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Remember New College of Florida, the tiny school that Gov. Ron DeSantis and his merry band of grotesqueries took over in 2023, turning what had been a well-regarded, left-leaning liberal arts college into a right-wing cesspool, the kind of place that puts an emphasis on the study of “western civilization” and dumps books its conservative masters deem double-plus-ungood into giant dumpsters, giving us all the opportunity to note that the Nazis were at least ecologically sound enough to burn the books they didn’t want instead of tossing them into a landfill.
Well, get ready for “New College of Florida II: The Newening.”
The unlucky school that has landed in Florida Republicans’ crosshairs is the University of West Florida, located in the bustling Pensacola metro area. UWF is a medium-sized state school with a little over 14,000 students, both graduate and undergrad. It is your average American university, as best we can tell. The school offers majors in the arts, engineering, education, business. Its athletic programs play Division II sports and there is an active Greek system.
DeSantis recently named five new people to the school’s Board of Trustees, including a couple of dips with ties to right-wing think tanks. This was on top of the state’s GOP-controlled Board of Governors getting rid of three trustees and replacing them with what the local NPR station called “Tallahassee insiders.”
The governor’s office provided National Review with a statement about the change:
Under the leadership of Ron DeSantis, Florida made a commitment to refocus the state’s universities on their classical mission: promoting academic excellence and preparing students to be citizens of this republic. Bringing in these new board members will break the status quo and help refocus the university on the core mission of education. We look forward to seeing the new board members hit the ground running.
Mm-hm. This is anodyne babble. The bit about refocusing “the university on the core mission of education” is wingnut code for “the university is too woke,” which itself is code for “the university teaches stuff that conservatives disagree with and must be crushed under our fascist bootheels.”
NR runs it down for its readers without saying the word “woke,” listing activities and classes at UWF that sound like the offerings at every other midsized college in America. But by virtue of the fact that NR is whining about them, you know they are bad: UWF has a Women and Gender Studies program! A group at UWF put on a drag show and donated the proceeds to the Pensacola Abortion Rights Taskforce! One of their English professors went on an Arctic climate change expedition!
That Arctic climate expedition could simply mean the professor took a cruise to Alaska and was upset at the sight of melting glaciers for all we know, but NR began life as a segregationist pamphlet where William F. Buckley could declare anyone to the left of Francisco Franco a dirty communist. Intellectual honesty is not necessarily its bailiwick.
The DeSantis appointees are a hodgepodge of winger loons. One of them is Scott Yenor, a Boise State professor who has served as a fellow at the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation. That’s the double espresso shot of reactionary conservatives who never got over Mary Tyler Moore breaking up with her boyfriend and taking a job.
Yenor appeared in our pages once before, back in 2021, when he gave a stemwinder of a speech full of not-at-all-retrograde ideas such as “independent women are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be,” feminism is “a fundamental threat to strong, fruitful families,” and that old chestnut about how men need to step up so that women will “be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children.”
We imagine the thousands of female students at UWF are going to love all this “get back in the kitchen, baby incubators” talk. How are any women engineering students supposed to think about a lunkhead with views that could best be described as “Neanderthal-adjacent” being on their school’s Board of Trustees? Because clearly he thinks females should be concentrating their talents somewhere other than STEM programs. (Delivery rooms, he means delivery rooms.)
The rest of the new trustees are a grab bag of conservative indoctrination. One dude has a law degree from Regent University and also served as a Claremont fellow. Another was also a fellow at Heritage. One is an instructor with the National Rifle Association. Is open carry a thing on the UWF campus? Because if not …
Sure, this is part of DeSantis’s assault on higher education in Florida. But it is also emblematic of the Right’s assault on higher education in general, which is only going to get worse in the next four years. As we talked about Friday, women are now more likely than men to attend four-year colleges. The Right would like to reverse that trend, mostly so the little ladies can find new careers as broodmares.
Additionally, Scott Yenor himself has referred to colleges as “indoctrination camps,” which he won’t mind when it is right-wing indoctrination, but for the moment means more attacks on funding, on professors the wingers claim are open Marxists, on subject matter and everything else under the sun.
Remember that New College had a little under 700 undergrads in the last semester before DeSantis and his cronies began their takeover. So clearly that whole experiment was, as many suspected, always intended to scale up. Watch your asses, large-sized schools in the State of Florida University System, the legislature has already outlawed DEI programs and you’re probably next for a makeover.
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