April 30, 2024 - Where There's Woke - Thomas Smith
55:22
WTW51: A New New College
New College, Part 2: The Transition, or How New College of Florida Got a Baseball Team DeSantis didn't just take over a college, he fundamentally disrupted the lives of New College students, faculty, and staff. In this episode we talk about those impacted, and the DeSantis Cronies' push to prioritize student athletes. As promised in the episode, attached is the student thesis from one of the more notable alumni. 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 M&M will now wear sneakers.
Hello, and welcome to Where There's Woke.
This is episode 51.
I'm Thomas.
That's Lydia.
I hope, did you get your gift?
Did you get your 50th episode anniversary?
No, no, not here.
Not here.
Oh, well.
Stuck in the mail?
Yeah, I mean, I sent it, so we'll just, you know.
It'll get here when it gets here.
Yeah, you know.
Definitely call him or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was really nice.
What it was.
How's it going?
Pretty good.
How are you?
Well, I'm excited to hear about this fascist religious asshole takeover of an otherwise good school.
This seems really sad.
Like this is just a really shitty, crappy bullshit thing.
Yeah.
So, very curious to see how this goes.
When last we left off, make sure I and the audience are following, Meatball Ron got his putting fingers all over the board of a college that was within his rights to do as governor.
I mean, there are consequences to electing pieces of shit, so let that be a lesson that maybe you just don't do that.
Don't elect the piece of shit to begin with.
And it's just crazy that it's this takeover.
I can't think of another time where we've seen anything like that.
I mean, maybe it exists, but it's pretty crazy to just do a complete... In the schools, I know there's often the famous corporate hostile takeover, where it's like, ah, we've got enough stock.
To buy enough spots on the board.
Almost succession kind of thing.
Yeah, that kind of thing.
I mean, way predates that.
I mean, the 80s, like the hostile takeover kind of thing was a thing people did.
There's specifically these investors that would like, it was really bad.
They had to, they changed some of the rules for that.
But anyway, like in the business sense, I've seen it, but I don't, I don't know if I've ever seen anything like this and it's pretty crazy.
So I'm interested to learn more about what the fuck happened when these assholes took over.
So yeah, that's part two, right?
Yeah, so we're going to jump in.
You know, one thing you might have noticed with the timeline that we talked about last episode.
I guarantee you I didn't.
Okay.
January 6th, 2023.
Okay, I did notice that.
What is happening in January during like the college year?
Well, January, you're starting back up the second semester, aren't you?
Second semester.
But generally, when you enroll in college, when does your year start?
In August.
So this was a change that happened fast and furious.
Mid-year.
Mid-year.
So not only was it something that no one was prepared for, no one knew this was happening, and then all the students come back after Christmas break.
Oh, wow.
I didn't think about that.
And their entire world has changed.
Wow.
Well, why don't we pause for our usual beginning of the episode teaser break?
So that's it.
That's the teaser.
And after this break, which you don't have to hear if you go on patreon.com slash where there's woke.
Thanks so much to our patrons who make this show possible.
After this break, we will find out what the hell that was.
Jeez.
You say Christmas break.
No, I'm just kidding.
I imagine that was like their first order of business.
We're calling it Christmas break again, everyone.
Yeah, winter break.
So January 6th, no one's on campus really at that point in time, but they're coming back a couple of weeks after that.
I was always after Martin Luther King Jr.
Day, which is always the day after that, mid-January.
It would always be that Monday and then we would come back the Tuesday.
Imagine being a student, coming back, and Chris Rufo is on your campus.
Oh my god, yeah.
Imagine leaving for Christmas break, for winter Saturnalia break, as a genderqueer feminist studies major, which I say that in a loving way, like you're there... Living your best life.
Yeah, you're open, you've got friends supporting you, you've got faculty probably supporting you, you know, like you're living your best life.
You leave, you come back, and all of a sudden your school is run by Chris fucking Rufo, among others.
That's a nightmare.
That's an actual hellish nightmare.
It really is.
And it was a nightmare for a lot of folks.
They, you know, tried to protest and they were attending board meetings and offering public comment.
None of that really mattered.
You know, everyone, they continued to vote 6-4, 6-4, 6-4.
As a result, more than a third of the faculty members did not return.
Voluntarily or fired or?
Combination.
Okay.
That's a lot, yeah.
Mid-year too!
And I don't know that they necessarily all left come January, you know, they might have trickled out.
What is this as of, like as of the next year?
So following spring semester, a total of a third of the faculty members.
Oh gosh, so they probably, yeah, they probably wouldn't have left their kids hanging, you know, I'm sure.
In addition to that, you remember how small the school is, right?
Under 700 people.
About 125 students chose not to return the following year.
And these are students that have started college and now they don't have anywhere to go.
That's nuts.
But they know they just don't want to be there anymore.
That's a tough choice.
I don't know what you're supposed to do in that situation.
Hampshire College, which is a small liberal arts school up in Massachusetts, they were struggling a bit too.
And when this happened, they reached out and said, if there are any new college students that want a safe haven.
Yeah, they're like refugees.
Yeah.
Oh my God.
They offered admission to new college students and would match the new college tuition because Hampshire College is way more expensive.
Wow.
That's good at least.
And so I think some folks took them up on that and moved up to Massachusetts, but that's a pretty big difference.
That's a big commitment, yeah.
Yeah, Florida to Massachusetts.
You're making a choice.
That's a very positive change.
