The New College Gambit

That’s one version of the story — the one Corcoran recounted 10 days later in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, vowing to punish the students who’d chanted, perhaps by withholding their degrees. 

Here’s another: On the evening of May 17, the New College class of 2024 sat under the watchful eye of cops, security guards and surveillance cameras, all trained on their faces, waiting for them to misstep. They’d passed through stringent security to enter their own graduation after a uniquely trying four years: entering college amid a pandemic; having their third year consumed by a made-for-media takeover of their school’s administration; and, for many, spending their senior year living in off-campus hotels, their dorms given to new students recruited to take their place. 

Now, on a day ostensibly meant to celebrate their accomplishments, it appeared they were instead being trolled with a keynote speaker seemingly chosen not despite, but because of their objections: Republican megadonor Joe Ricketts, who gave $1 million to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ failed presidential campaign, referred to Muslims as ​“cult” members and ​“naturally my enemy” and partnered with Corcoran on the disastrous rollout of a conservative-coded degree program opposed by nearly every New College professor. 

So when Ricketts stepped to the podium, some graduates booed, but then — like young people anywhere forced to listen to lengthy platitudes — mostly settled into bored silence.

Then the silence stretched on, and on, because the sound system wasn’t working. Of the two microphones on the podium, only the one for an internet livestream picked up Ricketts’ voice, while the in-person audience largely heard a mumbling drone, periodically interrupted by squeals of feedback and shouts that nobody could hear. After 15 minutes, a handful of students launched a 30-second chant, which, after a brief exchange with Ricketts, Corcoran seemed to seize as an opportunity to end the debacle. 

Ever since Jan. 6, 2023, when DeSantis appointed a series of right-wing activists to New College’s board of trustees with the mission to transform Florida’s weirdest, queerest public college into a ​“Hillsdale of the South” — emulating the Michigan Christian school known for its conservative ​“classical education” and hard-right politics—it was clear the takeover was meant to be a model. 

As one new trustee, right-wing education activist Chris Rufo, told the New York Times, ​“If we can take this high-risk, high-reward gambit and turn it into a victory, we’re going to see conservative state legislators starting to reconquer public institutions all over the United States.” 

Nearly two years later — after interviews with current and former New College students, faculty and staff, extensive research of news and academic reports, firsthand reporting and numerous documents shared with In These Times—there’s no simple answer as to whether they’ve succeeded. 

The new New College certainly gained notoriety for its steady stream of provocations: replacing professors of gender studies and history with those making an affirmative ​“case for colonialism” or excoriating the ​“cult” of ​“wokeness”; recruiting mostly male student athletes who could ​“rebalance” the ​“hormones” on campus; inviting a climate change denier and ​“race science” advocate to address the school. But they’ve also bungled the rollout of new initiatives nearly every step of the way, and to date, the sort of totalizing takeover DeSantis enacted in Sarasota hasn’t been replicated elsewhere. 

And yet, in the past two years, attacks on higher ed have metastasized across the nation, with the tactics deployed at New College reappearing in state after state, school after school — and with the promise Donald Trump’s return will take them further still.

Today, that notion is conservative conventional wisdom, as the election made clear. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for a second Trump administration proposes not just dismantling the Department of Education — a Republican goal for 45 years — but ending federal loan forgiveness, upending the college accreditation system and defunding disciplines like gender studies to instead fund ​“intellectual diversity” and majors that ​“bolster economic growth” — wonky words for hiring more right-wing faculty and shunting more students toward trade schools and vocational ed. A similar agenda recently outlined by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) includes mandates to ​“nudge students towards practical degrees” in the hopes of creating fewer ​“dance and women’s studies” majors and eliminating ​“the most common justification for student loan forgiveness — that students didn’t know what they were getting into.” In his new book, Heritage President Kevin Roberts calls for destroying ​“every Ivy League college” — as a start.

Trump has promised to raise billions of dollars by ​“taxing, fining and suing” private university endowments and using the windfall to establish a ​“no wokeness or jihadism allowed” online academy; to replace ​“radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs” with new authorities that will base university accreditation on how well schools promote ​“Western civilization” and attack diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs; and to deploy the Justice Department against schools suspected of continuing to use affirmative action principles. Combined with Vance’s proposals to rescind universities’ tax-exempt status and emulate Hungary’s attacks on academic freedom, this year’s Republican ticket led one elated AEI fellow to predict a Trump-Vance administration will ​“go Henry VIII on universities.”

