SARASOTA, Fla. – “It was 1987, I think. We had a huge bonfire in Fort Lauderdale for Beltane and the word got out around south Florida. Well, ‘got out’ as in we called people on the phone and told them about it,” Ciaron recollects, she declined to use her surname.
“It was mostly college students. Pagans showed up from UM [University of Miami], UF [University of Florida], and Rollins,” she said. “But a big group of Pagans, and I mean big, showed up, from New College. I remember asking, ‘What’s up with Sarasota?’”
Wiccan priestess and educator Rayna Templebee remembers those days as a New College student and agrees. The College has hosted and graduated numerous Pagans and Witches who have been reacting to recent events, she says. New College “consistently ranks as one of the best liberal arts colleges on all sorts of metrics because it attracts independent thinkers who want to be around other smarties. Not surprisingly there have always been a lot of Pagans and Witches at New College–I told my main professor the reason I was in college was to be a better Witch and I don’t think that was the first time he had heard that.”
Steve Prenner recalls switching from the University of Florida to New College, “New College was a fantastic environment for young adults to explore their identity in a safe and supportive environment while pursuing academic excellence.”
He added, “I felt seen and cared for. It is a disservice to all Floridians to take that away just because the students do not uniformly support a white Christian agenda.”
New College (formally known as New College of Florida) is Florida’s public honors college. It was founded in 1960 as a private institution patronized by the United Church of Christ eventually merging into the state system via the University of South Florida system in the mid-1970s and ultimately becoming an autonomous college in 2001. New College maintained its liberal arts tradition becoming one of the U.S. public liberal arts colleges.
New College follows a contract system instead of letter grades. Students in the college negotiate a contract of study with their faculty advisor and earn passes for fulfilling their research objectives while receiving critical faculty evaluations. Students must write senior theses prior to graduation. The model is rigorous and has earned New College a reputation for producing exceptional alumni.
Last week, Republican Governor (and possible presidential candidate for 2024) Ron DeSantis of Florida transformed the small public liberal arts school with about 700 students in Sarasota, into the new front of the culture wars.
New College of Florida logo
DeSantis wants Florida’s educational system to lead by example. He recently spearheaded the “Don’t Say Gay” law that prohibits “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
Now, DeSantis’ attention is on higher education. He unveiled an extensive overhaul of Florida’s university system to ferret out liberal extremism and unleash his self-described “war on woke” via his Stop WOKE Act of 2022 which removes programs “from imposing an agenda on people.” Unsurprisingly, New College has also been a longtime bastion for LGBTQ+ students.
DeSantis began his redesign of New College with the abolition of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs which had been previously mandated by a Republican-majority board of governors of Florida’s university system. He then declared at a news conference in the adjacent city of Bradenton that all students graduating from Florida’s public universities would from now on be required to take general education courses that include “actual history and actual philosophy that have shaped western civilization.”
“I think you have the dominant view, which is not the right view. The dominant view is the use of higher education under this view is to impose ideological conformity, to try to promote political activism,” DeSantis said. “That’s what a university should be. That’s not what we believe is appropriate in the state of Florida. Instead, we need our higher education to focus on promoting academic excellence, the pursuit of truth, and to give students the foundation to think for themselves.”
“They will also do things like require diversity statements is what they call it, but that’s basically like making people take a political oath,” DeSantis said. “In fact, that has been applied across the country, so if a candidate says, ‘my view is to treat everyone the same regardless of the color of their skin,’ that they get points off for saying that. That you have to embrace things like critical theory, like the idea of implicit bias and all of those other things, and that’s just not appropriate.”
DeSantis then replaced New College’s board who then proceeded to fire New College’s president Dr. Patricia Okker and its serving general counsel who had vetoed a request by one of the DeSantis-appointed trustees to open meetings on campus last week with prayer. The new board then voted to appoint Richard Corcoran, a former Republican legislator and Florida education commissioner, as New College interim president. Corcoran recently withdrew from a presidency bid at Florida State University after questions were raised over his lack of academic qualifications and possible conflict of interest issues.