Well, weather-wise, I don't know.
That's fair.
Depending what you want.
So we lost all of these people, incredible teachers, teachers that have been there for a long time.
I mentioned last episode certain faculty or staff members being fired, and you lost those people mid-year.
You lost the academic librarian mid-year.
Your president completely changed.
At the end of January, right after everybody gets back to school, just this tumultuous, you know, constant chaos that you're experiencing.
Later, when kids were getting ready to do orientation and things like that, the following late summer, early fall, orientation leaders were ordered to remove Black Lives Matter pins and Pride pins from their polo shirts.
This is still a public school, right?
It's still a public school.
You can't, come here.
I mean, maybe there's some sort of bullshit justification that works there, but that's, wow.
That is, wait, hold on, I thought they were the party of free speech.
Wait, Dave Rubin.
Exactly.
Dave Rubin, didn't you, oh man, I so believed when you said that free speech is now a Republican issue.
Yeah.
You can't even wear a fucking pin.
That's crazy.
There were murals that students had created, school-sanctioned, and they were completed, you know, early winter, expected to remain for years, and they painted over everything.
Wow.
Because it wasn't going to match the aesthetic of the school that they were trying to move toward.
The fascists, yeah, didn't match.
The flags and the swastikas.
They're really looking to be like modern and, you know, like very clean.
And this school has always been full of color, according to the students, full of color, full of life, quirky, weird, you know, and all of that just got painted over with beige.
And hard work that the students did to create these murals, their art, just completely wiped away.
Like, it was never there.
Did they try to put in some, like, Greek columns or whatever?
Genuinely, like, they think that's how everything should be.
Right, that's architecture.
Yeah.
Well, why don't we listen a little bit to a couple of pretty well-known alumni from New College.
After this was happening, they went on a radio show, and I don't want to spoil by saying who they are yet, because we'll talk about it when we're done, but why don't we go ahead and hear from them?
New College changes this all?
Yeah.
And the kind of fear that we hear from the members of this board, people who are trying to make some kind of spectacle, we make a big deal about, like, explaining, oh, maybe you don't understand, it's not an ideological place, it's not about... Are you sleeping in the water?
But, like, the real truth is this place completely transforms people, and I think maybe that might be what they're actually afraid of.
It's not ideological.
It's not anybody's being told what to believe or what to think.
I wasn't told what to believe or what to think.
I came to my own position.
I came to a point in my life where I had to really dramatically alter what I was doing, what I thought.
And it's not because somebody told me I needed it.
Nobody ever would have been able to convince me to do that if they were like, here's what's right, here's what's wrong.
It happened because New College doesn't do that.
And I'm starting to realize that's what they're actually afraid of.
Like, they want it to be a place where people tell you what's right and what's wrong.
Yeah, they cannot stand the lack of structure and the informality that we like to bring to academia.
They have really been afraid of the power that the students have.
Like, every year, students will get together and do some sort of protest because, you know, There are always things going on at New College, there are always problematic things happening where somebody's like, well that's a problem, and I as a student am impacted by it, and I would like to combat this change, and as this is my home, I would like to protect my home at the same time.
And so, there's so many protests that have happened, and by the time you leave, you kind of just...
I've learned how to throw a protest, you know?
A lot of people understand interpersonal, social situations in an activist sense, in an active way like that, far more.
I wish you could put it on your resume.
It's something that's kind of not quantifiable.
So by the way, if Chris Rufo promises to completely reform the audio engineering program of this college, I think I'm actually with the fascists now.
I don't know if the listeners... That's not affiliated with the college.
Okay, yeah, but it sounds like the people are involved in...
Yeah.
So let me tell you a little bit about that.
No, I'm not done.
I don't know if the listeners will hear it, but there's an awful static noise the entire time.
I'll probably try to filter it out, but I'm torn because often I want to shame the people who did the audio by leaving it in, but I also can't stand it.
So I'll probably fix it and then people will be like, what is Tom talking about?
Yeah, so the most recent individual that was talking goes by ex-Gonzalez now.
They used to go by Emma Gonzalez and that name might be familiar to listeners because they were a survivor of Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting and became a very incredible advocate and new college alum.
Went to new college and They ended up understanding themselves better.
They went on Jimmy Fallon, actually, I watched an interview, and saying that they go by X now, they have since come out as trans, and that they felt Emma defined that they had to be a girl.
And they didn't like that.
And they didn't like people thinking that they knew them because they were in the media and they had this trauma that everybody knows about.
Now they know their name, and they have all these just ideas of what that means then.
And so they kind of decided, okay, I'm starting over, and I go by X now.
Jesus Christ, and then Elon Musk ruined that whole thing.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
What are the odds?
How dare he?
And so, like I said, new college alum, someone who was an activist before they got to college.
Can they change their name to Twitter now?
Yeah, they should.
Hi, Twitter Gonzales.
That's actually a badass name.
That is really, really good.
It's also non-binary.
Yeah.
Okay.
X, reach out to us.
That's it.
You can have that one.
Somebody reach out to them on behalf of us and say, please change your name to Twitter Gonzales.
And then the first person that we heard on that clip is a name that I don't know that people will necessarily recognize.
His name is Derek Black.
He is a former white supremacist.
His dad started Stormfront, and his godfather is David Duke.
He was very, very, very deep in white supremacy.
And what is so interesting He was a white supremacist while he was at New College.
How did he go to New College?
