Republican politicians and right-wing activists are transforming one of the Sunshine State’s liberal arts schools into the “Hillsdale of the South,” a strategy that could be replicated across the country. As one New College alum tells Vanity Fair, “I weep for our nation if DeSantis wins a presidential bid.”

BY KATHRYN JOYCE

FEBRUARY 10, 2023

ILLUSTRATION BY KHOA TRAN. IMAGES FROM GETTY IMAGES. 

It took New College president Patricia Okker three attempts to deliver her farewell remarks. She kept being interrupted during last week’s board meeting in Sarasota, Florida, including once by a member of the school’s board of trustees, making a motion to terminate her without cause. Okker had been addressing the dozens of students, faculty, and parents who’d come to defend her record—and the hundreds more outside who weren’t admitted—saying she was sorry to disappoint them, but she couldn’t represent the mandate New College was being given through this “hostile takeover.” And she refused to support the claims of right-wing critics that the school had been indoctrinating its students. 

In the audience, supporters hugged one another and students left in tears. The trustees moved on, voting to replace Okker with interim president Richard Corcoran, Florida’s recently departed education commissioner who, in a 2021 speech at Michigan’s right-wing Hillsdale College, came close to calling for the collapse of the public school system through student attrition and said the political war “will be won in education.” The trustees replaced the board chair too, made plans to replace the general counsel, and instructed administrators to start preparing to dismantle the college’s diversity offices. 

It was hard to imagine a starker change in leadership for New College, the small, nontraditional honors college of the Florida public university system, known for its lack of grades, individualized majors, and leftist student body, but which has also been eyed skeptically for years by Florida’s conservative-dominated legislature for its low enrollment and graduation rates. But that was exactly the transformation intended when Governor Ron DeSantis last month appointed six new trustees to the school’s 13-member board, in hopes they would remake New College into a right-leaning “classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the south,” as his education commissioner Manny Diaz put it. 

After the Republican-controlled Board of Governors appointed a seventh trustee, the new majority represented a team uniquely qualified to carry out DeSantis’s scorched-earth, right-wing education wars. There was Manhattan Institute fellow and anti-critical race theory hype man Christopher Rufo, who has most recently turned his efforts to laying “siege” to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; one of Hillsdale’s graduate school deans, Matthew Spalding, who also helped lead Donald Trump’s short-lived 1776 Commission; Charles Kesler of the right-wing Claremont Institute, which spent the Trump years retconning an intellectual platform for the MAGA movement; a senior editor at a religious right magazine; the Catholic author of a book accused of “fram[ing] LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness”; and a private Christian school cofounder with a penchant for Covid disinformation. 

Following his appointment, Rufo immediately began speaking in martial terms: that conservatives were “recapturing higher education,” mounting a “landing team” to survey the school as well as a “hostage rescue operation” to “liberate” it from “cultural hostage takers.” Another new trustee, the private Christian academy cofounder Jason “Eddie” Speir, started a Substack to chronicle the transformation, sparking further panic in late January with a post proposing the board declare a financial emergency, firing the entire staff and rehiring only those professors aligned with the school’s new business model. (Speir also used his newsletter to propose banning USA Today affiliates from covering campus events over a reader comment suggesting people throw dog poop on the new trustees; to request the entire board be given his essay, “‘Florida, Where Woke Goes to Die’ What Does It Mean?” as “supporting material”; and to ask if any readers had a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order he could borrow.)

Students, faculty, and alumni from New College and far beyond decried the takeover as an attack on academic freedom with national implications. Multiple scholarly organizations, including the American Anthropological Association and the American Historical Association, denounced it as “an orchestrated attack on academic integrity.” The University of Florida graduate assistants’ union tweeted a message of “Solidarity with New College students, faculty, and staff as DeSantis appoints a card-carrying fascist to the presidency.” At a campus rally preceding last Tuesday’s meeting, former Democratic state representative Carlos Guillermo Smith warned, “New College is their first test, their first trial run.” Repeating a Twitter hashtag protesting students had used, Smith added, “your campus is next.” 

As though to prove them right, on February 1, Florida Republican state representative Spencer Roach—who cosponsored a recent Florida law mandating ideological surveys of public university campuses to “stem the tide of Marxist indoctrination”—tweeted that Okker’s termination should be replicated “at every university of the state.” In a January essay published in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Rufo touted the opportunities for emulation as well, writing that “If we are successful” in carrying out the mission of “institutional recapture,” what happens at New College “can serve as a model for other states.”

One horrified alum, Cayenne Linke, who attended New College in the 1990s, compared the takeover to a violent assault. “I feel like I’m standing at the precipice of the Fourth Reich, and I’m mostly powerless to fight back,” Linke said. “I weep for our nation if DeSantis wins a presidential bid and inevitably installs Rufo as education secretary.” 

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But that sort of lament has largely left the new trustees unmoved. When a current LGBTQ+ student told reporters about her grief, Rufo quoted her comments on Twitter, adding a laughing-crying emoji. 

