They're Killing New College Because They Can

The American right always has some fake intellectual to give cover to the destructive, hateful things it believes. They always find someone who gives the racist or xenophobic or homophobic fuckery an imprimatur of rationality. And then everyone on the right will celebrate that fake intellectual and his (and it's almost always "his") popularity will soar to the point that even those not swimming in the political effluvia we are all damned to drown in will come to believe what the fake intellectual is saying. Then the fake shit the fake intellectual says will become seen as a valid point of view instead of utter garbage foisted on us by a bulldozer shoving bullshit from one place to another without burying it. For years, for instance, we have had to hear from the bare handful of "scientists" who claim climate change isn't "real" when the overwhelming, peer-reviewed, and incredibly well-researched truth is...well, fuck, just watch the Weather Channel for ten minutes. 

Christopher Rufo is another one of those conservative snake oil hawkers gathering up the rubes to watch his snappy patter. He's a fascist ideologue who doesn't actually know shit about the topics he writes about, but because his perspective aids and abets what the savages in the GOP want to do to public education, they cheer him as authentic when he's fake. And dumb. Just so fucking dumb. He's never worked at a college or university until Florida governor and soon-to-be ex-presidential candidate Ron DeSantis appointed him to the board of trustees of New College in Sarasota. Yet he's treated as an expert on the purpose and function of higher education. It's not just that he opposes majors and courses that have been around for decades, like gender studies, queer studies, and African American studies (unless taught in an anodyne, useless way). That's typical of anti-progressive education criticism. No, it's what he believes is the place and function of a public university in the larger governmental ecosystem that makes him more dangerous than your average cranky dumbass screaming about critical race theory (prompted mostly by Rufo): the university is merely an extension of government and thus subject to total government control, First Amendment be damned.

Here's what Rufo said recently on Twixter: "Public universities are not a 'free marketplace of ideas'; they are a government-run cartel with control over 75 percent of the higher education market. They are governed by the laws of the republic, not the laws of supply and demand. Ultimately, the voters decide. Left-wing ideologues spent the past fifty years hijacking the public universities and transforming them into vehicles of partisan activism, not centers of scholarship and knowledge. They want politics? Let them have politics. There is no constitutional right to gender studies departments in public universities. The public gets to decide the mission and priorities of the public institutions—otherwise, it's bureaucratic tyranny."

Lemme just give you the biggest idiocies in this. First, as with most things, universities are funded by many sources, not just the "government." Everything is governed by "the laws of the republic," even capitalism. The "public" when it comes to "public universities" includes the students, virtually all of whom are of voting age, and their say matters, too. And as far as a "free marketplace of ideas," yeah, that's the purpose of a university. Otherwise, it's just a pure propaganda outlet. What is a greater demonstration of a dedication to free speech than to let adults teach and learn ideas that might challenge political dogma? No one is forcing them post-college to have to believe what they learned in any of their courses.

The New College of Florida is a test case for Rufo and his acolytes, as well as the anti-progressive forces who believe that most every university is just a training ground for communist takeover of the United States, a notion that's so fucking wrongheaded, considering half of students major in Business, Health, Engineering, Biology, and Computer/Information Science, that it should be laughed out of the discourse. The New College trustees appointed by future Senate candidate DeSantis were more or less tasked with destroying a small liberal arts college just to show they could, as a warning to every other institution. They fired the president and cut the office of diversity, equity, and inclusion. They got rid of gender-neutral signs on bathrooms. They put Bible verses on coffee cups at the school cafeteria. They shut the Pride dorm and eliminated a learning community for African studies. They have voted to eliminate gender studies as a department and major. They changed commencement, where students used to dress festively and extravagantly, forcing graduates to wear caps and gowns, and made Dr. Scott Atlas, a crackpot adviser to President Trump, the speaker. The students held an alternate graduation as a protest at the Sarasota Museum of Art. 

All these things, big and small, are just the start. They hired a new baseball coach and recruited athletes for a tiny school that doesn't even have a field, literally dumbing down the college to do it. They kicked seniors out of the best dorms to make rooms for athletes. Some students were forced to live in a hotel by the airport with a shitty shuttle schedule because it's an hour's walk from campus. They are, they promise, just getting started in tearing down a well-ranked college and remaking it in their image. A third of the faculty just fuckin' quit, leaving a ton of classes canceled, but leaving a ton of spots for the "right" kind of faculty to be hired. 

Rufo himself hasn't been coy about his goal. He wants to turn public universities into MAGA-humping boot camps for future fascists of America. And he's upset that New College had more women than men, saying it was a "social justice ghetto." By bringing in male athletes, Rufo says he wants to balance things sex-wise because it's good for the culture of the college. If your head just exploded as you screamed, "That's what affirmative action says, too, and you fuckers got that shitcanned!" well, you're joining me in that cry of frustration. 

If these conservatives were actually concerned with the free exchange of ideas, they could have endowed chairs for professors with their point of view. They could have established a Department of Conservative Studies or some such shit. They could have seen how that does. But, see, despite what Rufo tweeted up above there, supply and demand do matter. If a major has no students in it, it will cease existing. Colleges make those decisions all the time. But they're not after competing with progressive and liberal approaches to the, you know, liberal arts. They're not after teaching people to think critically about the world around them and about their leaders. They're after strict adherence to a Christian nationalist perspective on the world. Diversity is just another word for "Satan." 

But what do I know. I've only been a professor for roughly 30 years at public universities. Or maybe I might have more fucking insight than a greedy, attention-hungry dilettante with delusions of intellect.