Another day, another DeSantis disaster in the Sunshine State, as board members of New College of Florida in Sarasota voted to eliminate the public liberal arts college’s gender studies major. The vote took place Thursday after a heated exchange between the college’s trustees, according to reporting from the Tampa Bay Times.
Back in January, DeSantis appointed six new ultra-conservative members to the school’s board of trustees with the purpose of shifting New College’s philosophy and educational mission away from its liberal bent and directing it toward the conservative authoritarian ideals he’s been pushing across Florida.
On Thursday, New College community members saw the consequences of those actions when the board spent the day interviewing new candidates for the college president position and slashing the gender studies program. Tampa Bay Times reported that four members of the public were taken away by police at one point during the meeting.
One of the DeSantis-appointed trustees, conservative activist Christopher Rufo—whom you might know as the man responsible for introducing the whole Fox News-driven panic around “Critical Race Theory”—introduced the idea for New College to cancel its gender studies major, saying the program is “wildly contradictory” to the board’s directed mission to “revive a classical liberal arts agenda.”
Professor Amy Reid, a faculty trustee and the director of gender studies, obviously voted against Rufo’s cruel proposition. “When students ask me about the future of gender studies at New College, I generally reply, ‘I am here,’“ Reid said on Thursday, according to Tampa Bay Times.
People working to protect the rights of students and people of all genders in Florida, like Reid, may not have been able to stop the crushing vote this time, but organizations concerned with human rights and free speech are taking notice. PEN America issued a press release Thursday condemning the board’s actions in abolishing the gender studies major at New College, going so far as to compare it to authoritarian Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orban’s actions in 2018.
Jeremy C. Young, the Freedom to Learn program director at PEN America, specifically said, “The New College board’s abolition of gender studies is a repressive act that echoes the actions of a repressive foreign government. Indeed, it is an exact copy of what Hungary did in 2018, in a ban that irreparably damaged intellectual freedom in Hungarian universities and led directly to even more extreme restrictions on campus free expression.”
The release also points out that an early draft of Florida’s HB 266, a horribly regressive bill that prohibits public colleges and universities from spending money on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, also included a statewide ban on gender studies in higher education, which was removed in later versions. It could be said that what’s happening at New College is the beginning of the ultra-conservative right pushing that agenda through any way they can.
New College’s gender studies program has been around since 1995 and has been available as a major or “area of concentration” since 2014.
(featured image: Jason Koerner/Getty Images for DNC)