The invocation of Hillsdale College, a 1,500-student private Christian school in rural Michigan, might seem a surprising model for overhauling a public Florida institution, but it shouldn’t. The college, sometimes called “the citadel of conservatism,” has long had an outsized political influence in movement conservatism. Right-wing politicians and advocates vie for slots in its speaking program, the speeches of which are then distributed to a claimed audience of 6 million through a monthly Hillsdale publication. Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist who sought to overturn the 2020 election, and who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, facilitated the launch of Hillsdale’s Capitol Hill campus in Washington. This magazine called Hillsdale a “feeder school” for the Trump administration. 

Hillsdale has also spent the last 12 years proselytizing its Western civilization-focused model of “classical education” through a nationwide charter school-planting network, a bundle of freely-licensed right-wing K–12 curricula (including its ahistorical post-Trump “1776 Curriculum”), and its extensive connections with conservative state leaders. It’s largely thanks to Hillsdale that the idea of “classical education”—despite its varied forms and perspectives—has become right-wing shorthand for anti-“woke” American exceptionalism and an antidote to critical race theory. Last year, Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee announced plans to open 50 Hillsdale charters across the state; the year before, Hillsdale president Larry Arnn, who is also the former president of the Claremont Institute, claimed that South Dakota governor Kristi Noem offered to build him an entire campus. (Noem’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) 

But in Florida, Hillsdale’s footprint is uniquely large. The state boasts the highest number of Hillsdale-affiliated K–12 publicly-funded charter schools, several launched or directed by spouses of prominent state Republicans, including Corcoran and Republican congressman Byron Donalds. Hillsdale was instrumental in helping DeSantis overhaul the state’s K–12 civics standards along more “patriotic” lines. Last year the state hired a Hillsdale duo—one staffer, one undergraduate—to assess whether math textbooks Florida teachers submitted for approval contained prohibited concepts like critical race theory. And a number of prominent Florida officials, including Corcoran and DeSantis himself, have addressed gatherings hosted by the college, where Arnn praised both men as among the most important people in America today. 

Rufo has addressed Hillsdale audiences too: once in early 2021, where he laid out what quickly became Republican talking points about critical race theory, and again last spring, in a speech entitled “Laying Siege to the Institutions,” which he recently described as his “theory of action.” In the latter address, delivered while Rufo was teaching a journalism course for the college, he called on state legislators to use their budgetary power to reshape public institutions, including higher education. 

“We have to get out of this idea that somehow a public university system is a totally independent entity that practices academic freedom—a total fraud, that’s just a false statement, fundamentally false—and that you can’t touch it or else you’re impinging on the rights of the gender studies department to follow their dreams,” he said. Instead, conservatives must have the guts to say, “‘What the public giveth, the public can taketh away.’ And so we get in there, we defund things we don’t like, we fund things we do like.” 

In terms of the former, he elaborated, states should defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and find creative ways to undermine university departments perceived as too liberal, like changing state teacher accreditation laws as a means of rendering teachers colleges irrelevant. Both suggestions have become common conservative talking points over the last year. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported this week, South Carolina legislators have requested information from its state’s 33 public colleges and universities regarding training around race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, following similar moves in Florida and Oklahoma.

In terms of what the right does like, Rufo advised state legislators to fund the creation of new, independently-governed “conservative centers” within flagship public universities to attract conservative professors, create new academic tracks, and serve as a “separate patronage system” for the right. 

“Some people don’t like thinking about it that way,” Rufo said. “But guess what? The public universities, the DEI departments, the public school bureaucracies are, at the end of the day, patronage systems for left-wing activists. And as long as there’s going to be a patronage system, wouldn’t it be good to have some people who are representing the public within them?” 

In many ways, that’s an old idea. Big-money donors on the right like the Olin and Koch foundations have been establishing “beachhead” academic centers in universities across the country since the 1970s, as a means of shoring up academic arguments for right-wing policies, creating a pipeline of conservative talent, and endowing professorships for right-wing scholars—some of whom, more moderate academics suggest, are unemployable on their own merits. (Of possible note here: Corcoran’s appointment to New College follows his failed bid to become Florida State University’s president in 2021, when he was passed over, apparently, in part for lack of qualifications.) 

But these days, the model has been adapted, so that funds for such programs and institutes are increasingly coming from state legislatures directly, as numerous red states have passed bills establishing new “classical” and “civics” institutes with barely-disguised agendas. In Arizona, the legislature effectively replaced private donations from the Koch foundations with taxpayer funds in order to create a new School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State, to address a claimed lack of ideological diversity. In Texas, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has sought to establish a free-market think tank at University of Texas Austin, partly as a response to critical race theory. In Tennessee, Governor Lee paired his proposal to create dozens of Hillsdale charters with a call to build a $6 million, Hillsdale-inspired civics institute at University of Tennessee Knoxville to combat “anti-American thought.”

Florida already has several, including a politics institute at Florida State; the Adam Smith Center for the Study of Economic Freedom at Florida International University; and the University of Florida’s freshly-approved Hamilton Center for Classical and Civics Education, dedicated to “the ideas, traditions, and texts that form the foundations of western and American civilization,” and tasked with helping create anti-communist content for Florida’s new K–12 civics curricula. 

