April 28, 2024 - Where There's Woke - Thomas Smith
42:19
WTW50: New College Was a Progressive University. Then Ron DeSantis Took It Over
New College, Part 1: The Takeover Last year, Governor Meatball DeSantis successfully launched a takeover at the New College of Florida by appointing like-minded folks to the Board of Trustees, who swiftly enacted several significant "culture war" changes. This is Part 1 of a series where we walk you through what happened at New College, who was involved, and the impact to the students, faculty, and staff who experienced their entire world changing in a matter of weeks. If you enjoy our work, please consider leaving a 5-star review! You can always email questions, comments, and leads to lydia@seriouspod.com. Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green Eminem will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
This is episode 50.
Holy shit.
What a moment.
Wow.
Yeah.
I'm Thomas.
That's Lydia.
How are you doing?
Hi, I'm doing pretty well.
How are you?
Doing well?
Well, a surprise milestone, you know.
Yeah, I know.
Just realized that right now.
Yeah, well, I'm sure we have something exciting planned.
I definitely got you something for it, but it just hasn't come yet.
Definitely should be any minute.
No, you've been working on this project forever.
Oh my God.
It's unclear if you're ever done with it, but it's one of those like, all right, guess it's time.
Yeah, I guess it's time to get this one started anyway.
So I want to start by giving a special shout-out to a listener, Heidi Geyser, who helped me put this stuff together.
Nice.
Because there's so much, and she was super helpful helping me compile timelines and collate research and stuff.
So thank you, Heidi.
I hope you're listening, and I am very, very grateful for your assistance.
What did Heidi help me with?
The people want to know.
New College of Florida.
We're finally going to talk about New College of Florida.
New College.
Why is it called New College?
It's just always been called New College.
Oh, really?
Yeah, we'll get a little bit into kind of the background, but it's not a new college.
It's an old college.
Well, that's confusing.
It is confusing.
So, do you remember anything from 2023?
No, I remember nothing from 2023.
Oh, that's fair.
Do you remember anything related?
No, I don't remember.
We can go through all the years.
My memory stretches back, boy, about an hour maybe?
Do you remember hearing anything about New College of Florida in the news?
No, I only remember you mentioning it every- Me going crazy about it?
Yeah, you saying like, okay, we're going to do New College every single week for like- Every week I had another update for you.
I was like, you'll never guess what's happening at New College.
This is a spoiler-free household, so I know nothing about this.
I'm sure I'll remember once you start talking about it, but no, I don't know.
Yeah.
So on January 6, 2023, not 2021, But, you know, conveniently two years to the day from when conservatives attempted to take over our democracy, DeSantis announced that he would be taking over New College of Florida.
Wow.
A public institution, a public college in Florida.
He's taking it over.
And he did it by way of something that he's legally allowed to do.
He appointed new trustee members, six new trustee members.
And that is, again, within his rights as the governor to appoint.
However, Haya Raychick was not included here.
I was waiting for that.
But I guess Oklahoma has libs of TikTok.
Oklahoma has dibs on her.
But before we get into who those trustees are exactly, you started off this episode with, I think, a reasonable question.
What is New College, right?
It is Florida's designated honors college.
It's defined that way in statute, and it actually started back in 1960 as a private liberal arts college funded partly by the United Church of Do all states have a designated honors college?
No, this is pretty unique.
Oh, okay.
Thank God.
I was like, is that like the state flower and the state bird?
No, no.
So the school started in the private sphere for institutions.
It was open to all races, genders, religions.
In 1960, that's, you know, that's pretty good.
Wow, progressive in Florida, no less.
And in Florida, yeah.
And over the years, you know, it had decent enrollment.
But then in the 1970s, when inflation hit, they started to really struggle.
And by 1975, and I don't know exactly the decisions that led to this outside of just inflation as a general, you know, situation.
But by 1975, they were almost four million dollars in debt.
Pretty significant for that period of time for a small liberal arts college.
As part of trying to get out of that debt, they made an agreement with the state of Florida that Florida would absorb the debt that they owed to their creditors.
And in 1975, they became public by merging with University of South Florida, but they wanted to maintain, like, their independence to some degree.
So it was considered a separate upper-division campus within the University of South Florida rather than a USF satellite campus specifically.
That continued on until 2001.
In 2001, it became an autonomous college.
Whoa, it gains sentience?
Or blocks around?
No, you're probably right.
That's what my research is showing.
