Last year, Ron DeSantis appointed a handful of conservatives to the board of trustees at New College in Florida, including conservative activist Chris Rufo.
The idea was to bring some ideological balance to the school, which is known for being progressive even by the standards of higher education. The efforts of these trustees have been fairly successful so far, and that success has the left in panic mode.
The left owns higher education and has for decades. They see progressive control as the norm in academia, so to them this looks and feels like a hostile takeover, which it kind of is.
During a recent board meeting, five faculty members applied for tenure (a year earlier than usual) and in a move clearly designed to suggest that the left is still in charge, progressive protesters showed up to demand that tenure be given.
Someone apparently sent some sort of threat, which the left used to try to cancel the event, but it didn’t work:
When tenure was denied, one progressive board member named Matthew Lepinski resigned in protest and walked out to cheers from the mob.
Rufo’s response on Twitter was epic:
Michelle Goldberg, a left-wing writer for the New York Times, has taken great pity on the progressive crowd at New College and made all of this the subject of her latest column:
This Is What the Right-Wing Takeover of a Progressive College Looks LikeWhen I first met Matthew Lepinski, the faculty chair of New College of Florida, he was willing to give the right-wingers sent to remake his embattled progressive public school a chance.This was in January, a few weeks after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida appointed six activist conservatives, including the culture war strategist Chris Rufo, to New College’s board of trustees. Rufo, the ideological entrepreneur who made critical race theory a Republican boogeyman, was open about his ambition to turn the quirky, L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly liberal arts school into a public version of Hillsdale, a conservative Christian college in Michigan with close ties to both DeSantis and Donald Trump. He hoped the transformation would be proof of concept for his dream: a conservative takeover of higher education across the country.
This passage is almost comical in its description of life at New College:
The new trustees fired the school’s president, replacing her with Richard Corcoran, the Republican former speaker of the Florida House. They fired its chief diversity officer and dismantled the diversity, equity and inclusion office. As I was writing this on Friday, several people sent me photographs of gender-neutral signage scraped off school bathrooms.But day-to-day, students, parents, and professors told me, life at New College has been pretty much the same. Faculty have mostly been left alone to do their jobs. Corcoran, several professors said, was rarely on campus. Sam Sharf, who chose New College in part because she feels safe there as a trans woman, said that classroom discussions in her Politics of the African Diaspora and Alternatives to Capitalism classes haven’t changed, though she’s constantly aware that such subjects might soon be taboo, and is planning to transfer.
This part is telling. Emphasis is mine:
For many, the board of trustees meeting was the clearest sign yet that this is the last semester of New College as they know it. The pivot point was the trustees’ decision to override the typical tenure process. New College hired a large number of new faculty five years ago, and this year was the first that any of them could apply for tenure…It was all futile. A majority of the trustees voted down each of the candidates in turn as the crowd chanted, “Shame on you!” That’s when Lepinski quit, walking out of the room to cheers.The trustees framed their objections in terms of timing; the professors were applying after five years at New College instead of the more customary six, and would have the opportunity to reapply the next year.
Goldberg’s take is that this is like the end of the world.
It’s really just the end of one side having all the power. Let’s hope for more of this.
Featured image via YouTube.
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