“New College is a flashpoint for what’s going on. We’re a cautionary tale,” New College of Florida gender studies director Amy Reid told Ms.
In January of 2023, New College of Florida in Sarasota was the state’s only public liberal honors arts college, with a motto of “educating free thinkers, risk takers and trailblazers.” But a right-wing takeover has led to a mass exodus of professors and students and violations of academic freedom and potentially state laws.
The takeover of New College of Florida began on Jan. 6, 2023, when Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new board members to vacant positions on the 13-member governing board of trustees of New College. The new members were right-wing activists in culture wars over education. Most had no connections to the college or even to the state of Florida.
One was Christopher Rufo, best known as the architect of the anti-“critical race theory” movement.
Another was Matthew Spalding, a dean at Hillsdale College, a private Christian college in Michigan known for its religious conservatism. On the day of the takeover, DeSantis’ chief of staff expressed “hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”
DeSantis also appointed Charles Kesler, a member of the Claremont Institute who helped to build Trump’s 1776 Commission, and Ryan T. Anderson, president of the right-wing think tank Ethics & Public Policy Center. All had ties to right-wing think tanks and policy organizations, such as The Manhattan Institute and The Heritage Foundation.
On Jan. 31 of that year, the New College of Florida board of trustees voted to terminate president Patricia Okker—the first female president of the college—and soon after appointed a new interim president, former Florida cducation commissioner Richard Corcoran, an advocate of vouchers and charter schools.
In response, professors left New College in droves. Thirty-six professors—one-third of the faculty—left post-takeover. In April 2023, the board of trustees denied tenure to all five applicants with no explanation. In 2024, another 12 professors left the college.
Many students left as well. By September 2023, over three dozen students moved to Massachusetts-based Hampshire College, which offered transfer admission to New College students in good standing. More followed in the spring. (New College has less than 700 students enrolled, the smallest student population in the state university system of Florida.)
Undeterred, the new leadership imposed radical changes to campus, voting to eliminate the diversity, equity and inclusion office and the gender studies program. By May of 2023, the gender-neutral restroom signs were ripped down and murals celebrating diversity painted over. New College began recruiting athletes for newly-formed sports teams and sent out a survey proposing possible new mascots, including on the list “The Rebels” and “Conquistadors.” The school lowered its admission standards: The new admits had significantly lower average GPA and standardized test scores than previous first-years. Incoming athletes were assigned to newer dorms, while returning students were assigned to dorms that had serious mold problems. Eventually, most of the returning students were housed in off-campus hotels. In August of 2023, Inside Higher Education summed up the situation in an article titled, “Chaos at New College of Florida.”
At the same time, New College received $2 million from the Florida legislature to fund the New College Freedom Institute to supposedly fight back against a “tremendous cancel culture” at colleges and universities. In June 2024, the college hosted a symposium titled “Reversing the Ideological Capture of Universities and Institutions” with Trump COVID adviser Scott Atlas, who advocated the disastrous “herd immunity” approach to the pandemic.
With Project 2025 promising to do to higher education across the country what DeSantis has done to New College of Florida, Ms. sat down with New College professor Amy Reid to discuss how the college has changed since the takeover, and how faculty are fighting back.
Reid joined the faculty at New College as a French professor in 1995 and helped develop the gender studies program at the college. After the takeover, her peers elected her chair of the faculty, making her a member of the board of trustees.
Carrie Baker: What was New College like before the takeover?
Amy Reid: Because of the pandemic, like many other small liberal arts colleges, we were in a very weakened state, unprepared for what happened on January 6, 2023. We were facing real constraints in terms of our budget, and we were facing an increasingly hostile environment from the state.
But we also had some reason for optimism. We had just hired Pat Okker as our new president, and she seemed to be bringing some savvy about both internal and external relations that we needed. And she understood and was committed to the liberal arts in a way that was really important and encouraging to faculty and students.
Baker: What led to the takeover?
Reid: A number of things had happened on a statewide level even before the takeover, like a tightening noose for higher education in the state of Florida.
In 2021, the legislature passed House Bill 233, the “viewpoint protection” bill, which allowed students to record faculty surreptitiously if they wanted to file a complaint against you. We understood this as a way of breaking the bond of trust that’s necessary for education.
Baker: How did this law affect your teaching?
Reid: We got guidance from the union about reminding students that while they’re allowed to record lectures, they’re not allowed to record their fellow students or discussions. We were advised that if our class was discussion-based, which most of our classes are, to put on the syllabus that it was a discussion-based class and so could not be recorded. The union sent us boiler-plate language.
