Rufo met with students and faculty on the New College campus on Wednesday to discuss his plans.
Sarasota Fla. — Christopher Rufo had a message Wednesday for the students and staff of New College of Florida: the small, public liberal arts school on the state’s Gulf Coast is in a crisis.
The student body is shrinking, not growing. The cost for a degree dwarfs that of other state schools. The school will “accept more or less anyone who applies,” but most of the students who are accepted go elsewhere, Rufo said. The school is last in most of the state’s performance metrics, including for the employment rate and wage levels of graduates.
And, Rufo said, New College has a culture problem. It has become a far-left echo chamber where students with dissenting opinions or disfavored religious beliefs are ostracized.
Florida lawmakers have seriously considered dissolving the college, Rufo said.
“I’m going to level with you,” Rufo said. “We’re all here for a serious problem.”
Rufo, a filmmaker, pugilistic conservative activist, and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is one of six new members of the New College board of trustees who were appointed earlier this month by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Those new members have been tasked with reorienting the politically left-wing school as a classical liberal arts college in the mold of Hillsdale College, a private, conservative school in southern Michigan.
The move has been controversial on campus, where some students and staff have expressed concerns that DeSantis and his new appointees are trying to force their ideology on the school for political purposes.
On Wednesday, Rufo and Eddie Speir, the founder of a private Christian school nearby and another DeSantis appointee, held meetings with the college’s students, instructors, and staff in an effort to explain their mission and to take questions. More than 100 people attended the morning session for staff. A similar number of people attended an afternoon meeting for students.
Both crowds appeared generally skeptical – if not reflexively opposed – to the visions of Rufo and Speir, though both meetings were generally civil. People snickered with Speir suggested that wokeness is a kind of religion. When one staff member disputed Rufo’s data, which he said is from the state, Rufo replied: “I can’t see what you’re saying behind your mask, but you’re not right.” Students questioned their credentials to serve on the board, and their independence from DeSantis. “I’ve never met Governor DeSantis. There are no strings attached,” Speir said.
Rufo started both meetings with the “bad news.” The cost to the state for each degree handed out at New College is nearly $200,000, compared to about $37,000 at Florida State University, according to his data. Nearly half of New College graduates don’t have jobs, or aren’t attending graduate school, within a year of leaving the school, he said, and the school’s median wage for students a year out from graduation is only about $32,000 – last among Florida state colleges and universities. More than one in five students drop out after the first year. And instead of growing enrollment from about 800 students to 1,200, as the school promised the state in 2018, the number of students declined to fewer than 700, Rufo said.
The school also has a culture problem, Rufo said. There is a “stifling orthodoxy” on campus, and Christian students have been bullied and harassed for their beliefs, he said. According to the college’s consultants, three terms that best describe New College are “politically correct,” “druggies,” and “wierdos,” Rufo told staff. “The college is saying this,” he said. “I think that is not a great brand for the college.”
Rufo and Speir said their mission is to make New College a more tolerant place for dissenting opinions, and the kind of place where people with sharply opposing viewpoints can feel safe debating civilly. They assured attendees that their intent is not to replace one “stifling orthodoxy” with another. Rufo said he wants a “wider lane” for discourse.
“My goal is not to say let’s replace the left-wing orthodoxy with a right-wing orthodoxy,” he said. “My goal is to say, let’s expand the bounds of public debate. Let’s have more people able to participate. Let’s have a wider variety of opinions that can be debated, and discussed and articulated, without fear of intimidation, without fear of bullying, without fear of threats of violence.”
Rufo has publicly called for a conservative transformation of higher education from within, and has previously offered a blueprint for how to do it. Rufo acknowledged on Wednesday that he is not a traditional trustee, but is rather a “drastic soluton to a crisis.”
I'm proud to announce that Gov. 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. pic.twitter.com/wu7OKRhzhM
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 6, 2023
DeSantis’s staff have also been upfront about the effort to change the school’s direction.
James Uthmeier, DeSantis’s chief of staff, has said that “it is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”
Bryan Griffith, DeSantis’s press secretary, told National Review earlier this month: “As Governor DeSantis stated in his second inaugural speech: ‘We must ensure that our institutions of higher learning are focused on academic excellence and the pursuit of truth.’ Starting today, the ship is turning around. New College of Florida, under the governor’s new appointees, will be refocused on its founding mission of providing a world-class quality education with an exceptional focus on the classics.”
New College of Florida was founded as a private college in 1960. In 1975, it became part of Florida’s state university system as part of the University of South Florida. In 2001, New College split from USF and became the eleventh independent member of the university system. The school was designated by state lawmakers as the “Honors College for the State of Florida.”