Yeah, he had an interest.
So he went to community college after he finished high school.
And apparently he ran for a seat on the Republican Executive Committee at the college.
And he was 19.
He got 60 percent of the vote.
But then the committee refused to seat him because he would not take the oath.
Because white supremacist, I guess.
What's the oath?
Like, I won't be a white supremacist?
Yeah, no, I don't know.
It was like a pledging.
I don't know.
Community college, it's a public institution.
There's probably something related to, you know, inclusivity.
Not being a white supremacist.
Yeah.
Fair.
So when that happened, he decided that he actually wanted to study medieval European history.
And where do you go in Florida when you want to study something a little, you know, off the beaten path?
New college.
So it was his first time away from home.
And I think that this is something that you might relate to.
You're not a white supremacist.
You've never been a white supremacist.
But it was his first time away from home four hours across the state.
So now he's experiencing life without his dad with him all the time.
However, every morning, he's still called into the dad's radio show.
And, you know, was a white supremacist and stuff.
And then he would go to class and hang out with social justice warriors, essentially, and trying to live both of the lives.
Like, he was making friends with these people, but he was so confused and he didn't feel like he could 100% be himself.
He said, it was terrifying because I knew that one day somebody was going to type my name into Google.
Yikes.
Really?
They did.
Really?
Yeah.
So it became public knowledge at the college, and he ended up being ostracized by a lot of the community.
Wow.
But in response to that, he started to make friends with Jewish people on campus and have conversations with them.
And he started to realize that the beliefs that he had this entire time are wrong, That this group of people that he thought he knew and he thought he understood because of what was being fed to him by his dad and his godfather and that community that he was a part of, of these horrible backwards people, he was wrong.
So they would do like Friday night dinners, the little group of friends.
And he says at one of the dinners, he, you know, shared something about like what he believed about IQ differences.
And he would say, I have 12 different studies that have been published over the years.
Here's the journal that put it together.
I believe that this is true, that race predicts IQ and there are IQ differences in races.
And they would come back with 150 more recent, more well-researched studies and explain to me how statistics work.
And we would go back and forth until I would come to the end of the argument and I'd say, yes, that makes sense.
That does not hold together.
And I'll remove that from my ideological toolbox.
Wow.
And everything else stays there, but then they start dismantling it one by one by one.
And he said about over a year, a year or two, he got to a point where he just didn't believe any of it anymore.
Jeez, that's crazy.
Just his friends sticking with him and helping him kind of like deprogram almost.
That's a really powerful story, and it's something we've touched on before, but while it's definitely true that nobody has the obligation to do this, I do think it's really important, especially with younger people.
Especially with younger people.
Maybe not with old boomer pieces of shit, but with younger people who are brought up with a certain set of views.
It's really hard because on one hand, obviously, it's hard to be sympathetic to anyone with those awful views.
On the other hand, what would you expect someone born into that circumstance to believe?
Yeah.
Every single authority figure that ever is around you and raised you is telling you one thing.
Why wouldn't you believe?
You're lying to yourself if you're pretending somehow you would secretly know the truth.
You know, like you'd intuit it or you'd, I think it's important and it's crucial that especially with younger people that, you know, if, if people are willing and able to give them a chance and to try to like work on them, like it can work, you know, and then it's, if I imagine if he had just been ostracized, I don't think he'd ever have changed his views.
I bet.
Yeah, no, I think you're right.
And it's interesting because that environment, like how much he was involved with the creation of some of this stuff.
Yeah, no one else could work the technology.
Well, apparently when he was 10, he started to learn coding.
Yeah.
And then he created a page on Stormfront.
Yeah, this is not even really joking.
It says he started a dedicated Lord of the Rings section on Stormfront.
Oh boy.
Yeah.
That was, you know, geared towards other kids.
And he started receiving like death threats and stuff at that very young age.
And his dad is just like, oh, don't look at it.
Don't worry about it.
Hey, don't send a 10-year-old death threats.
I don't really care who or what they are.
Just don't do that.
Maybe they didn't know he was 10, but like, just don't.
Yeah.
So I think what is also incredible here is when Ron DeSantis, as we spoke about in the last episode, Ron DeSantis is saying, you know, gender studies, critical race theory, this ideological environment that they're creating for students that shouldn't be on the taxpayer.
They're telling our kids what to believe.
Here we have a new college alum that was literally a white nationalist.
And he has come out and said, I don't think they did enough to protect Jewish people on campus or people of other races on campus.
They should have spoken out more.
They did not step up and act in a way that I think was appropriate.
And here I am, a Nazi.
When what happened?
Well, he was a Nazi on campus and like engaging in some of this rhetoric and stuff.
Well, he was, I thought he was like under, like, hiding a secret.
Yes, he was, but I mean, in terms of, he doesn't speak about like the specific instances, but his interpretation of his time there was that there should have been a safer environment for people when things occurred.
And he felt upon reflection that that was not happening.
And as a former Nazi, you know, like things that he probably could have gotten away with at school.
Ostracized from the students, but not necessarily from the administration.
And in 2013, he publicly renounced his views with the Southern Poverty Law Center, and he just wanted to make sure that, you know, everybody understood, like, what he believes now and the growth that he's done.
And as you heard in that interview, he attributes a lot of that to New College and The people he was around there, the environment that was set up, even though it wasn't always as safe as he wanted it to be upon later reflection for marginalized folks.
But had he just stayed at home, that wasn't going to change.