The language that they have used.
So in 2001, it separated from USF.
From what I understand, there were challenges with USF.
USF is a huge school.
And I don't really know, I imagine there was a lot of politics at play between the two entities.
And it was kind of in everybody's best interest to discontinue that relationship.
And as I said, 2001, they became their own entity and became statutorily designated as the Honors College at that point in time, and their mission is also stated in Florida statute.
Nice work if you can get it.
I want to be statutorily designated like us, just like a smart person.
Like, we've decided...
Where There's Woke actually is the honors podcast of California.
Statutorily.
Yeah.
Don't look it up.
Only for the smart kids.
So their mission as defined in statute is to provide programs of study that allow students to design their educational experience as much as possible in accordance with their individual interests, values, and abilities.
So yeah, it's very liberal artsy, right?
It is a very liberal arts college.
It's actually one of the most well-regarded public liberal arts colleges from my research.
And they actually have like a significant percentage of Fulbright scholars.
We'll do Aware There's Woke probably in the future on Fulbright because he was a racist.
So I would love to dive into that.
But you know, the scholarship program through Fulbright Scholars is a good thing.
I've heard of it, yeah.
So we can talk about the scholars.
Seventy-seven percent of all Fulbrights that were awarded to Florida College students, public and private universities, in the last 15 years were at New College.
Wow.
So, you know, really bright student body.
Fulbright.
Some would say they're Fulbright.
And the way that New College approaches their academics is very alternative.
They think of higher education in line with that mission statement, right?
That the students are there to design that experience, their educational experience, as much as possible aligned with what they want to be studying.
And as a result, the majors that they offer are highly individualized.
So you can sign up and say, you know, I want to major in psychology.
You know, they have kind of a standard track for all those things.
But you could say, I'm kind of interested in psychology and also economics and also Irish history.
And so now I'm going to blend those things together and under the guidance of Faculty, I'm going to develop my own course of study, my own area of expertise based off of my interests.
They also don't do grades there.
This reminds me of Evergreen College when I covered that way back when.
Yeah, yeah.
Brad Weinstein's place that he's now not at.
They were the same thing.
Exactly.
So they don't do grades there.
They do narrative evaluations that the teachers prepare, and those evaluations are prepared based off of discussions that they've had with the students to create a contract.
They're essentially sitting down and saying, you know, this is the course of study that you are going to pursue, and in order to demonstrate You know, your education in these areas and like these are the objectives we're looking for.
And then they do those narrative evaluations at the end of the year or the end of the semester.
This sounds like a really small place though, right?
It's very small.
Fewer than 700 students are enrolled.
OK.
Yeah, very, very small.
The students do independent study projects.
They also have to do a thesis in order to earn their degree.
We'll get into that a little bit later when we talk about some of the students there.
But they, understandably, based off of everything that you're hearing here, they have a high tolerance of diversity.
They are very flexible with a lot of different things.
They have a reputation for having a lot of quirky students, a high LGBTQ population.
And understanding that, yes, it is an incredibly small school, and it is an incredibly unique school, the administration and faculty over the years
And I think there's an argument to be made that, you know, if you're producing the most Fulbright scholars than any other institution in the state of Florida, and you're talking about that potential return on investment, like that's a pretty big deal.
The administration would be kind of continually asking for additional funding, and the legislature just did not budge at all, citing low enrollment.
However, that's been a defining factor of that school.
You only are able to accomplish the environment and the mission and the structure that is this college by having a small student population.
Well, but like, okay, so you said it's, it was private and then it was too in debt so they had to go public, but there's like kind of a, They got a bit of a like a deal or some sort of negotiated way that they're going public, but what do they charge in terms of tuition?
It is affordable.
It is a very affordable education from what I recall.
Well, let's enroll!
Yeah.
It sounds like fun until you get to January 6, 2023.
Sure.
I don't think I want to be there now.
Despite the requests for additional funding and the legislature not moving on it, that went back and forth for several years.
And in 2020, In the Florida legislature, a representative named Randy Fine, who is a close ally of Ron DeSantis, introduced a bill to approach a merger again for New College, but this time with Florida State University.
And he went off, apparently, on the floor about how much money the school was costing taxpayers.
Again, that enrollment under 700 students.
How much could it possibly be?
Yeah, but I think when you're looking at it per student, they feel like it's not worth it.
Is there that big of a gap between, because they charge tuition, right?
I don't understand.
