE  
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Michelle Goldberg
January 9, 2023
The New York Times
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_ Naturally, Gov. DeSantis of Florida wants to demolish New College,
the most progressive public college in the state, at least as it
currently exists. _

Chris Rufo is one of six new appointees to the New College of
Florida’s board of trustees.Credit..., Ian Allen for The New York
Times

 

New College of Florida has a reputation for being the most progressive
public college in the state. X González — a survivor of the
Parkland school shooting who, as Emma González, became a prominent
gun control activist — recently wrote
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their alma mater, “In the queer space of New College, changing your
pronouns, name or presentation is a nonevent.” In The Princeton
Review’s ranking
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the best public colleges and universities for “making an impact”
— measured by things like student engagement, community service and
sustainability efforts — New College comes in third.

Naturally, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida wants to demolish it, at least
as it currently exists. On Friday, he announced six new appointments
to New College’s 13-member board of trustees, including Chris Rufo,
who orchestrated the right’s attack on critical race theory, and
Matthew Spalding, a professor and dean at Hillsdale College, a
conservative Christian school in Michigan with close ties
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Donald Trump. (A seventh member will soon be appointed
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Florida’s Board of Governors, which is full of DeSantis allies.)

The new majority’s plan, Rufo told me just after his appointment was
announced, is to transform New College into a public version of
Hillsdale. “We want to provide an alternative for conservative
families in the state of Florida to say there is a public university
that reflects _your_ values,” he said.

The fight over the future of New College is about more than just the
fate of this small school in Sarasota. For DeSantis, it’s part of a
broader quest to crush any hint of progressivism in public education,
a quest he’d likely take national if he ever became president. For
Rufo, a reconstructed New College would serve as a model for
conservatives to copy all over the country. “If we can take this
high-risk, high-reward gambit and turn it into a victory, we’re
going to see conservative state legislators starting to reconquer
public institutions all over the United States,” he said. Should he
prevail, it will set the stage for an even broader assault on the
academic freedom of every instructor whose worldview is at odds with
the Republican Party.

Rufo often talks about the “long march through the institutions,”
a phrase coined by the German socialist Rudi Dutschke in 1967 but
frequently attributed to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci.
Thwarted in their hope of imminent revolution, the new left of
Dutschke’s generation sought instead to bore into political and
cultural institutions, working within the system to change the basic
assumptions of Western society. Rufo’s trying, he said, to “steal
the strategies and the principles of the Gramscian left, and then to
organize a kind of counterrevolutionary response to the long march
through the institutions.”

This grandiose project has several parts. Rufo has been unparalleled
in fanning public education culture wars, whipping up anger first
against critical race theory
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then against teaching on L.G.B.T.Q. issues
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This year, he is turning his attention to diversity, equity and
inclusion programs, and, with his colleagues at the Manhattan
Institute, will soon unveil model legislation to abolish such programs
at state schools. In New College, he sees a chance to create a new
type of educational institution to replace those he’s trying to
destroy. When we spoke, he compared his plans to Elon Musk’s
takeover of Twitter.

Later this month, Rufo said, he’ll travel to New College with a
“landing team” of board members, lawyers, consultants and
political allies. “We’re going to be conducting a top-down
restructuring,” he said, with 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
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this master plan will likely be heavy on American triumphalism. Rufo
hopes to move fast, saying that the school’s academic departments
“are going to look very different in the next 120 days.”

The values of the people who are already at New College are of little
concern to Rufo, who, like several other new trustees, doesn’t live
in Florida. 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.”

Of course, as both leftist revolutionaries and colonialists have
learned over the years, replacing one culture with another can be
harder than anticipated. New College students may not go quietly.
Steve Shipman, a professor of physical chemistry and president of the
faculty union, points out that tenured professors are covered by a
collective bargaining agreement, which makes it hard to fire them
unless there’s cause. People like Rufo “are making statements to
make impact,” Shipman said. “And I really don’t know how viable
some of those statements are on the ground.”

We’ll soon find out. “We anticipate that this is going to be a
process that involves conflict,” said Rufo.

_Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is
the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s
rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public
service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual
harassment. @michelleinbklyn [[link removed]]_

* Florida
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* Public Education
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* Colleges
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* Right-wing agenda
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* Ron DeSantis
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