Or to your point, had they just didn't bother engaging with This person that they knew to some degree, and then they come to find out like these views that aren't okay.
If his friends hadn't worked with him through that, then yeah, I don't know where he would have been.
He would still probably believe every piece of this.
Well, and the important thing is he wasn't forced to take a diversity seminar that did this, or he wasn't forced to take how not to be a Nazi 101 mandatory class.
It's just these interactions with students.
And it's students, they're also doing what they're doing and trying to like deconvert him because of their beliefs that they should be allowed to fucking have because it's a free fucking country.
Those students in turn were not brainwashed by the university.
Like it's just, They have to have that theory because there's no other way to explain why their ideas never work other than their ideas being wrong.
Yeah.
To X's point in the recording... She means Twitter, everyone.
Sorry.
X Gonzalez.
It's Twitter, formerly known as X. Okay.
This is going to be very confusing.
I have to email them.
I know this is going to be dumb, but I know.
They said, you know, something that every student walks away from New College knowing is how to throw a protest, how to be vocal about something that you care about, how to recognize when something is happening.
And this was happening at New College.
You know, it's not a perfect school.
It never was.
No one was saying it was, but that it was an environment in which you recognize that something was happening you weren't okay with, and you got to stand up and lead a protest and have your voice heard.
And I think that is, in theory, what conservatives would want.
We also mentioned a little bit about the potential for lawsuits in our last episode.
You said, you know, it sounds like there'd be opportunities for lawsuits to occur.
There was a civil rights investigation that was filed with the Department of Education.
And this was a civil rights complaint on August 22nd, where it was accusing the new college of Florida's board of trustees and the administration of disability discrimination that it excluded qualified persons with disabilities from participation where it was accusing the new college of Florida's board of trustees and the administration of disability discrimination that it excluded qualified persons with disabilities from participation in, denied them
It doesn't specifically say who involved was making these claims regarding disabilities, but it also cited the hostile environment for and discrimination against protected groups like LGBTQ students and the hostile environment for those folks.
The civil rights complaint was going somewhere.
And just recently, there was a satisfactory settlement, I guess.
And they are not disclosing what that is.
It is confidential.
So we don't know exactly what came to be from that.
Who were the plaintiffs exactly?
Students.
Okay.
Was it like one student or was it?
There are not a lot of details, honestly.
Yeah.
Interesting.
For example, I think Rufo's tweeting habits kind of fueled a lot of this.
They specifically include a tweet that he wrote saying, among other things, the problem is that non-binary is an entirely fake identity.
It does not exist.
Nobody is non-binary.
This is weapons-grade pseudoscience that ends up pushing kids on a path to lifetime medicalization, sterilization, and castration.
Unbelievable.
Non-binary people are non-binary, though.
Yeah.
Just off the top of my head.
I think that's probably the only people who are non-binary.
He's non-binary people, I think.
But he should remember that group of people.
That's kind of important.
Right, right.
The other piece that was filed in this investigation was that when the board voted to abolish the Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence, one of their first things that they did, I think that was February 2023, What ended up happening was the Muslim students on campus didn't have food to eat during Ramadan.
Oh, wow.
That entity was responsible for making sure that they had food that they could have.
Yeah, that's important.
That's something you need.
Yep.
Pretty terrible.
The meal plan hours were not accommodated for Ramadan, so this office was a way for them to actually eat at a time that was in line with their religious beliefs.
But like I said, we don't know how that got settled, but it got settled.
And that's kind of where we're at there.
But nothing from like a group of teachers or there's nothing?
Yeah.
So then there's a lawsuit that was filed by an entity called the NCF Freedom Organization.
And this was a lawsuit from SB 266 that really was going after higher education in Florida.
And they said that this law infringes on freedom of speech, that their academic freedom had been violated.
But for whatever reason, they have decided to withdraw the lawsuit without prejudice.
So they could come back.
And if they have any instance of harm or whatever, they absolutely could come back.
But right now, that lawsuit is not going anywhere.
Richard Corcoran spoke about this, and he said, We are crossing the Rubicon.
New College of Florida is making significant progress toward becoming the top liberal arts college in the nation.
It is time to put this lawsuit behind us.
By what measurement?
Yeah, I don't know.
That's an interesting question that we will get to as we talk about this.
I guess they don't have grades.
Oh wait, did they get rid of that?
Were they like, we need grades?
No.
So they decided to keep the structure of the school because they said this is the defining feature of the college.
And that is so interesting to me.
Because you would think conservatives would be like, we need grades.
We need a way to tell the underprivileged kids that don't get as many resources that they aren't as valuable.
And he closes it by saying, it is time to put this lawsuit behind us and come together to realize the immense potential of New College as a thriving educational institution.
So... Why is he commenting on that?
When they withdrew the lawsuit?
I don't know.
He decided to issue... So it's not a settlement, but it's... Nope.
Huh.
Nope.
Yeah, I wonder what's going on there.
Yeah, so that's kind of what we're at with lawsuit stuff against the college specifically.
And so they're not really going anywhere, which is a little upsetting.
The American Association of University Professors, though, is involved in this because naturally they have major concerns about what was going on.
And they issued a full report on their website in December 2023.
And their report is looking at kind of the broader structure of higher education in Florida under DeSantis's decisions and changes and movements.
But they really highlight New College at the very beginning of the report.
And they spoke with Nicholas Clarkson, who I mentioned previously.
