‘Hillsdale Of The South’: DeSantis Appointees Are Restoring Florida’s Public Liberal Arts College To Classical Roots

After Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Announcement last week he was appointing six new members to the New College of Florida’s Board of Trustees, leftists have gone berserk.

The college is small and liberal in Sarasota. Functioning as Florida’s honors college, it has just slightly More than 700 students, 90 faculty members and full-time staff. It has expanded its critical race theory-type initiatives in recent years. “gender studies” Include a program “gender diversity center” “queer studies.”

DeSantis plans to transform the school by appointing enough trustees to give the board of 13 a conservative majority. He also hopes to use the same classical education model used by Hillsdale College in southern Michigan, which has a core curriculum that emphasizes the Western tradition and classical texts.

“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,” James Uthmeier is the Chief of Staff for DeSantis National Review.

DeSantis’ appointments include Charles Kesler, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and editor of the Claremont Review of Books, a conservative literary publication; Mark Bauerlein, a professor emeritus at Emory University and editor at the ecumenical journal First Things Magazine; Matthew Spalding, vice president of the graduate school of government at Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C.; and Chris Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and conservative investigative journalist.

The New College will be transformed by the conservative majority. They plan to restructure its administration and academic department, and create a new core curriculum. The left is furious.

The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg condescendingly Writes That “DeSantis Allies Plot the Hostile Takeover of a Liberal College,” characterizing the new majority’s efforts as an “assault” On “academic freedom” This punishes every professor “whose worldview is at odds with the Republican Party.” The Daily Beast laments “They Were Loving College. Then Ron DeSantis Got Involved” (The article quotes a New College sophomore at 22 who is in serious trouble and, after hearing the news, decided to take action. “got really sad and then just, like, laid down”). Let’s just say that the media was a wreck (and sent angry tweets). Keep Coming.

Despite all the media attention, the new trustees have not lost their determination. Rufo spoke to Goldberg “We anticipate that this is going to be a process that involves conflict.”

Spalding, in a statement that he provided to The Federalist, denied the notion that the conservative board members would remake the New College into an exact copy of Hillsdale.

“As a professor, dean, and vice president at a successful liberal arts college, my focus is on the work at hand: restoring New College’s ‘distinctive mission’ as the ‘residential liberal arts honors college’ of Florida,” He said. “I appreciate the complimentary nods to Hillsdale College, but we are not going to serve New College’s mission by remaking it into a carbon copy of another institution.”

Spalding instead is interested in bringing the New College to its former home.