Why Ron DeSantis wants to trample the dreams of about 700 college kids on his White House path

As William Lopez was finishing high school as an honors student in the Gulf Coast resort city of Naples, Fla., with future dreams of becoming a psychiatrist, he didn’t plan on attending college in his increasingly conservative home state, where higher education has been embroiled in bitter “culture wars” since the GOP’s Ron DeSantis became governor in 2019.

Not until he decided to visit the sun-soaked bayside campus of New College of Florida, a small, one-of-a-kind, publicly funded liberal-arts college in Sarasota, two hours north of his hometown.

“I fell in love with the place,” Lopez told me by phone this week — not so much for its postcard-perfect setting, but rather the warm vibe he picked up as soon as he set foot on the 144-acre campus. He remembers “just the entire sense of community” — and what he learned about the college’s unique curriculum that allows its more than 700 students (according to its website) to carve out their own degree path without grade pressure.

Now midway through his freshman year, Lopez has found New College — his bond with highly motivated classmates who invariably wave as he gives campus tours to prospective students, its student life that’s known as a safe haven for a large LGBTQ community — everything he hoped for that day. At least right up to the moment last week when he read in an online campus forum that DeSantis and his allies are installing a new board of right-wing trustees with plans to immediately turn New College upside down, transforming it into a bastion of conservative learning.

“I thought it was some kind of joke,” Lopez first thought of the news — but the White House-ambitious DeSantis is deadly serious about blowing up New College to boost his new political mantra that “Florida is where ‘woke’ goes to die.”

Led by trustee-appointee Christopher Rufo, who lives 3,000 miles away in Washington state but is famous for making “critical race theory” a Fox News buzzword of the far right, DeSantis’ academic hit squad ambitiously hopes before the end of the 2022-23 school year to implode everything that made smart young people come to New College. They would replace its free-spirited curriculum with one modeled after the private Christianity-and-Reaganism-soaked Hillsdale College, purge the diversity and equity focus that students celebrate, and curb classroom discussions about race, gender, or sexuality.

The looming fight for the soul of this tiny Florida college is important because it speaks volumes about where the battle for America is headed between now and November 2024, when DeSantis hopes to stand as the Republican nominee for president. It’s not just that the war over New College spotlights how higher education — who goes, who pays, and what our young people learn there — has become the front line in the politics of a new American antebellum. Just as important, the dictatorial style with which DeSantis and his allies are imposing a entire board of right-wing ideologues upon New College again reveals the cruelty-is-the-point brand of authoritarianism he would bring to Washington — not caring about the humanity trampled along the way.

DeSantis and his cronies didn’t think twice about dumping 50 desperate, confused, and intentionally lied-to legal asylum seekers from Venezuela on a dark, chilly runway on Martha’s Vineyard, just to become the toast of Fox News for “owning the libs” on immigration. Then he dispatched cops with handcuffs to drag away 20 mostly Black Florida residents on trumped-up voter fraud charges — after government officials had allowed these folks to register — to make himself look bigger to the Big Lie crowd.

In pulling out the rug on these more than 700 young people who’ve spent — or borrowed — thousands of dollars so far to get their dream liberal-arts education, Team DeSantis is reaching for a new low for cable-news talking points over human empathy. His hatchet man Rufo isn’t even pretending to care about the lives of these brilliant kids who worked so hard to get to Sarasota and flourish there, telling the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg this week that “we’d be happy to work with them to help them find something that suits them better.”

It’s important to step back and understand why this is happening. Conservatives were rattled by the size and power of the Blacks Lives Matter marches that occurred in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 police murder — especially the millions of young people who protested, even in small towns that had voted for Donald Trump. The previously unknown Rufo became a right-wing superstar by turning up on Fox News to blame anti-racism education in schools for what happened, and by co-opting and demonizing a phrase to describe it: critical race theory. It became the battle cry of a new war over what kids are taught and what books they can read.

In DeSantis’ Florida, Rufo and his acolytes have found what the writer David Pepper would call a “laboratory for autocracy” to implement his idea — that changing the classroom can nip progressive ideas in the bud. The governor’s move against New College is just the culmination of a much bigger crusade: new laws to ban classroom discussions of racism or LGBTQ issues from universities down to kindergarten, state monitoring of the political climate on campus, and right-wing politicization of college governance, tenure, and accreditation — all intended to place a bitter chill on academic freedom. Call it what it is: a new McCarthyism.

» READ MORE: Campus ‘Red Scare’ takes Florida back to the ’50s | Will Bunch Newsletter

Not surprisingly, DeSantis’ classroom crackdown keeps bumping up against thorny roadblocks like the First Amendment. Federal judges have blocked some initiatives like a so-called “anti-woke” law meant to bar professors from discussing race. So now we get the governor’s hostile takeover of New College’s with trustees who want, in Rufo’s words, “an alternative for conservative families in the state of Florida to say there is a public university that reflects your values.”

It’s something of a fluke that New College has survived to become a punching bag for these 21st century authoritarians. It was opened in 1960 as a private institution with support from the progressive United Church of Christ, and as an outpost of a post-World War II faith in college to promote free inquiry, critical thinking, and a liberal education around diverse subjects. It’s lasted into a new millennium of careerism and student debt through a combination of good luck, political leaders who beginning in the 1970s helped it become a unique kind of state-run honors college, and its revolutionary academic program that remains a magnet for top high-school grads.

“One of the main drawing points for students is that academic flexibility,” Rocío Ramírez Castro, a fourth-year student and Puerto Rico native who grew up in central Florida, now nearing her degree in anthropology and Spanish, told me. Like Lopez, she praised the school’s system of giving narrative evaluations instead of letter grades and the ability for students to design their own courses for their specific interests. Those who apply to New College love that they have a little more say and a little more autonomy in what they are going to be studying,” she told me.

Ramírez Castro described an environment at New College that is embraced by its students — and also lauded by outsiders like the Princeton Review which ranks it third best among America’s public colleges and universities for “making a difference.” That is exactly what makes the school such an inviting target for culture-war bomb throwers like Rufo and DeSantis. Diversity issues — and, yes, the academic idea of “critical race theory” — are threaded in many classes. Programs like that right-wing bogeyman, gender studies, are strong. LGBTQ student life is flourishing.

“We have a thriving queer community, to the point where the majority of our campus is a queer community,” Ramírez Castro told me. A popular LGBTQ club called Queery has helped to cement a culture that is embracing of non-binary or transgender students in a state where politics is increasingly driven by homophobia on the right.

It’s hard to imagine what New College would look like a year from now with an ultra-conservative regime and academic blueprint, or — just as important — whether this scheme can be pulled off, as opposition from the current students and the mostly tenured faculty intensifies. The outcome may not matter as much to DeSantis as the fight to get there, and the headlines that his war on “wokeism” will generate as the 2024 campaign heats up. However this plays out, the governor has already reached a new depth of hypocrisy by unveiling his program under a banner reading “Freedom From Indoctrination” — a most Orwellian description of his vision to crimp some of the best minds of a new generation.

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter