"Oh, Boo Hoo. You’re Losing Your Socialist Madrassa"

How Floriduh turned a "woke, nihilist" Liberal Arts college into a reliably beige and unimaginative Right-wing indoctrination camp

This really should be the new logo of the GOP.

One can fight evil but against stupidity one is helpless.

• Henry Miller, Sextet: Six essays

If there’s one thing consistent with the Republican Party anywhere in America these days, it’s the party’s ability to shit on everything it touches. Particularly in red states, Republican “leadership” has shown an astonishing propensity for taking things that have previously worked very well and turning them into flaming piles of horse shit.

Nowhere has this been demonstrated more thoroughly than with what Floriduh Gov. Ron DeSantis has done to New College, which used to be Floriduh’s public honors university. What once was “a home for freethinking but high-achieving hippie and LGBTQ+ nerds” has been thoroughly neutered and turned into “a bastion of conservative indoctrination liberal arts study.”

And there’s nothing “Liberal” about Gov. DeSatan’s “liberal arts.”

Tuition was low, but standards were high. There were no fraternities or competitive sports. It was a place, they said, where people felt comfortable being themselves.

New College was once a small state school on Sarasota Bay that attracted students and faculty who were intelligent, inquisitive, and, frankly, a bit different than what you might find in other college environments. Individuality was not only encouraged but celebrated. That was about to change.

It was precisely that quirkiness and individuality that Gov. DeSantis and his Right-wing barbarians wanted to beat out of New College.

Individuality is bad. Individuality means critical thinking and the willingness to color outside the lines. Republicans HATE individuality and critical thinking.

We are now over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within.

[Insert sound of jackboots marching in unison here.]

The emphasis is no longer on intellectual exploration and freethinking but instead on Conservative indoctrination and “Western civilization.” That’s code for teaching that White people were benevolent masters who taught their slaves job skills to support themselves when freed. It’s a dishonest, White-centric educational curriculum that’s far more indoctrination than education.

Yeah, slavery was an unpaid internship and slave owners were merely ensuring that their charges possessed the work skills they’d need on that glorious day when freedom arrived.

With the new school year about to begin, New College is virtually unrecognizable. That, of course, was the goal.

Mission accomplished. The school that opened in 1960 and was often referred to as “Barefoot U” would now be buttoned down, properly shod, and presenting a much different image to the world.

It’s been eight months since Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decided it might be fun to let far-Right culture warriors dismantle New College of Florida[.]….

With the fall semester starting soon, it looks like the tearing-down phase of the project is going just great, as we learned from Scott Lemieux at Lawyers Guns Money, who calls attention to a pair of distressing articles detailing the damage already done by the new “leadership” at New College. Yeah, this is going to be one of those pieces where I urge you to go read the whole things if you can.

In the spring, DeSantis appointed an all-new Board of Trustees to govern New College, led by professional shit-stirrer Christopher Rufo, the Seattle-based propagandist who did more than anyone else to drive the moral panic over "critical race theory" and helped spearhead the Right’s ongoing panic over LGBTQ+ folks. The goal, DeSantis’s administration enjoyed saying, was to transform New College into a “Hillsdale of the South,” as if anyone but rightwing wienerheads thinks Hillsdale, a rightwing fundamentalist school in Michigan, is a beacon of serious academic work. But DeSantis only wants to appeal to rightwing wienerheads in his presidential campaign, so that’s fine.

In keeping with his stated Presidential campaign goal of turning America into a larger version of Floriduh, Gov. DeSantis can point to New College as a “success story.” Since he cares only about “Right-wing wienerheads,” what he defines as REAL Americans, he can point to New College and say, “You see? No CRT! No LGBTQ studies! No DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) studies!”

And no “Left-wing wienerheads.” Yay, ‘Merica!!

Yes, New College is now a safe learning environment for the offspring of White Conservative Christian heterosexuals. The new “Hillsdale of the South” has become the first publicly-funded university to put the “fun” in “Right-wing fundamentalist Christian” university.

New College is once again a safe space for White Conservative Christian heterosexuals to express themselves.

Among other changes the wrecking crew have already wrought (ooh, alliteration!), the new trustees fired the college president, Patricia Okker, and replaced her with former Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran, who served as Education Commissioner under DeSantis, as interim president. (Prior to that appointment, he had no experience in education, but his politics were in the Right place.) The trustees eliminated the diversity, equity and inclusion office, and denied tenure to five well-credentialed professors, claiming their work was substandard, which simply means they’d been hired under the college’s old order. The board is now planning to eliminate New College’s gender studies program starting in 2024, although students currently in the program will be allowed to graduate before every trace of their having been there is sandblasted. Rufo bragged on TwitteX that “We are the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of queer theory and gender pseudoscience into academic life.”