He was the assistant professor of gender studies at New College, and he resigned right when the school year was about to start up.
He says, this is a test case for a conservative overhaul of higher education, and it isn't going to stay isolated to New College of Florida.
And I think that is a fair statement to make because even Rufo is saying that, even DeSantis is saying that, you know, that this is something where they are happy to say that this can serve as a model of how conservatives can tackle other colleges.
Have you looked into that?
It seems like, well, why hasn't he already done that?
Like there's other public universities that, is it just that, I wonder if you need it to be a tiny one just by the nature of like how that would work.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think you probably do need it to be a tiny one.
Like I can't imagine him going to University of Florida and being like, this is mine now.
Like I don't, I cannot imagine that.
Just because the specific agreement they had come to with New College due to that bankruptcy thing or something.
I don't think so.
I'm just wondering.
Really?
So you think he could do this to a board of directors at any school?
Yeah.
I think he can, but I don't know that it would affect change if it was like a huge school with huge endowments.
I think I think it's easy for them to hide behind this.
The school's not performing well.
So the state had to step in.
Right.
And they're saying performance metrics are not great.
So the state had to step in.
Enrollment's down.
So the state had to step in.
I guess money wise.
Yeah.
Whereas like UF, FSU, you do that and it's gonna be like, what are you doing?
Plus you don't want to fuck with the football.
No, you don't.
You don't want to mess with sports.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
Maybe that's, yeah.
Okay.
That kind of makes sense.
Yeah.
And pin in that too.
You gotta bully the smallest, you know, first.
Yeah, exactly.
There is another college that performance metric-wise has been doing okay, but it is a small college that was called out at that same point in 2020, you know, railing after the fiscal conservatism and the concerns about how much money per student the state is spending at those schools.
So there's potential that there could be another one on the horizon.
We'll see.
When is this fucking meatball up for re-election?
I forget.
How long did those go?
Is it four years?
Yeah, four years.
I feel like he was elected in 2018, but I could be wrong.
No, it couldn't be because he'd already... Did he get re-elected?
I think it's 2022.
But was that a re-election?
Oh, no, because it was Scott.
It was a re-election.
Oh, really?
God, the years have gone so fast because it was Scott was governor and then he ran for Senate.
Yeah.
And that guy sucked.
But was that that long ago?
Yeah.
This is his second term.
Since 2019.
So this is his second term.
Are there term limits?
They don't all have term.
Anyway, you got to get rid of this fucking guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Please, Florida.
It's another two years?
Yeah.
Asshole.
So the AAUP in their report, they spoke about the tenure concern that we spoke about, where historically about one-third of the college's faculty have applied for tenure in the fifth year.
This was not something new.
This was common practice for them.
And of the individuals who are pursuing tenure under that model, I guess there was a It's a warning from President Corcoran where he advised them to withdraw their applications because they would risk being denied tenure.
And five of the seven, I guess, decided to call his bluff and lost.
And he drafted a memo.
Put it in their files and part of it says, I recommend the Board of Trustees defer its decision on awarding tenure to the candidate.
If that is not possible, I recommend denying tenure at this time.
This recommendation is based on extraordinary circumstances, including but not limited to changes in administration.
Well, that's fair.
You've gotten rid of a bunch of fucking programs, so it is a little... That's the one logic that I think does work.
It's like, well, we're not going to get tenure.
more traditional liberal arts institution and the related current uncertainty of the needs of the divisions units in college.
Well, that's fair.
You've gotten rid of a bunch of fucking programs.
So it is a little that's the one logic that I think does work.
It's like, well, we're not going to the last piece.
Yeah.
It's like, well, we've gotten rid of gender studies.
We're not going to give tenure to it.
For example, I know that.
But anyway, yeah.
But the standards of academic freedom that most colleges and universities operate under is that this focus on ensuring the college is moving towards a more traditional liberal arts institution, that sure sounds like you're trying to infringe upon the academic freedom of your professors that are applying for tenure.
Yeah.
I don't know how much that matters.
What's the enforcement?
Who can say anything?
I don't know.
Yeah.
So the new college faculty, you know, like pretty upset.
This is last spring still.
So we're we're nearing the end of the year for them.
And they had been giving it their best shot, I guess, for a couple of months.
And in mid-May, they voted to censure the board of trustees.
Eighty percent voted to do that.
And they wrote a letter to the faculty.
Is that some official thing?
Or are they just like, I think it's a statement.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In the letter to President Corcoran, they said the board had failed in its fiduciary duties.
It is endangering the college's ability to fulfill its mission.
Again, the mission is defined in Florida statute.
And the letter cited potential conflicts of interest by some of the trustees and unprofessional behavior by board members.
Let me send you a link to give you an example of What that unprofessional behavior might be.
What I will say first in response to the last point that trustee Keenan brought up is that it's been raised repeatedly over this past number of months that there are conflicts of interest among some members of this board who seem to be perhaps profiting From their work on this board, and so I think that is the reason why she raised that question, Mr Rufo.
Can you be specific with which people?
Let's not make vague accusations.
Be a grown up and actually say what you mean.
Shut the fuck up.
I'd like to know if I'm one of those with a conflict of interest.
Yeah.
Trustee Reed, your tone the entire time, everything you say is so angry, is so negative, is so critical.
And then you have these vague accusations of breaking the law.
And so I would say that either make your accusation or shut up.
By the way, that's like an old lady.