Higher education should not just be funneling people towards a narrow career goal, but about expanding your horizons, taking off your blinders.
Amy Reid
Baker: What other laws did they pass that impacted New College?
Reid: In 2022, they passed the Stop WOKE and Don’t Say Gay Acts. Don’t Say Gay focuses primarily on K-12, but Stop WOKE has provisions that involved employment, education, K-12 and higher education. The law bans employers from having diversity training and limits discussions of divisive topics.
Then in 2023, they passed House Bill 1521, which is the trans bathroom ban, and Senate Bill 266, which prohibits all use of state funds for DEI or to “promote activism” in higher education. At that point, members of our new board of trustees argued publicly that the field gender studies was not academic but activist. We started to see how the legislators and the forces represented on our board of trustees were working in concert.
Senate Bill 266, which was signed into law on the NCF campus in May 2023, specifically prohibits teaching theories that “systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.” The law also requires that humanities courses in general education curricula across the state include the Western canon. My specific field of expertise is in African and Francophone literatures. So that meant, in one fell swoop, that my classes that had always been part of our general education curriculum could no longer be, unless I was going to start adding in the Western canon to courses on African or Caribbean literature. My class on post-colonial African literature could include several Nobel winners and Booker Prize winners, really important authors, and yet it wouldn’t count.
They also took away a lot of tenure protections, including the right to workplace arbitration for faculty, so if you’re denied tenure, the only person you can appeal that decision to is the person who denied you tenure in the first place: the president of the institution. You can’t have an outside person consider the case. They’re eviscerating any sort of employment rights for faculty. The state has even gone so far as to argue in its defense of “Stop WOKE” that faculty have no rights to free speech, but are limited to “government speech”—meaning ideas endorsed by the state. The implications of this are dystopian.
Baker: How did faculty respond to these changes?
Reid: Already in 2022, it started to feel like a crisis was looming, so we planned a gender studies faculty retreat for January 2023. Then I went to the National Women’s Studies Association conference in November of 2023 and there was a panel talking about issues in Florida with Diane Price Herndl from USF, Nikki Morse from FAU and others. That was the moment when I realized what we needed to address head-on the issues of censorship coming from the state. I reached out to my colleagues back home and our faculty union. We planned a day-long workshop to talk about what it means to be teaching about race and gender in Florida now. We had scheduled it for the third week in January, and then January 6 happened, and so our day-long workshop was all the more important because we were right then at a crisis moment. About a third of New College faculty—from Humanities, Social and Natural Sciences—took part in the workshop.
Baker: Was DeSantis’ Jan. 6 announcement a surprise?
Reid: For most of us, yes, it was totally out of the blue, but I think the administration had some heads-up about it.
Baker: Are board members usually political appointees with no affiliation to the college or is it normally done in consultation with the college administration or faculty?
Reid: The boards of trustees for all the universities were remade a number of years ago to include more state-chosen nominees. They are approved by the state legislature.
Baker: Were the six that were appointed different from previous appointments in their lack of connection to the college or to the field of education?
Reid: Yes, because they were primarily not from Florida. Most have no connection to New College, and several have no academic experience. Christopher Rufo just a political operative. Spaulding and Bauerlein are in the right-wing academic sphere. Bauerlein is a retired professor from Emory. Spaulding is part of Hillsdale College. And they brought in Ryan Anderson, who’s at The Heritage Foundation. They had Eddie Speir, who was a local guy, but with views so extreme the legislature wouldn’t even approve his nomination. They had one New College alum, Debra Jenks, who they brought in to be the chair. But most of the new board members had no connection to New College. Speir and Jenks were the only two who had Florida residency.
Chris Rufo was very clear that students and faculty who didn’t like this could leave, could ‘self-select out.’
Amy Reid
Baker: What changes happened when these people joined the board?
Reid: They immediately fired the president. Then they announced that Richard Corcoran would be the new interim president. News of his appointment was circulated before the board met, which raised questions about a possible violation of Florida Sunshine Laws. As commissioner of education, Corcoran was responsible for increasing the government support of private schools and voucher programs across the state. He has a lot of connections to the charter school movement.
Baker: What did they do after they appointed Corcoran?
Reid: They shut down our DEI office. They fired Yoleidy Rosario-Hernandez, a queer person of color who directed the office. Chris Rufo was very clear that students and faculty who didn’t like this could leave, could “self-select out.” They proceeded to fire a number of other people, targeting women and people of color, although not exclusively, replacing professionals with people with political connections, often with very little expertise or experience in higher education. They announced that they were going to get rid of the gender studies program. They closed down the Pride dorm and threw out the books from the Pride library.