Yeah.
But then the costs of the school don't get to be spread across a larger number of students.
So when you're talking about like USF, FSU, those are, you know, 50,000 students.
I guess I was assuming that you would also not spend a bunch on crap or something, you know, like it depends on, I guess I don't know that side of the ledger.
Like, are they building a bunch of buildings or something?
Like why, why would it cost so much?
Yeah, not from my understanding.
So, I think that there are certain things that have become clear through this research.
That bill ultimately died, but during that time, legislators were, they knew that New College had a target on its back from that fiscal perspective.
Like, it was very clear.
If New College didn't exist, I feel like Fox News would have to invent it, you know?
Yeah!
Do they just exist for that?
If anything, I feel like Ron is sanctimonious.
Yeah, like a caricature.
Should, you know, encourage new college, because that's what you need to be a culture warrior all the time.
You need that foil, you dummy.
Yeah.
This is why you aren't president and didn't get close.
In 2020, when that bill died, one of the state senators named Joe Gruders, and this name will matter later, so bear with me that I'm giving you local Florida politician names.
I'll remember the name Joe Gruders.
Yes.
He specifically said to local reporters, something is going to happen there.
That's ominous, right?
They get on the phone with, hey, something's going to happen there.
And they're like, what?
Who is this?
What are you talking about?
Where?
Yeah, just New College because of the language that was being used as they were talking about how big of a problem it was at that school because it cost so much money, et cetera, et cetera.
Obviously, something did happen.
That's why we're talking about it today.
As I mentioned, January 6, 2023, Ron DeSantis took over the board of trustees.
Oh, meatball.
In remarks later that spring at the Midland County Republican Party Spring Breakfast in Michigan, he is quoted as saying, I had a small liberal arts college in Sarasota called New College of Sarasota.
It's not called that.
First of all, I have to pull out of your quote to fact check you on a college that you just took over three months before this.
And yeah.
That is on brand.
He said, I don't think anyone had even heard of it.
Apparently he hadn't.
Very few people had heard of it.
It was performing very poorly.
It was supposed to be Florida's top honors college in the entire state under Florida statute.
That's what it says.
But what happened is it became an ideological epicenter.
It was all about things like gender ideology, critical race theory, and all that.
And we don't think that that has a lot of value from the perspective of our taxpayers.
So I think what's interesting here, just looking at that timeline between 2020 when Randy Fine, that representative who is friends with DeSantis, tried to encourage folks to grab new college under the FSU wing and merge it.
Also, Randy Fine, for sure a drag name.
Yeah.
And the move from that fiscal focus to, in DeSantis' own words here, that it was an ideological epicenter, and it was about gender ideology, critical race theory, etc., and that taxpayers should not be paying for that.
So, let's talk a little bit about how he decided he was going to solve that issue.
When he appointed the new trustees, I think what I want to talk about here is a who's who a little bit.
What other drag stars were there?
Yeah, Randy Fine.
Okay.
No, so Randy Fine, he was not tapped on the shoulder to come on over as a trustee.
Dang, I don't watch that show, but he didn't make it?
He had to sashay away?
Sashay away, yeah.
Oh, can you believe I got that reference?
Okay, that's going to seem like not an accomplishment, because every other person in the world knows that.
I've just heard that once, and I've guessed that that's what happens when you get eliminated.
I'm really proud of myself right now.
I don't know if this is going to make the final edit, but I'm surprised you didn't die of shock of what I just said.
RuPaul is also not on the trustees, unfortunately.
But Dr. Mark Bauerlin is, and he... That's a terrible drag name.
Come on, man.
It's a terrible name.
Figure it out.
There's your problem there.
So he was a professor of English at Emory University from 1989 to 2018.
He strongly opposes DEI initiatives, wouldn't you know it?
He is quoted as saying, they lead students to develop bad ideas.
How?
And another quote, he did not elaborate.
Okay.
He says, when you start saying, oh, we need to publish more writers who are not white men, the process has been corrupted.
OK, is that a DEI thing?
In his mind?
I don't know.
I don't think so.
I know I say it all the time, but is the DEI in the room with you right now?
It's the best tweet because it's just like, you just blame everything on it.
It's anything vaguely to do with race, sort of.
You're just like, it's DEI, DEI.
Really?
There's a publishing part of DEI that's like, the DEI journal only publishes.
It's like, what is that?
I don't know what that is.
Am I wrong?
What is that?