Yeah.
She is the director of gender studies.
That's Dr. Amy Reed, the faculty representative on the board.
And she was speaking in support of Grace Keenan, who is the student representative on the board, who raised concerns that were dismissed.
And so she was stepping into, you know, voice of reason.
The only two voices of reason really on this board.
Did she say what?
No, and I think that there's kind of a whisper thing going on.
I don't know that anyone has like put pen to paper exactly to specifically call anything out.
This board meeting was in relation to a program we're going to be talking about a bit later where the individual who is the head of that program.
Christopher Rufo has described him as, you know, my good friend, et cetera, et cetera.
And so... Of what?
Sorry, what program?
It's a program we're going to get into later regarding great books, you know, because we have to have something about great books.
Yeah, but it's somebody who's going to profit, like a contractor type deal?
Okay.
Yeah.
So, you know, you can clearly hear the tone of these board meetings.
They're rough.
They are rough.
So that's the AAUP report.
One of the other big changes was that New College did not have any sports.
Yeah, why would you?
700 person school.
Recreational things, they had, you know, clubs.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
But they decided when they took over, one of their big points that they were going to do, they were going to have a sports program.
And it was going to be like 14 different sports that they were going to do.
Chris Rufo's like, I've got to suit up, that's the only way.
Is he going to get his high school baseball career back or something?
Yeah, yeah.
So what ended up happening?
Like, you would think that pursuing a sports program, you might want to have facilities to do the sport.
Probably be necessary, yeah.
They don't have that.
You would think that you'd want to have, you know, some thoughts about some coaching.
They got there eventually.
They have some coaches.
They're all from religious high schools that have come in.
And they got kind of like immediate approval from, I don't know if it's the NCAA.
I guess they're like low, low, low, low, low division.
Yeah, division nine.
Yeah.
But they are officially a sports school, I guess.
Why would you fucking do?
Like, OK, even by their logic, even by their logic, I could see I'm a fan of sports.
I would be.
By the way, I wouldn't go to any fucking college that didn't have intramurals, at least because it's great.
It's exercise.
It's fun.
It's and it's kind of a club thing.
It's a hobby thing.
That'd be awesome.
There's no reason not to have intramural sports or the next step up is like club sports.
You know, I think it's I think what you do is you kind of find some other colleges to Play, but it's not like official or whatever.
Yeah, they have like a sailing thing, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's great.
Nothing wrong with that.
Fun stuff.
Like, that's enough.
What is your, like, if your theory is under your stupid religious bullshit, well, it's part of a complete breakfast.
You got to have the, yeah, sure.
But like, you're going to try to compete with a 700 person school that's lost however many of their what's and has no thing.
That's just going to be embarrassing because So why would they do this?
I'll tell you.
I have a few theories.
Oh, money?
Do people get to make money off of it?
Yeah, well, I think money is part of it, but I had mentioned how many students left.
Yeah.
As of July, they had, this year, July 2023, they had 328 incoming students.
That's a record for new students.
115 of them are student-athletes.
That's a record for new students.
115 of them are student athletes.
70 of them were recruited to play baseball.
And of those 70, all 70 came with scholarship.
They don't have athletic scholarships at New College.
They received merit-based scholarships.
And so of the 179 students that received $10,000 Presidential Honors Scholarships, 84 of them were athletes.
To put this into perspective, So those 70 freshman baseball players that all had scholarships when they came in.
70.
Wow.
Freshmen.
That's a lot.
I remember Meatball Ron was like a baseball player, like a real baseball player.
Yeah, yeah.
The University of Florida, Division I, student population 90 times bigger than New College.
They have 37 baseball players on scholarship in total.
Yeah.
Total.
Baseball teams are not that big.
I mean, you want to obviously want to have some amount of development.
And then the money that they're offering them.
Like, this was a way that they could get a lot of students to come in that weren't going to play for a Division 1 school or a Division 2 school or a Division 3 school.
Or a Little League.
But they want to keep playing baseball and they're going to get money to do it.
They get to go to school for cheap.
So is it a way to just get juice enrollment?
But if the whole thing is like you're failing money-wise, how are you paying for the resources you need to support all these new students?
Oh, that's got to be part three.
We're not going to be able to get into all the money for part two, but I promise we will.
I promise we will.
When those student-athletes came in, New College had existing problems that I had mentioned, and one of those problems was deferred maintenance.
And that deferred maintenance is on things like dorms.
The invisible baseball field that they don't have?
Yeah, also that.
So, you have these dorms that aren't sufficient for your student population already and are in rough shape already, but they decided that the student-athletes got the good dorms on campus and they moved returning students Wow.
Hotels?
That's gotta be expensive for the school.
they get to go to.
Or off-campus hotels.
Hotels?
Yep.
That's got to be expensive for the school.
Yeah.
You are not supposed to do that.
I mean, I went to a private university in Florida, and we did have overflow housing with hotels.
If something happens.
Yeah.
And you have a bigger incoming class than you have room for, but they don't want to use that.
It's very expensive, and it's annoying for the students to have to bus in all the time.
Plus it's Florida, there's probably like, you know, a lot of drug deals going on at these hotels.
Alligators though.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All the alligators.
Yeah.
So you have these, this incoming class that looks incredibly different than the school has ever looked.
Ever.
And I thought The Nation put this really well.
They said that New College and Ron DeSantis, really, are purchasing a right-wing student body through athletic scholarships to replace those students they've driven out.