New College students have described DeSantis’s plans as dystopian. DeSantis responds that students should get “meaningful degrees” not degrees like “zombie studies.” He describes New College as an epicenter of academic failure that has caused enrollments to drop because “people want to see true academics, and they want to get rid of some of the political window dressing that accompanies this.”
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Pagan alumni reacted
“New College disturbs people who like things in neat little boxes–it not only allows students to be who they are, it pushes them to be smarter, more creative, and more unique versions of themselves,” Templebee said.
She added that she thinks his plans will eventually fail, “I don’t think what DeSantis and his cronies are doing will succeed ultimately because I don’t think people in Florida or the rest of the US are willing to live under a fascist who mocks differently-abled people and wants to ban discussion of structural racism. But he is going to cause a lot of harm to the current New College students and faculty and he should be ashamed about that–they are caught in a political crossfire, not of their making.”
Brian Sullivan of Celtic folk rock band, Emerald Rose, and New College alumnus said, “I’ve been reading about the DeSantis movements at New College. It is very disturbing that the state administration has decided to target such a successful and accomplished institution as New College.”
Like Templebee, Sullivan added, “the school has always been a place for those that didn’t fit within the parameters of traditional education, and the record of their contributions to American culture and society is long and storied.”
College Hall at New College of Florida [Photo Credit Alaska Miller CC BY-SA 4.0]
But DeSantis is also attacking the underpinning educational process and academic freedoms.
“Governor DeSantis’ orchestrated attack on the governance, faculty, staff, and students of New College of Florida marks his most pointed effort in a misguided strategy to embed right-wing conservative Christian religious and political ideology into Florida’s public education system,” said Michael Owens a New College alumnus.
“While DeSantis claims he is reorienting teaching away from indoctrination and back towards education, the treatment of New College shows the hypocrisy in that claim. His appointment of six allies in this attack to the New College Board of Trustees was immediately followed by their appointment of a Christian, conservative, nonacademic ally in this attack, Richard Corcoran, as New College President.”
Owens points out that this is about weaponizing education. He noted, “Corcoran has said ‘education is 100% ideological’ and ‘Education is our sword. That’s our weapon. Our weapon is education.’”
Sullivan agreed, “It is a travesty that the governor and his appointees are taking such an ugly and intolerable approach to New College. It reveals a very disturbing agenda of the modern Republican party to attempt to force their perspective on those who are different from them.”
Sullivan sees the governor’s appointee as “occupying forces” and hopes New College will keep all options open including returning to its roots as a private institution. He says the students will persevere and hopes they rally the community to their cause.
Owens notes that harm will come to New College, at least in the short term, “Replacing New College’s Board of Trustees and President with conservative Christian ideologues will harm New College’s faculty, staff, students, academic excellence, and record of success. Chillingly, it is intended as a warning to public schools throughout Florida that DeSantis and his allies’ goal is for public school education to be a weapon for the expansion and entrenchment of conservative Christianity ideology in our schools and children.”
He hopes that Florida’s public colleges and universities will collectively speak out against this political takeover and DeSantis’ philosophy of indoctrination.
It is unclear what impact resistance efforts may have on DeSantis’ new policies. President Okker described the events in a final emotional speech as a “hostile takeover.” Students said they just cried.
Students have organized a petition and are planning a protest on February 23, 2023, and they will be joined by various political leaders. The petition called “Stand for Freedom” states:
[DeSantis] has displayed a pattern of behavior in which he Hijacks School Systems as he did with the New College of Florida. Marginalizes and Dehumanizes The LGBTQ Community, and portrays an abject Disregard Of The Rights Of Students. He says we are being indoctrinated by wokeness, but we say he is using us in his narrative, and destroying our schools to achieve his vision.
We are Florida’s students and citizens. It is our education that is being tarnished and our schools being discredited.
Prenner underscored that he feels the attack is real, and likely sustained, “What is astounding to me is the speed in which an autocratic ruler can destroy a long-standing public institution. I’ve been pondering a lot lately about how to survive a fascist regime because, it appears to me, that’s what is coming for all of us.”
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