On its website, New College of Florida identifies itself as a “community of free thinkers, risk takers and trailblazers,” and a school where “your professors know you by name.”
But critics say that over the years New College has drifted far to the ideological left.
Many of the questions for Rufo and Speir were not explicitly political or ideological, but focused more on things like funding for programs, campus safety, improving buildings and facilities, and their interest in collaborating with faculty. One student suggested that Rufo and Speir aren’t really supportive of free speech, but instead intend to suppress left-wing viewpoints. Others accused them of being anti-science and supporting biased history.
One student questioned if they simply intended to implement the Hillsdale model at New College, but both Rufo and Speir said no. “Let’s learn from what they’re doing,” said Rufo, who noted that he’s taught at the school. He said his intention is to build on New College’s founding vision, which embrace learning in the classical tradition, and was rooted in the traditions of Oxford and the University of Edinburgh. “Ultimately New College has to be New College,” he said.
Of the two trustees, Rufo came across as the more polished, deliberate, and moderate. There is much to admire about what makes New School unique, he said. At one point, he praised the school’s STEM-focused staff members as “rock stars.”
Speir appeared to talk more off the cuff, and at times seemed to be trying to intentionally trigger the largely liberal crowd with his rejection of wokeness – he quoted DeSantis that Florida is the state where “woke goes to die” — his expressions of his religious faith, his questioning of the safety of Covid-19 vaccines, his view that freedom can’t be traded for security, and his insistence that “we’re not going to be shouted down.”
While the efforts to change the direction of the school have been controversial, there were no real protests on Wednesday. Some staff brought signs reading “Support Educational Freedom,” but for the most part they were not displayed during the meetings. One student told reporters that students were on their best behavior to avoid showing up on Fox News or on Libs of Tik Tok, but that there is a plan to protest the board of trustees meeting next week.
Wednesday’s event apparently almost came close to getting shut down after a death threat against Speir was allegedly discovered in the school’s email system. Speir and Rufo said school leaders wanted to cancel the event, but they declined, saying that giving in and letting one person shut down their conversations would be against what they stand for. A large number of police officers were on hand for the event, and there was a Sarasota police command post set up in a nearby theater parking lot.
Speir said that the school has not been particularly welcoming to him so far. He received some guffaws when he said he was “literally risking my life to be here.” But, he added, “I think that we have a lot more in common than we realize.”
Both Rufo and Speir engaged with students and staff one-on-one at the end of the two events.
Karen Stack, who lives nearby and whose son is a New College grad, attended Wednesday’s event with a homemade sign that read “Stop the War on Public Education.” She said she is no fan of DeSantis or the efforts he had made to change the direction of the state’s schools.
“He’s throwing red meat at a very conservative right-wing crowd, and he needs them because I suspect he is probably going to announce his run for the presidency,” she said before the morning session. “And these are certain stepping stones to get him there.”
A political science student who spoke with National Review, but who declined to give his name, said that Rufo and Speir are at odds with “everything that our institution really stands for,” claiming they are anti-science and not supportive of some of the school’s more controversial programs. He said he has no doubt that they will try to force a new ideology on the school. “Ron DeSantis wouldn’t have put these six new trustee members where they are now if it wasn’t for a larger part of the culture war,” the student said.
But not everyone who attended was combative with Rufo and Speir. Some said they appreciated the engagement, and other said they came away somewhat reassured. Rufo praised theater professor Diego Villada, who said that after reading about Rufo and Speir in the media, he assumed they would be crazy. But he said he was surprised at their openness, and expressed willingness to engage, and to make the school better.
“I thought the trustees spoke from the heart,” Villada told National Review after the event. “I do not agree with everything that they have said. And I also don’t think they’ve been given the time to find out the truth about who we are. Because they just got here.”
He said he is “cautiously optimistic,” but also recognizes that concerns that some minority students and LGBTQ student have are real. “I do not feel that these people are here to destroy the college,” he said. “I just feel like they have a fundamentally different view of what is appropriate, and what is useful, and what is the future of the college.”
History professor David Harvey said he also came away from the meeting somewhat reassured. Many of the problems with New College that Rufo laid out are real, he said. And while culture war issues have dominated the headlines, he said, “I think we also saw some areas of common ground, in sort of the belief in the ideals of a liberal arts education, a belief in civil discourse. And I think a shared recognition that we have some real problems we need to fix.”
Harvey said he doesn’t necessarily agree with Rufo’s description of the campus climate, but he said in a small, homogenous institution group think can set in. “I take them at their word, that they are interested, they want to create a space where people of different viewpoints can co-exist and debate civilly,” Harvey said. “That’s what I as a faculty member want, too.”