I want to watch their first game so badly.
I cannot tell you how badly I want to watch these people get destroyed.
Amazing.
I'm so glad you went there because that's what I'm going to next.
No!
No way!
So I listened to, and folks in our Facebook group, folks in our Facebook group know.
Really?
How did I miss this?
You'll know.
I listened to an episode of Blocked and Reported, Jesse Singleton's stupid podcast.
Because they were talking about New College and I was like, I'm curious what their takes are going to be.
Yeah.
They said at the end of the episode, I listened to the whole episode, they said they were going to cover the baseball team season if the season actually started.
No, I want to cover it.
They didn't do it.
So now we get to Are we the official coverage of the baseball?
Do you want me to send you the link?
Because I don't understand the staff.
I want you to send me tickets.
I'm not going to Florida.
I think their season just ended on the 24th.
They are the Mighty Banyans.
That is their Banyan tree.
Named after Steve Banyan.
Stupid, I don't know.
No, that was good.
I liked it.
Let me send you the link so you can look at the site with me.
Well, there's a lot of variables, though.
Like, who are they playing?
You can engineer a season.
I don't know.
Well, I mean, if they are really in NCAA something, like, I just don't know what this level of sports would be.
Here's the other thing.
If they had to build a team out of a freshman class, that's a huge liability.
So it'd actually be fair to expect they're going to suck.
And unless, I don't know if the league would like make any sort of allowances or if they're playing an easy schedule.
I don't know.
I've never, this is a weird situation.
It is a very weird situation.
Early in the season, and they do like series, right?
So they play two to three games against the same school in a row.
They destroyed Lighthouse Christian College.
That college is just a lighthouse that has two kids in it.
They try to play all the positions.
Turn the light on and off.
Actually, yeah, only one can play at a time because the other one has to eat a man in the lighthouse.
Yeah, but their overall record for the year is not great.
I mean, they won 20.
Wow.
They lost 26.
Honestly, on paper, that's not bad for this situation.
But I have no idea who they're playing.
I don't know either.
These schools aren't real.
Oh, did you send me something?
Yeah, I sent you the link to their page.
Yeah, it says that they finished up their season.
Sounds like they didn't make the playoffs.
Game one, they lost.
This is against Weber International.
Don't know who that is.
They lost four to eleven.
And then in game two, they beat them four to three.
So there you go.
Oh, at number five, Weber.
OK, that's a ranked team.
All right.
Tell me what fucking division this is.
Okay, so I want to apologize for my wife.
They are not an NCAA program.
They're in the NAIA, which is like for small schools, National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics.
And I don't even know what division they are.
So there's three divisions.
Six varsity sports teams.
Wow.
Within months.
Yeah.
They recruited more than 150 scholar-athletes fielding six varsity sports teams.
That is pretty impressive.
I mean, I don't know why.
What's the point?
Yeah.
Well, so here are some thoughts.
The New York Times ran a piece on this, and they interviewed Chris Rufo.
This is Michelle Goldberg.
When I spoke to Christopher Rufo last weekend, he offered several explanations for New College's new emphasis on sports, including the classical idea that a healthy body sustains a healthy mind.
But an important part of the investment in athletics, he said, is that it is a way to make New College more male, and by extension, less left-wing.
Okay.
Yep.
So affirmative action for men.
Student athletes, like they're mainly the athlete part normally, but I don't know if it's different at this level.
Yeah.
I mean, I saw, I saw, you know, like an economics professor sharing that interest in his courses seems to increase.
So I think you're going to get people studying more business related things.
The male population, just for a frame of reference, increased from 23% of the student population to 54%.
Well, I mean, mission accomplished.
I will say this about Rufo, like he's competently evil.
Maybe they have a plan here.
Why is it impossible to find what division schools are for anything?
This happened recently with something else.
Oh, it was because I was trying to figure out Eli's dad's college.
I was like, what division?
North Carolina.
For some reason that's, it's stupid, but like it's information that they decide doesn't exist.
Yeah.
I don't know why.
I'm even on the Wikipedia page for the Sun Conference, which is their conference that they joined, and it can't tell me what division it's just can't do it.
I think they're in division three.
Okay.
Which it would be the smallest division of the smallest organization.
Yeah.
Which whatever, I guess that's what you would be, but Okay.
I don't know.
I like sports.
I just, I don't know how to feel about this, I guess.
Like it's interesting, but I don't, I don't really feel like that's what college needs is not more sports.
It seems like I think sports usually, if anything is again, coming from a sports fan, it doesn't even make any, there's such a massive business and take so much.
It should just be separated from college.
It doesn't even make any sense for it to be a part of college.
It's just a billion dollar industry that the students only just now are starting to be allowed to profit from at all.
Yeah, and they had sports.
It was almost this, essentially.
They just weren't getting scholarships for it, you know, if they're doing intramural and stuff.
Yeah, it's a step above that, but it's, yeah, it doesn't really... Barely.
Nobody cares.
Yeah, it's like, I mean, they say it's like, oh, it's the equivalent of an NCAA Division II.
Really?
And for one, I don't buy that because why wouldn't you just go to an NCAA Division II school?
Like, I don't know.
Yeah.
But also, nobody cares.
Nobody's going to be like, I was the NAIA Division III runner-up finalist for the... What does that do?
Whatever.
I don't know.