Yeah, I don't know, like when you're trying to raise voices that you don't hear from very often or something, that that's thought to be DEI.
He goes on to say, right off the bat, standards go down.
Peer review becomes politicized.
This is the beginning of the fall of a discipline.
And I've seen it happen many, many times.
Name one time.
Yeah, he didn't.
In 2008, he wrote a book called The Dumbest Generation, How the Digital Age Stupifies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, or, in parentheses, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30.
Boy, that's a time honored.
You're always right when you have that take just throughout history.
Yeah.
Then he did a sequel, of course, because that book needed to live again.
In 2022, the dumbest generation grows up from stupefied youth to dangerous adults.
He converted to Catholicism in 2012, endorsed Trump in 2016, and October 20th, 2023, He's a trustee member at this time.
He has been appointed for 10 months at this time.
He retweeted this from Twitter user Joey Manorino.
And this is a tweet that got 2.2 million views, the original.
And when he retweeted it, it says, Our president has dementia.
Our vice president is a cum dumpster.
Oh my God.
Yep.
Our secretary of state has the presence of a turnip and it goes on.
Yeah.
I read that and my jaw dropped.
I could not believe what is he thinking?
So we've got, we're going through the new A-team and you got this guy, he's good at opening vaults.
And you got this guy, he's good at racism.
And this guy is good at sexism.
It's like the new, uh, you know, assholes 11, uh, you know, to try to turn this college around.
Wow.
So he retweeted that?
He retweeted that.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
Look, if I know Catholicism, that is definitely in line with...
Yeah, right.
Was it the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus said, blessed be the cum dumpsters for they shall... So that's where we're starting with this Mark Bauerling guy.
The next person I want to talk about is Charles Kessler, who is... Who's this cum dumpster?
He's from the Claremont Institute, you know, where John Eastman is from.
And he, you know, big Trump supporter, of course, was also a professor at Claremont McKenna, understandably, and was a member of the 1776 Commission.
So, you know, an unbiased individual there.
We also have Dr. Ryan T. Anderson.
I don't know if I've said this name on this show yet, but I think I brought him up on SIO when we covered marriage and the public good.
Because he is from the Witherspoon Institute originally.
He founded that public discourse magazine that is through the Witherspoon Institute.
Since then, he has moved on and he is the president of Ethics and Public Policy Center.
He was also affiliated with the Heritage Foundation a while back, and he is known for Writing the book, along with Robert P. George and Sharif Jurgis, What is Marriage?
Man and Woman in Defense, Alito cited that in his dissent in US v. Windsor, and he also wrote When Harry Became Sally, the 2018 book that Amazon removed from their platform.
Because they did not want to be selling that garbage.
And in 2021, Congress had Amazon come in to defend why they removed the book from their platform.
The other individuals that DeSantis appointed are Debra Jenks.
And Debra Jenks is a Floridian.
So I think she's our first Floridian.
Oh, I thought you were suggesting, like, that's, like, here's the reason all these people are assholes.
This guy, Trump supporter, come dumpster, this guy.
This person's a Floridian!
You're like, yeah, wow, God, he's three for three so far.
But she's a lawyer based out of Palm Beach County.
She practices in securities arbitration, registration, regulation.
She's actually a new college graduate back in 1980, and her degree was in economics.
And then she went to Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, and that's where she earned her JD and moved back to Florida and practices there.
I've watched a lot of the board meetings.
She sucks.
Her bio does not do her justice.
At all.
For how much she sucks.
Yeah, she sucks.
And she is the chair.
So you have to hear her a lot.
Then we also have Matthew Spaulding.
Matthew Spaulding is the dean of the Washington, D.C. campus of Hillsdale College.
Ugh.
Yeah.
And he also was involved with the 1776 Commission because, of course, he was.
And the Hillsdale College tie-in here is interesting because, I mean, it's not surprising, but in so many of the press conferences that occurred after, Ron DeSantis had said, you know, we want to make New College the Hillsdale of the South.
And some folks have pointed out, well, Hillsdale is a private religious institution, and this is a public school.
So you literally cannot make it that.
One would think.
Yeah.
But they're certainly going to try, aren't they?
And then there is Eddie Spear, who co-founded a Christian school in Florida.
He's a pretty intense figure in this, and we'll talk about him a little bit more later, but I want to touch on the most controversial figure.
Do you have a guess?
Do you know?
Controversial in what sense?
