Tranforming New College

One of the more dramatic elements of Ron DeSantis' program to eliminate wokeness from education in Florida is an attempt to transform New College. New College was founded in the 70s as a small, quirky liberal arts college and mostly remained one down to last year, with no sports teams, a strong gay community and a fair number of trans people. Some of the parents who were interviewed last year said that New College was the first place their "weird" children ever felt really comfortable.

DeSantis has said quite openly that his plan is to turn New College into a bastion of conservative, liberal arts studies modeled on Hillsdale, a private college in Michigan. He wants, he has said, to show conservative Floridians that at least one state college "reflects their values."

For the details of how this has transpired, you can read this report just issued by the American Association of University Professors and this older article in the NY Times. The basic story is that DeSantis packed the governing board with six new conservative appointees, one of whom is a dean at Hillsdale (and none of whom live in Florida). The board proceeded to deny tenure to all the liberal arts professors up for tenure last year (obviously, whatever they said, to free up those slots for conservative hires), dismiss several faculty who were on one-year contracts, and get rid of a slew of administrators.

Like everything Ron DeSantis does, it was ham-handed and sleazy, and probably broke Florida law by setting obvious ideological tests for state employees. But let's ignore that for a moment and take a broader look at the politics of university education.

The AAUP report blasts DeSantis and his board for repeatedly attacking academic freedom. Which they undoubtedly have, in a sleazy and ham-handed way. It is a violation of all the rules of the American academic world to fire professors because of the work they do or the way they teach is too liberal, and the New College board undoubtedly has done so.

Plus, all professors at Florida state universities are now subject to the bizarre dictates of the Stop WOKE Act, which forbids, among others things, "indoctrination." Nobody really knows what this means, since it has not been tested in court, but as written it might include any attempt to persuade students of any point of view. AAUP: "It is, of course, difficult to imagine how one could teach any subject without seeking somehow to persuade students of something." The AAUP also points out something I did not notice when I read the law, that it explicitly forbids teaching that any race is "morally superior" to any other but says nothing about any other way in which a race might be superior.

But the wackiest provision of the law is that students are explicitly allowed to surreptitiously record their professors' lectures to monitor their compliance with its dictates. Not to be cynical or anything, but I find it hard to believe that in Florida today any professor is going to be sanctioned for taking a conservative point of vew, so this just hangs out there as a way to harass leftists.

It's pretty awful. What I keep thinking, though, is that American academics have brought this on themselves. I think left wing activist professors are a minority, but they are a large and noisy one. I recently read the official faculty bio of an anthropology professor that listed her research interests as "destroying capitalism" and "practicing revolution." This sort of thing is common, and to the AAUP it is protected under the rubric of "academic freedom." But why should conservative voters, legislators, and governors support it? Why should taxpayers pay for it?

I am not arguing that right-wing extremists and left-wing extremists are equally bad and we should silence both and have some kind of neutral, non-ideological educational system. I consider myself a pragmatic centrist, but that does not mean I don't have an ideology; pragmatic centrism is an ideology, and it is no more inherently correct than Marxism or Objectivism. 

I do not think there is such a thing as non-ideological education; in fact I think valuing higher education is itself an ideology. "Academic freedom" is an ideological construct. (Shouldn't Marxists, at least, understand this?) It is a construct I approve of, but that doesn't make it some high truth that ought to be exempt from political debate.

Reading the AAUP report I keep thinking, yes, that is pretty disgusting. But what, in the modern academic world, does academic freedom really mean? If you tried to be a conservative anthropology professor, you would simply fail; nobody would take you on as a student, nobody would serve as your thesis advisor, and you would certainly never get a job, because about 98 percent of the anthropology professors in the US are leftists. If you asked anthropologists why they would not support a conservative colleague, many of them would be happy to tell you that American conservatism is too evil for them to tolerate it in any way. It would be nearly as hard to be a non-feminist professor of women's history, or a professor of black history who thinks there was some value in segregation. In many fields the system as it exists already imposes a great deal of control over what professors think, study and teach, much of it through simple peer pressure.

But none of that is what really matters here, at least not to me. Say what you will about Ron DeSantis, at least he thinks that university education is important enough to fight about. He thinks that how Florida's colleges teach history matters. He is also putting his money where his mouth is, showering New College with millions in new funding. This concern makes him, so far as I can see, part of a small minority of Americans. The real danger to university education is that it will fade away because not enough people care about it one way or the other.

I predict that the attempt to remake New College into a conservative liberal arts college will fail. It will fail because Ron DeSantis won't be governor forever and his replacement is unlikely to make it a priority; it takes decades to change a university, and the long-term commitment won't be there. But mainly it will fail because students aren't interested. Several reporters have prowled New College this Fall, interviewing students, but I have not read about a single student who is excited by the college's new focus. Richard Corcoran, the new President (at a salary of $1 million a year) wrote an op-ed saying that all new freshmen will have to take a course about The Odyssey, but so far that course hasn't even appeared in the catalog. And why would it? What, really, would be gained by forcing every student to take a whole course on one poem? Sometimes I think that these conservative reformers have never met an actual freshman.

The thing that is most salient in the "conservative" takeover of New College is not the curriculum; it is the new emphasis on sports. AAUP:

At the same time, New College has moved to recruit a large number of student athletes, although until now the school had had no intercollegiate athletics program. Spending lavishly on new “presidential honors scholarships,” New College recruited its largest ever first-year class. As of July, New College had 328 incoming students, of whom 115 were athletes. Among that group were seventy freshman baseball players supported by scholarships. By comparison, the University of Florida, an NCAA Division I university with a student body ninety times larger than that of New College, has just thirty-seven baseball players on scholarships. New College also does not yet have a baseball field, or for that matter any other intercollegiate athletic facility, although the parking lot, this committee was told, now has batting cages. As faculty members were quick to point out, moreover, these student-athletes tend to have little interest in either New College’s existing liberal arts programs or any proposed “classical” curriculum.

I've seen this before; seeking to recruit conservative students, and especially conservative male students, the only thing administrators can think of is sports. Most of the reporters who have been to New College recently have commented on this, e.g., Michelle Goldberg in the NY Times:  At a College Targeted by DeSantis, Gender Studies Is Out, Jocks Are In. It also strikes me that all the names that I have ever seen come up as part of the effort to change New College are male, which is downright weird for academia; conservative educational reform seems to be a thoroughly male-dominated endeavor. I suspect the sports business is related to this.

Here, I believe, is where conservative educational reform efforts will go to die: the batting cages. If "liberal arts" colleges can only recruit students by offering them athletic scholarships, they have already failed.

I can't bring myself to get particularly angry about the takeover of New College because it is a petty thing compared to the overall collapse of liberal studies across America. If some of that collapse is happening because people perceive liberal arts professors as leftists peddling ideology, then maybe having some colleges with a conservative tone might help. I'm willing to try it. I mean, academic freedom will be cold comfort for all the professors who lose their jobs because their departments have no students. I can't take Ron DeSantis and his crew seriously, so I have no particular hopes for New College, but I would be curious to see somebody else with less hammy hands give it a try. I want to see liberal arts education survive, because I loved it and still feel every day like it changed me for the better. I am willing to work with almost anybody who has a plan to save it. But, as I said, I think what is happening at New College is doomed to go nowhere, so it will only screw up a lot of people's lives for no good end.