Last spring, this track record prompted another Florida school, St. Augustine’s private Flagler College, to worry that it was being, well, groomed to become “the Hillsdale of the South.” The legislature was considering a multimillion dollar grant for the school to establish its own “Institute for Classical Education”—money that was certainly needed and might also be used to shore up existing programs, but which faculty feared would come with intolerable strings. Professors there brought a resolution to the faculty council, declaring that, if the funding came through, faculty would retain control over how it was used for hiring and curriculum creation. In Flagler’s case, the administration readily agreed. 

But that sort of assurance—long considered a bedrock of academic freedom—is not a privilege shared at Florida’s public universities. And at New College, DeSantis’s new trustees made no effort to hide the fact that ideological transformation would bring rich financial rewards. 

Several hours before last week’s New College board meeting, DeSantis affirmed as much, in a press conference announcing a suite of plans to reform higher education, including defunding all diversity programs at public universities and requiring them to instead teach a core curriculum focused on Western civilization, further eroding the protections of faculty tenure, bolstering University of Florida’s conservative institutes with even more funding and autonomy from university administrators, and transferring hiring authority from faculty committees to college presidents and the trustees who appoint them. In the same speech, DeSantis pledged an initial $15 million dollars to New College for immediate faculty recruitment and student scholarships, and an additional $10 million annually—money he suggested would not just attract the right sort of professors and students, but also new private donors.

“I can tell you this: you have people who are interested in donating money now, they want to endow professorships and all this stuff,” DeSantis said. “So it just shows you, if the mission is sound, people really respond to it.” 

To New College’s distressed community, and academics more broadly, it suggested that the strategy for transforming the school was, effectively, cash. “A strategy that has worked, that it seems DeSantis may employ at New College, is to take a lot of money from very conservative outside donors, and flood the school with money for things that it’s hard to turn down,” like scholarships or restoring crumbling infrastructure, said Lauren O’Neill-Butler, a writer and New College alum who now teaches at New York’s Hunter College. “It often starts with a new center ‘to fund more classical education.’” 

Indeed, last summer, after the Florida legislature approved the creation of University of Florida’s Hamilton Center, it received an additional, unsolicited $3 million donation from a previously unknown nonprofit, the Council on Public University Reform, which had no website or listed phone number and whose only contact was the director of a conservative Catholic legal institute currently pursuing a master’s degree at Hillsdale. 

At Flagler College, civil rights history professor Michael Butler, who led the group of faculty skeptical about the implications of their own proposed classical institute last year, said that in recent days, every colleague he’s seen has stopped to share their fear and outrage over what’s happening at New College. For now, in the grim environment of Florida higher education, being a private school seems like an “oasis of intellectual freedom.” But it would be naive, he continued, to think that either private schools, or the rest of the country, will remain “immune from the ideological hysteria” consuming their state. 

“It’s easy to ridicule Florida, or cite ‘Florida Man.’ But the Florida of today is the America of tomorrow,” Butler said, referencing a maxim from filmmaker Billy Corben. “If you put these culture wars into context, there’s always a bigger issue at play. This time, it’s 2024, and Florida is being used as a laboratory for policies and practices concerning higher education that will be unveiled at the national level.” 

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Indeed, over the weekend, an essay published on Revolver—a site launched by former Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie, who was fired by the White House in 2018 for appearing on a panel alongside the founder of the white nationalist website VDare— compared the takeover of New College to Napoleon’s swift defeat of the Austrian army in 1805, writing that DeSantis and Rufo were “putting on a masterclass” of the principle that “speed, surprise, and decisiveness matter far more than mere strength” in any battle. 

“DeSantis’s conquest is clearly a test run, with lower stakes, executed against a small and obscure school with little institutional power to resist,” it read, with the author urging Republicans around the country to seize the momentum. “Every state in America is holding a legislative session this spring. Now presents a golden opportunity to grab as much territory on education as possible, while Florida leads the way … concerned citizens nationwide must quickly learn how to adapt the New College plan to other publicly-controlled universities across the country.” (The article did not include a byline, but was presumably written by Beattie.)

Education might traditionally be a winning Democratic issue, the author continued, “yet there is a very real sense that they are caught off-guard and being overtaken by the sheer speed of events,” as well as the confounding array of attacks on public education happening at once. The New College overthrow, after all, has happened simultaneously with the Florida Department of Education banning a new Advanced Placement high school African American studies course, with the seeming result that the College Board, which oversees AP curricula, immediately caved, stripping the course of content related to contemporary issues like the Black Lives Matter movement and police violence, as well as numerous Black authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and bell hooks. (This week, a letter from Florida’s Department of Education made clear that DeSantis’ administration had been in frequent contact with the College Board as it was creating the course last year, as the DOE requested that subjects like intersectionality and systemic marginalization be removed.)

“Universal vouchers, weakening tenure, core curricula, CRT bans, and more,” declared the Revolver piece, “it’s all hitting, all at once.” On Twitter, Rufo thanked Beattie for understanding the strategy at work, writing, “This is the best analysis of the New College takeover, by far.” 

Vanity Magazine