Ron DeSantis Chose the Wrong College to Take Over
Before this year, life at New College of Florida could feel like a retreat into a pleasantly forgotten corner of the country. Students walked on paths that wound past wisps of Spanish moss and a stately banyan tree to a park on Sarasota Bay, where the outside world often felt as distant as the sun setting into the Gulf of Mexico. Then on January 6, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s popular Republican governor, seized control of the college by appointing six new members to its board of trustees.
Suddenly, the Sarasota campus found itself at the center of the culture wars. A DeSantis spokesman declared that the college had been “completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning.” Christopher Rufo, the most outspoken new trustee, vowed to take it back. “We are now over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within,” he tweeted. In New College, Rufo saw every excess of “wokeness” in academia. He believes that critical theorists spent decades pursuing the “ideological capture” of universities, installing “coercive ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ programs.” At New College, he charges, the students and faculty faced something like “a hostage situation.”
[Graeme Wood: DEI is an ideological test]
On a recent visit, though, I found that New College bears little resemblance to this caricature.
New College has problems, some typical of left-leaning colleges. Some of the criticisms and proposals put forth by the new trustees are reasonable. But Rufo’s indictment, which has been embraced by the populist right, is mostly wrong. New College was never captured by a large and fearsome DEI bureaucracy. In fact, the academic program cultivates a fierce and idiosyncratic independence. And when it hired its first dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion in 2022, it wasn’t surrendering to the woke left. It was responding to an explicit mandate from a DeSantis appointee.
Here, an example is useful to clarify how anti-woke dogma does and doesn’t square with the facts on the ground. It concerns diversity, equity, and inclusion––a trio of concepts, like God, country, and family, that most people support in the abstract, but that warrant skeptical scrutiny when they are put forth as official orthodoxies in higher education, given how often they are invoked to justify ideological discrimination or bias in hiring, infringements on academic freedom, free-speech violations, and bloat. Recall that Rufo advanced a narrative of radical leftists imposing a “large” DEI bureaucracy on New College to coerce and bully professors and students while undermining free speech and open inquiry. DeSantis to the rescue!
The real story of DEI at New College: The bureaucracy that Rufo inherited was largely the result of directives from a DeSantis appointee in the state capital, not radical leftists on campus. Here’s how it happened. Florida’s public colleges are overseen by a 17-member board of governors. In 2016, then-Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, appointed a future chairman of that board: Sydney Kitson, an NFL player turned real-estate developer. In 2019, DeSantis made a consequential appointment to the same board: Brian Lamb, who’d played point guard at the University of South Florida (ask alumni about the clutch free throws he sank in the last seconds of a 1998 game against Florida State University) before becoming a banker.
After George Floyd was murdered in 2020, Kitson an initiative “to examine the inequities in our society.” He put Lamb in charge, perhaps because Lamb was by then the at JPMorgan Chase. Lamb sent to all the presidents of public colleges