Controversial figure that would be placed on the board of trustees.
Is it Ben Sasse?
No, because he's the president of the University of Florida.
Oh, that's right.
I'm mixing up my bullshits.
I can't remember.
Rufo?
Christopher Rufo.
Oh, it's Rufo!
That's right.
Yeah.
Wow.
We obviously need to figure out when we're going to do a dedicated episode on him because he has been popping up a lot lately for us.
He's just always there.
He's omnipresent.
But Christopher Rufo, just very, very briefly, the chief instigator of critical race theory, the person who made up that this is something that is being taught to young children.
He's a Manhattan Institute fellow, and he more recently has moved on from critical race theory because it's not getting as many clicks.
And now is the time to attack diversity, equity and inclusion.
It's also because they, it's like by election cycle and the election cycle, there's different vintages, you know, there's the caravan.
I think that was one election cycle.
And the critical race theory was one and they didn't do that well with it.
So I think, I think that's part of like, all right, okay, we'll rebrand to something else, but it's just, it's the same thing.
And he's, sorry, he's another board member or does he have some other role?
He is on the Board of Trustees.
So when Chris Ruffo was announced as part of this, he tweeted immediately, of course, and he said, I'm proud to announce that Governor Ron DeSantis has appointed me to the Board of Trustees of the New College of Florida.
My ambition is to help the new board majority transform New College into a classical liberal arts institution.
We are recapturing higher education.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
So it sounds like, does he do the kind of thing where you just need to appoint like a bare majority kind of thing?
Or did he wipe the whole, everybody?
He only has a certain number of spots that I think he's allowed to appoint.
So there is always going to be like a faculty representative that he doesn't get to appoint.
There's a student representative that he doesn't get to appoint.
And I think that there are other entities that get to appoint other folks.
So I think six might be Yeah, it's a six to four situation basically that they're living with right now.
So he was super, super excited about coming on.
The first meeting that they had was later that month, January 31st, 2023.
And in that meeting, they voted to remove the president of the college.
Wow.
Cool.
Patricia Auker.
The very first time they met, they had her fired.
And they appointed Richard Corcoran as the interim president at double Auker's salary.
Why?
Who knows?
For a college that's, you know, fiscally concerning?
Yeah, I thought the whole issue was the thing.
We'll get more into Corcoran, too.
But before that board meeting, DeSantis had a press conference, right?
You know, they're just capitalizing on all of these moments.
And he announced in that press conference right before the board meeting that they would be defunding all diversity programs.
And this is for Florida public education in general, that they would be defunding all diversity programs.
That they would be moving to a core curriculum, right, that model legislation that we've talked about before on this show, where it's like the general education becomes its own college and then you get to have greater control over that, focusing on Western civilization.
He announced that they would be tackling tenure and that he would be pursuing moving hiring authority from faculty committees to the presidents and the board of trustees.
Cool.
Yeah.
In February 2023, the board moved to eliminate the Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence in April 2023.
So we're starting to see some of these things happen, even though there is no legislation that's been passed regarding what DeSantis says he wants to do for public education.
I'm just saying that there is no, you don't need it, but there is no authority making them do this.
It's just the majority board, six to four, this is what DeSantis wants, so this is what we're going to move to do.
April 2023, they denied tenure to five faculty despite them being strongly recommended, strongly.
Oh, I feel like I heard about that.
Per the tenure process.
So they were strongly recommended by other faculty.
They were strongly recommended by those not in New College from their field.
So as a result of the mess that had been going on and then kind of the straw that broke the camel's back, I think, was that denial of tenure to five faculty members in April 2023.
The faculty rep on the board quit.
They were like, I can't do this anymore.
And that person was then replaced by, again, not someone... I was going to say, is that a good idea?
It's okay, because DeSantis can't pick the person.
Oh, okay.
The faculty votes on it.
Yeah, and I don't know necessarily that a lot of people were clamoring for this spot, but...
Shout out to Dr. Amy Reid, who is sitting in the spot still to this day.
And she is the director of the gender studies program that they also voted as a board to kill in August 2023.
So she stepped in to that role and she teaches other classes and stuff, too.
So she's all right.
But when fall starts of 2024, there will not be a gender studies program anymore.
Wow.
Those classes do not exist.
What happens to students who are, like, in the program?
They have to figure something else out.
I guess it's... It's an individualized, you know... Yeah, that's interesting.
So they gave them essentially a year to figure out what that transition would look like for them.
