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Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published. city journal.
On Thursday, the New College Florida Board of Trustees voted to direct the administration to abolish the university’s gender studies program, making it the first public university in the United States to roll back the intrusion of gender ideology and queer theory into academics. started to let
The decision is sure to provoke fierce reactions from left-wing critics, but it is part of a broader transformation. In January, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed me and a number of other reformers to the Board of Trustees of New College. He set us with the challenging mission of reviving a classical liberal education and restoring the founding mission of a university founded by calling upon the New Colleges of Oxford.
We knew from the beginning that this mission would involve more than just a ‘rebranding’ campaign. That would require a complete overhaul of university structures and their programs. In our first few months as a Board, we initiated profound changes to central administration, removing the President, ousting the Chancellor, abolishing the DEI department, and hiring political veteran Richard Corcoran as Interim President. did. Despite the backlash we received, including student protests, media outcry, and the disapproving visit of California Gov. I made a difficult choice.
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These changes are already bearing fruit. Interim President Corcoran secures millions of new dollars from state legislatures, launches ambitious campus renovation plan, recruits largest freshman in college history, makes school stronger in decades placed.
At the same time, Corcoran recruits a new team and is busy rebuilding the college’s institutional capacity, which had shrunk significantly under the previous administration, and designing a new core curriculum that begins with Homer’s first year of immersive learning. Odyssey continue to provide a foundation based on logo (cultivating human reason) and Techne (Fostering Applied Arts).
Faculty has also changed. Through a combination of cultural encouragement and good fortune, many of the most ideological left-wing faculty who presided over old orthodoxy and expressed strong opposition to the classical liberal arts left the university. Professor Aaron Hillegas, who said he would “burn down university buildings” if he was “more patriotic,” resigned. Professor Nicolas Delon, who justified violent protests against the new government, has left the university. Liz Leininger, the New College professor who spread baseless accusations of “McCarthyism,” has retired of her own accord.
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In total, 36 professors retired, making way for a slew of new recruits interested in pursuing mankind’s great questions rather than maintaining stifling left-wing echo chambers.
The university’s new academic body boasts PhDs from universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Northwestern. More importantly, all of these professors share a commitment to classical liberal education, in which the “truth, goodness, and beauty” rather than the bureaucratic trinity of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” is prioritizing the pursuit of
So we arrived at the current question. Given its new mandate to revive the classical liberal arts, what should the new colleges, which under the old regime partnered and outsourced to more than one-third of all faculty members, do about their gender studies programs? Is it? As a center of learning? The resounding response from the Management Committee was immediate repeal. While the decision may seem obvious to many conservatives who have long criticized gender studies as a vessel for pseudoscientific, non-academic partisan activity, it is worth further explaining why the department is being abolished. Yes.
The argument in favor of repeal has three parts. First, despite the recent fuss about “academic freedom,” state legislators and boards have failed to redirect academic programs at public universities that are not aligned with the mission of the taxpayers they generously support. , has the right and obligation to reduce or close they.
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If a public university violates any part of this social contract, the people, through their elected representatives and appointed representatives, have every right to advocate reform. Yes, professors at public universities like New College have First Amendment rights to promote gender pseudoscience. However, they are not entitled to unlimited state funding for their talks.
Second, there is a strong precedent for abolishing faculties that deviate from their academic mandate in favor of ideological activity.like i have be familiar with Earlier, the University of California, Berkeley closed its criminology school after it was hijacked by left-wing extremists and used to facilitate a highly controversial “prison operation.” Similarly, the University of Chicago closed its teaching schools for substituting low-quality programs of left-wing activism for rigorous academics. In both cases, the administrator made a wise decision to terminate these programs.
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Finally, every university has a mission and a corresponding obligation to honor it. The New College of Florida’s mission is to restore classical liberal education and revive the search for transcendental truth. This mission is ultimately at odds with the fields of gender studies and queer theory, which clearly oppose classical notions of what is true and what is good. , and beautiful. Such postmodern, anti-normative thinking may be welcomed by other universities, but it is not a requirement of the university itself.
The new college board’s decision to begin terminating the university’s gender studies program sets a new historical precedent. Academic decline is inevitable. Citizen-minded leaders can take power from the people and use laws, appointments, and board governance to redirect public universities away from left-wing nihilism and back toward higher principles. .
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