To control faculty, they halted the tenure process. There were seven people who had been approved through all levels of tenure review except for a final vote by the board of trustees. They shut that down. Corcoran convinced two of the seven people approved for tenure to withdraw their candidacies, and the five people who went up for tenure were all summarily denied. That really signaled to faculty that we were not going to be in charge. Corcoran also shut down all discretionary spending.
Baker: How did you get a seat on the board of trustees?
Reid: At the meeting where they denied faculty tenure, the faculty chair Matt Lepinski resigned from the board of trustees and quit the college. I was elected to fill his seat. Because of my position as the head of gender studies and as a tenured faculty member, I had been speaking out on behalf of the faculty since January. I was also part of a group of faculty members who were named to an emergency coordinating committee for the union so that we could respond to everything that was happening on campus. When Matt Lepinski stepped down, different people asked me to run to be chair of the faculty. So, in June of 2023, I joined the board of trustees.
Baker: So they were trying to get rid of gender studies, but then the gender studies director ends up on the board of trustees. They were probably not happy about that!
Reid: No. They were not.
Baker: What has it been like at board meetings with those new members?
Reid: It’s been awful. I’m regularly dismissed. When it’s on zoom, I have my mic cut off. I’ve been called “petty and performative” and in one meeting, Christopher Rufo told me to “just shut up.” I consistently read the budgets and raise serious questions about the financial oversight of this school. They don’t want that. The childish insults they lob at me are unbelievable.
Baker: Are they monitoring your syllabi?
Reid: For any course that’s part of the general education curriculum, the state requires that you submit your syllabus and it becomes part of a publicly searchable database for five years. This is part of the chilling environment that was in place before. There were a lot of interim steps about textbook review, and turning in your syllabi, that were making Florida a more hostile place to teach, creating a chilling environment for faculty and students. The state’s newest requirement is that all syllabi be searched for terms including “Israel,” “Palestine” and “Judaism,” purportedly to identify antisemitism—it’s really a witch hunt.
I stayed out of commitment to this place and its students.
Amy Reid
Baker: Are there other things creating a chilling environment?
Reid: They’ve searched people’s emails. There’s been censorship of emails on campus. That’s been a big issue. After the trans bathroom ban passed in 2023, the administration started renaming all of our unisex bathrooms on campus. If the sign said gender-neutral bathroom, it was taken down. We had a multi-stall bathroom with a sign indicating it was open for everybody, and that sign was taken down. In some places, they put up signs that said men and women. In other places, there’s still just torn plaster where the signs used to be. That is visible and hostile defacing of our campus.
Then a college official sent out a memo to everybody—faculty, students and staff—explaining the trans bathroom ban and that people had to use the bathroom that corresponds to your birth certificate and that if you are asked to leave a bathroom and you do not, then you are subject to punishment under the student code. But it even went further, suggesting that faculty should be policing the bathrooms.
Three of us from faculty leadership wrote a response saying the law does not require anybody to enforce this law, that there was no faculty bathroom patrol. We sent our memo to everybody who’d gotten the initial memo—faculty, students and staff—but it only went out to faculty. Our email was blocked from going to students and staff. I had students and staff circulate it on the side for us, but the administration never let our message go to the whole campus community. And they never responded to our requests that they clarify that there is no legal requirement that faculty patrol the bathrooms and that they circulate a map showing where gender-neutral bathrooms are on campus.
Baker: How many faculty members left after the takeover?
Reid: Out of roughly 100 faculty members, over 30 left the college in 2023, including people who retired, took early retirement, sought other employment, walked away, or were visiting and not renewed. With the exception of a couple of retirees, those were all people we had expected to be teaching the next year. My three closest colleagues all left. Nick Clarkson, who is the only gender studies professor, resigned very publicly. Ms. published his letter of resignation a year ago. Another 12 of us are leaving this year.
Baker: Why did you stay?
Reid: I stayed out of commitment to this place and its students. Then I took the job as faculty chair, which basically meant a commitment to doing that. I worked as hard as I could. For the past year and a half, I’ve been working on our campus, on the board of trustees, and in statewide organizations to support really high-quality public education, the principles of academic freedom and the values of DEI.
Last spring, I started looking for other employment because I realized I could not stay. I found a job with PEN America, where I’ll be working with the Freedom to Learn team, which allows me to continue the work that I’ve been doing for the past year and a half at New College in a broader frame. I hope that I can take the hard-fought lessons I’ve learned over the past years to help forestall these broad attacks on higher education and public education across the country.
Baker: How do you define academic freedom?
