Since the day Ron DeSantis appointed some conservatives to the board of trustees at the New College of Florida, changes at the school have been coming swiftly.
The DEI office was almost immediately dismantled, then some liberal staff members left over a tenure dispute.
Now the gender studies department is being taken apart.
Naturally, Christopher Rufo is at the center of all this.
The Tampa Bay Times reports:
New College of Florida trustees move to end gender studies majorThe New College of Florida board of trustees voted during a heated meeting Thursday to begin the process of eliminating gender studies as a major at the Sarasota school.The decision, opposed by three board members, concluded an already tense day during which the trustees interviewed candidates to be the school’s next president. At one point as the board met, four members of the public were escorted out by police.The outbursts were an outgrowth of tensions that have simmered since January, when Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed six new trustees to the New College board with a mandate to dramatically change the school’s mission and culture.One of those board members, conservative activist Christopher Rufo, proposed an addition to the agenda toward the end of Thursday’s meeting.The gender studies program, he said from a projected Zoom screen, is “wildly contradictory” to the board’s mission to “revive a classical liberal arts agenda.”
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune has more on this:
The gender studies program at New College was established in 1995 and sees about eight student majors in a given year, with dozens more taking courses that are gender studies eligible.The incoming 2024 class of students would be the first to be affected by the change, Rufo said.The action is the latest by Rufo and other board members appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to execute a lightning transformation of the state’s only public liberal arts honors college into a model of conservative education, likened to the Christian Michigan-based Hillsdale College. One of the appointees’ first moves was to abolish the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion program.It also moved to fire the previous president and install Richard Corcoran as interim president, who has moved to quickly boost enrollment by establishing a first-ever sports program at the college.
Here are a couple of Twitter reactions:
The left still controls 99.9% of higher education. This is just one school.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY