New College of Gilead (Formerly Known as Florida)

Update 7/30/23:At the start of the 2023-24 academic year, New College of Florida announced that 36 of 100 full time teaching positions were vacant.  Six vacancies were the result of resignations, and a quarter of them followed the extreme right takeover of the board of trustees.  In Florida universities generally, the loss of faculty this year is to at least double and perhaps triple the normal turnover.  One senior professor at the University of Florida law school who is Black said simply: "Florida is toxic."  He said there's been no new hires of Black teachers for years.  He has left the school and the state, partly for his own safety. 

In addition to attacking school libraries and curricula and K-12 schools themselves, the rabid right officials of Florida are completing their takeover of a previously progressive college, known as New College of Florida.

Recent stories about it reminded me of something I’d entirely forgotten: in high school, when I was exploring where I might go to college, I considered applying to what was then called simply New College. 

At that time it really was a New College—in fact, it didn’t have students yet.  I don’t know exactly how or why I was receiving unsolicited information from them, but their letters and brochures were very inviting. 

 It was to be a liberal arts college for academically talented students, who would have a wide latitude in following their own lines and areas of inquiry.  Students would be given written evaluations instead of grades, and each semester they would set goals and sign a contract to fulfill them, which included agreed upon standards of passing or failing.  The student body would be very small but also racially, culturally and economically diverse, and (vital to me) there was financial aid available.

 The brochures as I recall them made much of the most recognizable name on the charter faculty: the eminent historian Arnold Toynbee.  Toynbee made his academic mark in the 1940s and 50s, and was known as well for his international expertise.  Though his academic influence apparently declined by 1960, and he’d retired from teaching before New College persuaded him to join them, he gained new currency with the election of John F. Kennedy to the US presidency.  That’s why I knew his name. 

Toynbee’s major opus was a twelve volume A Study of History which he began publishing in 1934, with the final volume arriving only in 1961.  His major thesis, as JFK described it, was that nations succeed or fail based on how they respond to challenges.  Kennedy used this as an overarching guide to his approach to policymaking.  

 Describing his New Frontier vision in his nomination acceptance speech, Kennedy said: “The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set a promises.  It is a set of challenges.”  “Challenges” was a frequent word in his public vocabulary. Most of what Kennedy tried to accomplish—increasing US prestige and influence in the world, beginning the control of nuclear weapons, and addressing economic, environmental and social issues (such as racial justice and poverty) in the US—were, in his view, the necessary responses to challenges in what he described as the dangerous decade of the 1960s.  Responding to challenges was both defensive and proactive—the challenge to do better.

 In the end, the lure of Toynbee, the utopian sound of the college, and the Sarasota sunshine, were not enough for me to seriously entertain applying.  Maybe I just lacked the courage (and any more information than the brochures offered), but I did not attempt to be one of the first 101 students at New College that entered in 1964.  

Over the years New College seems to have maintained this initial character, and it worked pretty well.  It’s near the top in academic rating, and has had the highest proportion of Fulbright scholars of any college or university in the US.  But seemingly due to its small size (between 600 and 700 students), New College went through several institutional permutations to keep going, most recently becoming the smallest college in the Florida state university system, and also its Honors College. 

 That relationship seemed to work okay until this year, when Governor Ron DeSantis exercised state control to appoint six new members of the governing board of trustees, including four known “conservative” activists (who didn’t live in Florida.)  They quickly fired the college president, denied tenure to all five eligible professors, announced their intention to shut down “ideologically captured departments,” disbanded the diversity and inclusion office, fired the school’s librarian, etc.

 Their intention, said the governor’s chief of staff, is to transform New College into one “more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”  Hillsdale is a small but influential conservative Christian college in Michigan. Not heavy on Fulbright scholars, it nevertheless supplied the Trump administration with its alums.  The majority leader of the Michigan Senate testified to the US House January 5 investigating committee that he was pressured to accept a slate of false electors assembled to overturn the 2020 elections by, among others, the vice-president of Hillsdale.

 Besides its institute for constitutional studies that Mrs. Clarence (“Ginni”) Thomas helped set up in Washington, Hillsdale actively trains teachers in American history and other subjects, and has created the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum for students from pre-school through high school.  As described in the May 23 issue of the New York Review of Books, it sounds basically like the kind of history commonly taught in the 1950s in grade school and high school.  In place of the Catholic propaganda added to my history courses, there’s conservative propaganda.  But one overall effect is to erase post-1950s scholarship on race, and impose its own revisionist interpretation of the role of slavery.  Scholarship on other groups missing from 1950s history is also ignored. 

Meanwhile, the current faculty and student body of New College has been in a furor all year, under fire from this educational blitzkrieg.  They had their finals interrupted by DeSantis arriving to sign a series of bills restricting gender and race education in Florida colleges and universities.  Graduating seniors refused to recognize their own graduation ceremony (except to heckle the official speakers, including a Trump advisor) and set up their robustly attended alternative commencement, supported by alumni. As for the faculty, they voted to censure their own trustees.   

 But students are a regularly renewable resource. The new New College is already taking steps to get the kind of “mission-aligned” students (in the words of a trustee) they want by becoming the first in Florida to accept the Classic Learning Test as well as the SATs from prospective students.  “Classic” is the new code word for ultra-conservative and (as one of the trustees described it) “Christian tradition.” 

  The total takeover of New College is not the only DeSantis attack on higher education in Florida. His policies and laws affect thousands of students in large public universities as well, and schools across the state have staged walkouts and protests. The speed, intensity and extent of Florida’s transformation into officially a white separatist, anti-choice, anti-gender diversity enclave is shocking, and like Hitler’s blitzkrieg invasions, it is meant to be.  That intensity encourages acts of overt violence, as well as patterns of prejudice.  No wonder the NAACP and other organizations have issued a traveler’s warning for Florida, as if it were a foreign dictatorship.  One of the state's most recent sports heroes, former NBA star Dwayne Wade has already moved his family out of the state, partly in prudent fear for his trans child.

 Even given all that, this latest move has an especially insidious element.  New College of Florida is a public, not a private institution, like Hillsdale in Michigan.  Transforming it into a Christian college is a flagrant violation of the separation of church and state that is at the heart of the imagined American Fascist governments of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Florida is the Republic of Gilead in the making.

 Arnold Toynbee had some controversial and wrongheaded views, but he had something relevant to say about our times. Maybe he even warned New College students in that class I wasn’t in, that entered in 1964.  He believed that societies rarely fade away to die by natural causes.  They are either murdered, or they commit suicide.  Mostly they commit suicide.