Reid: Academic freedom is about ensuring that faculty can teach and that students become active and engaged learners, active and engaged citizens for their lifetime. Higher education should not just be funneling people towards a narrow career goal, but about expanding your horizons, taking off your blinders.
Baker: Do you think New College is becoming more vocational and less about a broad liberal arts education that teaches them to think and engage different perspectives?
Reid: Across the state of Florida, the legislature and the board of governors are encouraging education for jobs, not education as a value in and of itself. Florida has had, until recently, one of the best state systems for higher education. We’ve actually been ranked first in the country for a couple of years. I think that’s going to be shifting, unfortunately.
Baker: Is it harder to hire good faculty now?
Reid: These statewide initiatives are driving away faculty and students. The hiring process has become politicized. A lot of people do not and will not apply to jobs in Florida anymore. Then you add onto that certain litmus tests that seem to be applied. New College faculty have worked really hard for this past year to fill faculty vacancies in the most ethical way possible, but some hiring decisions seem to reflect an ideological agenda. For example, the hiring of Bruce Gilley, who seems to think that his job description includes attacking the New College faculty, as a presidential scholar. How bizarre that President Corcoran offered him a position when Gilley writes pieces in the conservative blogosphere insulting New College faculty.
Baker: What has been the impact of the takeover on students?
Reid: You can imagine what it means when a third of the faculty leave. Students are unable to complete their areas of concentration and senior theses. We’ve had significant departures in fields ranging from biology, chemistry and physics to sociology, political science, psychology, literature and gender studies.
Baker: Are students leaving too?
Reid: We lost a lot of students. We’ve had a large queer presence on campus and now students have to think twice about even using the bathroom. The new administration has recruited large incoming classes of primarily athletes. They’re people who are coming here to play sports rather than to study, and that has negative consequences for the academic program. Last year we had over 70 baseball players on campus. The University of Florida has about half that number on their baseball roster. This year, they’ve recruited at least 75 foreign athletes, including upwards of 30 soccer players from Brazil—that’s going to be a big team. Some of the students are transferring from other religious colleges. Most of the coaches that they’ve hired have worked at places like Bob Jones University and Liberty University.
Last year, when we had problems with the dorms, the administration chose to handle the problems in ways that made it clear that our continuing students were not wanted. They kicked almost all the returning students into off-campus hotels. These are students who’d already received on-campus housing assignments, but they were put in hotels and the first-year athletes were put into the dorms that had traditionally been for upper-class students. This year, they’ve actually put up a whole bunch of temporary dormitories that look like storage containers on the soft-ball field!
Baker: Are there more male students on campus now?
Reid: While we do not know what the ratio of male to female students is for the incoming class, last year was the first time in all my years at NCF that we had a majority male incoming class and, as a result, a majority of male students on campus. I expect that to be an increasing trend this year, when most of the incoming class is comprised of athletic recruits. In the past, like most liberal arts colleges, we’d had a majority of female-identified students—between 65 and 69 percent in recent years, which is in line with other similar schools.
Parallel to that the administration just sent us a booklet with profiles of the new faculty. Of the 45 listed, I think seven are female. So at least 80 percent are male, maybe more. That’s stunning.
Baker: Are you seeing religious events and prayers on campus?
Reid: Last spring, former trustee Eddie Speir had a mass baptism of students on our campus and posted a video about it. Our athletic director talks very explicitly about his religious mission. They’ve hired two different companies to run the on-campus coffee shop that had previously been run by students—both were religiously affiliated. There were complaints about them passing out cups with religious messages on them and playing videos of religious music. When people have state contracts that are subsidizing them to run a coffee shop, that’s a misuse of state funds.
Baker: Do you have any hope for New College?
Reid: It’s hard to know what’s going to happen. This coming year is going to tough. We may hit a tipping point for New College this year, but there are still faculty who are staying, who are incredibly dedicated and working really hard to support our students and to continue to provide a valuable educational experience for the students here. That gives me hope.
Baker: How are you holding up?
Reid: Since the takeover, it’s felt like fighting the hydra because as you focus on one battle, there’s always eight other arms coming around. So I look to Molly Ivins for encouragement: “Keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it.”
Ms. Classroom wants to hear from educators and students being impacted by legislation attacking public education, higher education, gender, race and sexuality studies, activism and social justice in education, and diversity, equity and inclusion programs for our series, ‘Banned! Voices from the Classroom.’ Submit pitches and/or op-eds and reflections (between 500-800 words) to Ms. contributing editor Aviva Dove-Viebahn at adove-viebahn@msmagazine.com. Posts will be accepted on a rolling basis.
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