The fuckers also closed the popular Pride dorm and painted over student murals this summer, because a fascist aesthetic demands straight lines and bare walls, not unsightly (and dangerously ethnic) colors and exuberance.

That’s right; you don’t create budding fascists in an environment that fosters creativity and individualism. Nor do you want to encourage critical thinking, because once students begin thinking, they being questioning the established order…and we all know what that can lead to, right??

LIBERALISM!!! SOCIALISMO O MUERTO!!!

No, you want to create an environment of bland uniformity- “straight lines and bare walls”- that will encourage students to focus on the need to obey and focus on the party line. Only by keeping students coloring within the lines can the State ensure that when they graduate, they’ll become faithful servants of the State and its Supreme Leader.

So, no DEI, no queer studies, no “gender pseudoscience”- nothing that deviates from the new mission of New Colleges- producing faithful servants of the State.

Not that there haven’t been “growing pains”:

The new regime is also just plain not any good at running a college, as the article points out, detailing the banal but infuriating problems students are having just finding a place to live, because the former junior-senior dorm is now full of student athletes — who make up about half of the incoming 2023-24 class. New College never bothered with sports before, but now it has 70 baseball players — but no baseball field or any other athletic facilities, at least not yet. Maybe Brett Favre will help out there.

Why so many athletes? USA Today notes that University of Florida, which is in the NCAA’s Division I, only has 37 baseball players. It also points out that the new crop of jocks has brought down the college’s average GPA, so take that nerds. Maybe they just want to start a chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and wanted a big turnout for the first meeting. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with importing a lot of muscleheads with rightwing views to help modify the “student culture” at what until now has been a haven for nerds and queer kids, could it? Crazy conspiracy talk on our part, never mind.

But there is a new emphasis on creating a more masculine student body and making a deliberate effort to create a much different culture at New College, as Christopher Rufo explained to the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg:

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.

“All sorts of cultural problems?” And by that, I’m assuming he means that the student body leans WAY too far to the left and was FAR too feminist for his liking? A “social justice ghetto?” No, you certainly don’t want a student body where students believe in a shared responsibility to look out for one another. Any good, God-fearing White Conservative Christian heterosexual cisgender patriot KNOWS that it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and one must climb over the rotting bodies of their conquered adversaries to succeed.

Yes, kids, compassion and caring are for losers and Liberals. No one made it to the top by linking arms and singing “Kum-Bah-Yah,” knowhutimean??

Kill or be killed. Welcome to American capitalism.

The depth and breadth of changes made to New College by the Right-wing barbarians is stunning.

• Faculty may no longer use their pronouns in official communications.

• Gender-neutral signs have been removed from all campus bathrooms.

• The Pride dorm has been eliminated.

• The African Studies learning community has been eliminated.

• The school’s diversity office was disbanded.

• A Bible verse appeared on mugs at a campus coffee shop.

And there’s more to come. The Gender Studies program is hanging on (barely) and is unlikely to survive beyond the fall semester. By the end of the 2023-24 school year, much of what distinguished New College from other colleges and universities will have been stripped away. The newly-appointed Conservative board of trustees and the mission to rid New College of its devotion to “woke nihilism” will have turned “Barefoot U” into a state-funded Christian college.

Never mind the separation of Church and State issues inherent in that, the sad aspect of this story is the destruction of a genuinely unique and free-spirited learning environment. But, as mentioned earlier, this is just another example of Republicans shitting on everything they come into contact with. They attempt to destroy anything unique and different because they feel threatened by it.

They can’t control “unique” and “different,” so they must destroy it to bring it under their rule.

This is why the Right can’t lead; they lack imagination and the ability to process anything even remotely unique and out of the ordinary. Unless they can stuff something into their tiny box of things they can understand, they’re threatened by “new” and “different.”

And so we all suffer from their lack of imagination, intellectual agility, and flexibility. If the GOP succeeds in ruling America, our world will be painted in shades of industrial beige…and for “variety” in shades of black and white.

I can only speak for myself, but I don’t want a world painted in shades of black and white. I want to inhabit a world splashed in a full palate of colors, and I want those colors to be within and outside the lines. In fact, why do we need lines? They serve only to limit the imagination.

If such a lack of order threatens Republicans, then f**k them all, every last one.

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