Ron DeSantis’s appointments of new trustees at a public liberal-arts college in Florida has raised questions about the governor’s end game—which “is less about ideology than about power,” benwallacewells writes.
. These campaigns have raised an enormous political war chest for DeSantis, and helped give him a regular perch on Fox News. But what distinguishes DeSantis from other culture warriors, especially in the eyes of conservative intellectuals, is that he not only uses his profile to inveigh against progressive control of institutions but also his powers as governor to remake them. After Rufo made his comments about New College to the, he called DeSantis’s aides.
But Rufo’s arrival was hard for the New Collegers to dismiss. DeSantis had just won a large majority by running on aggressively defending social conservatism. Florida’s constitution and laws gave him the power to assert control over its public universities. Rufo explained to me the story, as he saw it. New College was a struggling campus. The most recent data shows that it accepted seventy-five per cent of students who applied, but enrolled only thirteen per cent of those who were accepted.
The academics in the audience might not have much liked Rufo—might even, in many cases, have feared what he represented—but there was no confusion: he was prepared and aggressive and camera-ready, a facsimile of DeSantis himself. Nearly all the questions went to him. Speir, buff and bearded, with a spacey manner and an elliptical speaking style that at times scanned as Christian and at others as stoner, was somewhat harder to fathom.
DeSantis came to Sarasota a week later. He delivered a speech outlining some legislative proposals regarding public higher education in Florida: he would ban diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and the teaching of critical race theory, give trustees broader powers to review and fire faculty, and compel colleges to deprioritize fields deemed to fit a “political agenda.” At New College, the action was more direct, and swift.
Black is now a doctoral candidate in medieval history at the University of Chicago. When I spoke to him last week, I asked whether he thought his conversion would have happened at another college. “I really don’t think so,” he said. The key, Black went on, was New College’s small scale. In the school forum, “there were all these threads that said ‘Don’t speak to him, don’t acknowledge him, we want to make him feel like a pariah,” Black said.
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