A lot of faculty left.
There's someone I follow that was a gender studies professor, Nicholas Clarkson, who has been pretty vocal about what that experience was.
He's a trans male, and The experience that he had on campus, someplace that he felt safe at and loved, and loved teaching courses to his students, all of those things, and just how intensely it changed.
just because of DeSantis overthrowing Board of Trustees.
They didn't stop there though.
They also voted to remove gender neutral signage from restrooms because that's worth spending time on.
- Okay, yeah. - And they eliminated the diversity office.
And shortly after eliminating the diversity office, they then fired the diversity chief and the academic librarian, Both of them are LGBTQ.
And just prior to that, you might have seen this actually.
This made the news pretty prominently.
When Christopher Rufo was on campus for something in May, he was approached by a lot of students.
There was a protest going on.
And one of the students, who was actually the president of the Student Senate, Libby Harrity, spit on him.
Yeah.
He filed criminal charges of battery.
They would be a misdemeanor.
And in order for her to get out of that, she agreed with the school that she would withdraw.
Wow.
And she left and has not come back.
She's not allowed back on campus.
But she made that choice because the other option was that she would be charged with a misdemeanor and have to go to trial and see what happened there.
And, you know, it was on video.
Like, she did spit at him.
So that wasn't, you know, who knows how that would have worked out.
One of the people that I mentioned earlier, Eddie Spear, that, you know, decently controversial, but not Chris Rufo controversial.
I haven't talked about him much since I brought that up.
And there's a reason why.
Why don't you go ahead and open up to the first video I sent you.
This is the Committee on Ethics and Elections in the Florida Senate.
This is a hearing that they held For public comment, primarily regarding DeSantis's trustee picks, because even though he picks people, the Senate has to confirm them.
And so this is April 2023.
The only trustee that showed up to this hearing with the committee was Eddie Speer.
And we're going to hear from him when a member of the committee, one of the senators, asks him to give us more details about the truths that he says he goes on campus to engage students with.
OK.
Can you share with us first your truths that may have caused concern, what those are, what those truths are, and then maybe the continued dialogue?
Trustee Spear, you're recognized to answer the question.
I do want to remind everybody that we have a 1230 hard stop, and I want to make sure to afford the members of the public the opportunity to still sign up to speak, so if you don't mind keeping your answers as succinct as possible, sir, but also directed to the question, that would be appreciated.
Yes, thank you.
I have to start with the truth, that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.
Everything else comes from there, articulated in the Bible.
Now there's a lot of room for interpretation from there.
Yeah.
But the truth specifically in relation to a hit piece would be a tweet that I sent out describing gender Trans has a mental disorder.
Gender trans has a mental disorder.
And then immediately went on campus to face the wrath.
And I found the students to be engaging in conversation, albeit heated, but we've worked past that.
And right now I believe that there's a lot of Challenges yet to go at New College of Florida, but also the engagement and the respectful engagement, at least from what I've seen, my personal experience has been very positive.
If he hadn't been there, if he hadn't been at that hearing, I don't know what would have happened because they were really focused on Chris Ruffo.
And they said, you know, in previous other points of that hearing, they said, you know, he's not here to defend himself with these things that we're hearing, these concerns that we have.
So we're going to table discussion of Christopher Ruffo, et cetera, et cetera.
But Eddie Spears showed up.
Later, when the Senate was voting to confirm the DeSantis board of trustee appointments, they did a bulk confirmation.
And when the media received the list of executive appointments, when that came out as a press release, Eddie Spear wasn't on there.
They did not approve his appointment and they just didn't want to talk about it on the floor.
That was the first he heard about it, too.
Wait, he wasn't already a board member?
No, so they are appointed by DeSantis and then they serve in good faith until... Oh, so they got to serve while... Yeah.
I see.
Okay.
And so he no longer is on the board.
And yeah, and that's the first time he heard about it was when the press release came out that he wasn't going to be confirmed.
And essentially, I think the lesson there, Chris Rufo went through.
Everyone knows what Chris Rufo thinks.
He just didn't say it in the Senate committee room, I guess.
Yeah.
Talking about Jesus Christ being the truth.
Yeah.
And Eddie Spear decided to say some of the quiet parts of the cloud.
Surprised that mattered though.
It's still Florida State Senate, right?
Yeah, it is.
I do think that, you know, a lot of the pushback that you kind of see in that hearing is from the black senators that are on that committee.