I wonder if those people whose podcasts you listen to went through the same process, were like, we're going to cover their season, and then they realize, oh, it's just a small... It's nothing.
It doesn't... Yeah.
It very quickly, I lost interest because I have no frame of reference.
It doesn't, Oh, you won the division three NIAI sun conference.
Like what is cool.
You beat two other like farms and a lighthouse.
I don't know what that is.
Yeah.
Jesse single and Katie Herzog would have a hard time bringing in their anti-trans comments probably with the baseball topics.
So they had to stick to what they know.
Yeah, I would probably get old every time being like, and none of the athletes were trans.
Exactly.
Well, we've been talking a lot about, at least by name, I've mentioned Richard Corcoran quite a bit.
He's the president?
He's the president.
I think we're going to Dig into his stuff more in the next episode when we talk about all the money because there's some interesting things going on there.
But I did want to go out with this episode just sharing the title of David Duke's Godson slash Stormfront's son.
The title of his thesis, right?
So I had mentioned he was going to New College because of an interest in medieval European history.
And you can see some of the students' theses on the New College website.
I tried looking for X's, but it was not available to read.
It was something that is remaining private.
But this one is available to read.
And I am happy to share it with everybody.
I will send the link as part of the shout outs.
Why?
I don't know, because it's amazing.
People want to read it.
So did he deconvert it?
Yes.
Yeah.
So he had deconverted by this point.
It was towards the end of his career.
But it has nothing to do with that because he was studying, you know, medieval European history.
So the title of his thesis is Mortuus Non Mordit, Michael Ranft's Influence in the 18th Century Vampire Debate.
And I have not read it.
I'm so excited to read it, and I want to share the wealth with everybody, if anyone else would like to hear about the vampire debate.
Makes me so happy.
So nerdy.
Yeah.
That's your typical new college person.
The student that spit on Chris Rufo, she ended up taking Hampshire College up on that offer and she transferred there.
So when she withdrew, she found a home up in Massachusetts.
That's lucky for her.
Yeah.
Okay, so what did we learn?
It sounds like they're winning.
Slash, it's over, right?
I mean, you've established a sports program.
That's pretty organized, you know?
To the extent where they're in this conference and they're competing, they're not really that bad, like all things considered.
That takes a lot of organization, it takes a lot of buy-in from people, and they've fundamentally changed the demographics of the school.
Yeah, completely overhauled the administration.
You have a bunch of people who are serving in positions that have never worked in higher education before.
They have very different backgrounds that have nothing to do with anything.
And kind of grabbing them out of the wheels of this, I think would be incredibly difficult.
And I think we have also seen how chaotic it is when you change a school Completely.
You completely overhaul it in the shortest time period you could ever imagine.
I don't see reasonable people wanting to do that like normally on a normal basis.
Like if we ever got control back of New College, what would that look like?
Would we even...
Turn it back over that quickly.
Yeah, no, I wouldn't want to.
It wouldn't be fair because, you know, the thing about the left is they usually don't like to just fuck people over, especially school students.
Right.
So we'd probably have a have a grace period and whatever.
I mean, it would still be good that we did that multi-year transition.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I think what's interesting is like the whole goal is like we're going to pry the colleges away from the left.
But what have you really done?
Like if you take the theory of these people is that These universities or whatever, these tiny schools, I guess that's the case, maybe are brainwashing, producing progressive students that are crazy and they're producing scholarship that's blah, blah, blah.
But if all you've done is Changed it from a school to a gymnasium or a practice field where people play baseball.
You didn't really like, you didn't take over scholarship and instant, like you just changed what a place is.
You know, like you haven't really, you know what I mean?
Like it's not really fair to say like, ah, we won back universities and whatever.
No, you just like displaced people and then did a different thing.
That's not really anything.
We also learned that the entire faculty is changing, right?
The administration is changing, the faculty is changing, the nature of the school except for this no grades.
Yeah, that's still the same.
That's still the same, and they do want people to still kind of create their own program, but you're not allowed to wear Black Lives Matter pins anymore if you are serving as An orientation leader during school orientation week.
We see this monumental change happening here and we're getting a lot of sports and it's almost as if the entire college is not being treated as an institution for higher learning.
It's being treated more like a business.
In a way that is detached from learning.
I understand that universities ultimately, like, they have to make money.
Well, no, they don't.
Public universities don't have to make money.
Well, they have to make money to pay salaries, I guess is what I mean.
I just want to say it's the same way that, like, the Postal Service doesn't have to make money.
We just decided that that somehow make money.
Yeah.
Like, oh, they're they're losing money.
It's like, no, they provide a service that we need and we pay for it.
Same could be said could be for state universities.
I don't particularly care if they make money.
I mean, obviously, there's a lot to go there.
But I'm sorry.
I dispute your premise because I think it's buying into the right wing framing.
I think that's fair.
I have been living and breathing a lot of budget documents.
So we will get into the money side of things because I think there are some illuminating things there.
I'm really excited to follow the money.
We're going to follow the money a little bit, and we're going to spend more time with President Richard Corcoran, because he's an important figure in all of that.
All right.
I've got to get to baseball practice, because I'm now fighting Banyan.
Go Banyans!
You can probably find that faster than me.
You know, it's not that easy sometimes.
And while you're doing that, I'll read some coverage to our good listeners.
Sean Lara Rosa had a good run on the mound in Game 1.
Lara Rosa came in and pitched two innings, allowing just one hit with a strikeout and no earned runs.
