Ron DeSantis and his personally appointed wrecking crew of rightwing ideologues are looking for some students and faculty to come help them turn New College of Florida into a bastion of rightwing higher education, a “Hillsdale of the South,” as DeSantis aides have put it.
Unfortunately for the DeSantis crew, led by professional Culture War grifter Christopher Rufo, New College already came with a faculty and student body who don’t at all fit the mold of Gov. Orban’s ideal institution. The place has historically been delightfully idiosyncratic, with students encouraged to design their own degree programs, and instead of grades, an end-of-course conversation with the prof about what students learned. Think Washington’s The Evergreen College, but with palm trees instead of geoduck clams and rain.
So in February, the Florida Lege directed $15 million to help the new New College recruit a more suitable crop of students and faculty. The budget amendment said the funds were to be used, at the Board of Trustees’ discretion, “for hiring faculty, offering student scholarships, and covering additional operational costs necessary to transition into a world-class classical liberal arts educational institution.” We assume that would also help purchase every new student their very own AR-15 lapel pin.
To help attract the Right kind of students, New College is getting help from rightwing groups like the “Florida Family Policy Council” and its mailing list. That group’s president, John Stemberger — a longtime Bible-Banger — sent an email to “friends with college-age students” plugging the scholarships, with the topic line “Students should consider New College in Sarasota quickly being touted as the Hillsdale College of the southeast,” which is a run-on sentence.
The email also passed along a message from Richard Corcoran, New College’s interim president. Corcoran, a big mucketymuck in Florida Republican circles, had previously been speaker of the state House and a state education commissioner under DeSantis. Corcoran’s message said the $10,000 scholarships will be available to “each qualified first-time-in-college or transfer student,” in addition to other financial aid. Good deal! The message said that New College is
the place for the rapidly growing population of students who are looking for a place to explore their intellectual curiosity, pursue their passions, and gain a better understanding of the world without having to abandon who they are and what they believe. [emphasis added — Dok]
Translation: You can be a rightwing Christian nationalist and no one will ever suggest that’s a bad thing.
The “Tomorrow Belongs To You” boosterism was a bit less subtle in a story from a thing called “The Florida Standard,” a website seemingly created to tell the world how great Ron DeSantis is, and that he makes the very best three-headed gophers ever, and should make more. The headline and subhed make clear that if you a student from a stock photo, you should very definitely get $10,000 to enroll at NCF — and did you know that it is “touted as the ‘Hillsdale of the South'”? (It’s like that running gag in the movie version of Get Shorty, touting the Oldsmobile Silhouette as the “Cadillac of Minivans”)
The hard-hitting press release rewrite touts — in another internal heading and in the text — that NCF is out to become the Cadillac of Hillsdales, without even the least hint that up until now, New College has been a haven for liberals, intellectual stoners, and a very LGBTQ+ -friendly culture. (We do hope that even after the takeover, the school’s knitting club can keep the name “Anarchy Deathsticks.”)
Last week, a New College professor made a bit of a splash by saying in his resignation letter that the effort to remake New College as [yes, you know the phrase now] left him feeling almost ready to “burn the college’s buildings to the ground,” but for his love for the students and what the place used to stand for.
In the kind of excellent invective that we assume means he doesn’t need to worry about making his next mortgage payment, Aaron Hillegass, the director of applied data science at New College, tweeted a copy of his resignation letter to Corcoran, noting that he’d been hired just prior to DeSantis’s hostile takeover.
Hillsdale College is bad for America. It cultivates prejudice against immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, minorities, and non-christians. It pushes a nativist and nationalistic agenda that would isolate the US from other nations.
When a governor guts the leadership of a state school in an effort to make a facsimile of Hillsdale, that is fascism. Not the shocking Kristallnacht-style fascism, but the banal fascism that always precedes it.
The nation is watching this experiment. If it is successful, the academic freedom of every state school under a conservative governor will be in peril. I love New College, but for the good of our nation, I hope the school fails miserably and conspicuously.
If I were more patriotic, I would burn the college’s buildings to the ground. However, the soft spot in my heart for the students and faculty who remain prevents this. Thus, I will (not outraged, just moved by a nagging sense of duty) vote with my feet, and simply walk away.
Note: I am taking the $600K that I pledged to the New College Foundation with me.
When my employment contract expires on August 22, I will not be renewing it.
Hillegass later added that no, he would not really do a arson, and that the line was simply a “poetic flourish that sounded cool until it showed up in the Sarasota Herald Tribune.” Heck, we bet he only burned metaphorical bridges with the letter. Wingnut Media must have gone after him, because yesterday he tweeted that he really is a capitalist, and that one of his ancestors was “Michael Hillegas who was the treasurer of the Continental Congress.”
So put that in your tricorn and smoke it, teabaggers. In the replies, they all call him a hypocrite for not being tolerant of fascists, the end.
[Florida Standard / Tampa Bay Times / Semafor / Photo: Alaska Miller, Creative Commons License 4.0]
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