And I do think that there was significant rhetoric that Eddie Speier engaged in on his blog.
An advance that was really concerning.
And I think that a lot of students felt threatened by what could happen because of his rhetoric and because of Chris Ruffo's rhetoric.
But Eddie Speer made the mistake of actually showing up and being confronted by it.
So that's where we're at with the trustees.
Chris Ruffo, like I said, he's still there.
And Eddie Speer never made it.
But we have Hillsdale represented.
We have the Claremont Institute represented.
You know, all these incredibly conservative figureheads, essentially, many of whom have honestly like Catholicism or, you know, just Christian nationalism sort of at their base.
And I think it would be very clear that that movement does not exactly align with the folks that were at New College.
Faculty, existing administrative staff, you know, and students.
Yeah, so this is crazy.
I mean, what seems like has happened is you've got this university that's known for being very progressive.
It's a small, it's a tiny school, and it's successful, by the way, which is always the thing that conservatives just ignore, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing.
Like, there is a lot of bullshit in college, sure, whatever, but like, if It was truly worthless.
I'm pretty sure it's expensive to go to school.
I think people would probably stop doing it.
But anyway, point is, it's this very progressive little school.
And even though it's in Florida, obviously there's all kinds of blue areas in an otherwise pretty swing state.
It sounds like it's a little bastion of Progressivism and then Meatball Ron gets his pudding fingers on it.
Yeah.
And it's just like, we're going to change this whole school.
And just by being able to take over the board, it's this process of like, it's really like a takeover.
He's like a.
He's like a little fucking parasite that just like got in the school via that direction and then just slowly is just converting it to their purposes.
This is crazy.
And it seems like it's working.
Like, I don't know.
I'm not sure what people are supposed to do other than it feels like there's a number of lawsuits that could be filed, you know, regarding employment and regarding, I don't know though, like I'm not, I'm not an expert on like how that would work with Florida law and with, I have no idea, but it definitely seems like Someone's going to have claims, but that's also the kind of thing that takes eternity.
So this just seems like a thing Meatball Ron gets to do?
Yeah.
Yeah, he just gets to do this.
And, you know, next time I really want to talk about the impact that this had on the students specifically, the impact that it had on the faculty, what that transition looked like, and You know, why don't we play a little bit of a short documentary that none other than Christopher Rufo put together.
This is posted November 28th, 2023.
The hard left has dominated the universities for generations.
The movement has captured the academic disciplines, established ideologically driven bureaucracies, and put activism rather than scholarship at the center of academic life.
The left has long considered the university campus its own private domain, untouchable by political leaders.
Until now.
In a new short documentary, I tell the story of a small public college in Florida that's become the opening move in a conservative counter-revolution.
It's weird that they couldn't just win on the level of ideas like they always talk about.
It's like the only way to get your bullshit in there is by an actual hostile takeover.
You can't just like publish stuff that makes sense because none of your crap makes sense.
But whatever one's opinion, one thing is certain, the takeover of New College has changed the dynamics of America's culture war and, if successful, will provide a model for a conservative counter-revolution across the nation.
So let's see what that looks like.
Yeah, so like taking over 700 student bodies all over across the nation.
Yeah, how many of those do you have to do until you win the whole war?
The problems at Newt College are, in many ways, the same as the problems with American universities as a whole. the same as the problems with American universities as a They were founded with a noble mission, the pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful.
But over the years have seen that mission degraded, abandoned, and replaced with a new commitment to partisan political activism.
At New College, this process of ideological capture had reached its conclusion.
Faculty pushed bogus scholarship on queer theory, radical black feminism, and how to subvert the capitalist white supremacist university.
Administrators established a diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy to enforce left-wing orthodoxy.
And, according to a consultant's report, students maintained a progressive echo chamber and bullied their peers into submission.
Sorry, are they not allowed to have their political views?
I don't get it.
Yeah, we'll leave it there.
We'll find out if that's really what was happening.
Okay, so we've set up kind of the takeover, the board, despite that one guy, they still had enough to do whatever.
And now we're going to look at kind of the fallout.
All right, well.
All that ahead in part two.
I'm sure it's great.
And now it's a leading university.
They cured cancer.
Actually, it's a leading university.
And that's what it's done.
I also love the idea that there's like bogus gender theory or whatever he said.
I want to like, do they have the right version?
It would be funny if they're like, hey, finally, I can submit my research on black queer feminism.