It hasn’t been a good time in higher ed for a long time. If you take the really long view, says University of New Orleans historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, author of the 2023 book Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and Campus Wars in Modern America, you can trace right-wing attacks on universities back past Nixon, past Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.’s pivotal 1971 memo urging conservatives to counter ​“the campus origin” of hostility to capitalism, past William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1951 God and Man at Yale, to at least the 1920s and the early Red Scare that accompanied the entry of Jewish intellectuals into U.S. academia. 

Yet it’s a uniquely bad time now — one that academics say ranges from ​“worse than McCarthyism” to ​“an intellectual reign of terror.” A recent survey from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) found that more than half of academics in the South are seeking to leave their states. This spring, a United Nations special rapporteur conducted an official U.S. visit to investigate ​“the escalating assault” on universities and academic freedom. 

If you go to right-wing conferences these days, says Yale professor of race, ethnicity and migration Daniel HoSang, it’s hard to overstate how central a mobilizing force outrage over higher ed has become. While yesterday’s conservatives certainly attacked universities as ​“cultural centers of degradation and opposition to the imperatives of private interest,” they didn’t seek their outright destruction, since ​“that’s where a lot of their own thinkers get trained.” (After all, the Federalist Society was born at Yale.) Today, HoSang says, the Right increasingly calls for ​“dismantling these institutions altogether.” As one right-wing legal analyst put it this July, taxing university endowments is the least conservatives should do; ​“Next up is expropriation, followed by salting the earth.” 

The legislative attacks accompanying this fury are so numerous that observers track them in broad categories of assault: 365 proposed ​“educational gag orders” restricting discussion of ​“divisive concepts” like race, gender and U.S. history, finds PEN America, and DEI bans that have affected 213 campuses in 33 states, according to a running tally maintained by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

There are laws to weaken tenure and accreditation and policies to compel both ​“viewpoint diversity” — a transparent means of elevating conservative voices — and ​“institutional neutrality” — an equally transparent means of suppressing pro-Palestine views. In numerous states, legislatures are establishing explicitly conservative centers within flagship public universities, to both provide a home for right-wing scholars and create new conservative academic tracks, all exempt from the normal oversight of faculty peers. 

But the scale of such an accounting obscures the effects on the ground. Like that the University of Alabama’s Black Student Union and LGBTQ center were forced to leave the school’s student center following a new anti-DEI law. Or that Tennessee created an online portal to report professors for teaching concepts like intersectionality, while Arizona proposed establishing a ​“grade challenge department” for students who contend their bad grades reflect political bias. Or that Wisconsin Republicans blocked salary raises until the state university system agreed to excise DEI programming and create a new position dedicated to ​“conservative political thought.” Or that Florida is purging hundreds of courses from the state’s general education requirements, after already removing introductory sociology courses last year when the state university system chancellor declared the discipline had been ​“hijacked by left-wing activists.”

“You can have a university system without academic freedom,” says Henry Reichman, history professor emeritus at California State University, East Bay and coauthor of a 2023 AAUP report on ​“political interference” in Florida’s universities. ​“It won’t be a good university system and it won’t serve society very well,” but ​“that’s the kind of higher education they want.”

The same day, five miles north, DeSantis announced similar reforms coming for all of Florida’s public universities: new core curriculum requirements focused on ​“Western civilization”; eliminating ​“all DEI and CRT bureaucracies”; post-tenure faculty review; and establishing university presidents’ and trustees’ ​“authority over the hiring process,” to prevent faculty from imposing ​“ideological litmus tests.” That May, DeSantis used New College as a backdrop when he signed a law codifying some of those measures. 

In the months in between, students and faculty reeled from such an onslaught of changes that some called the transformation of their college colonization, others terraforming (or ​“terror-forming”). Signs indicating gender-neutral bathrooms were removed, student murals were painted over, lawns changed to Astroturf. A student-run cafe was replaced by a vendor whose coffee came with Bible verses printed on the cups. The campus police presence at board meetings, recalls student Sara Engels, went from “‘I’m a police officer here to help’ to ​‘Fuck around and find out.’”

Even the school color was changed — from bright cyan blue to sober Oxford navy — as well as its anti-mascot mascot, the Null Set: the empty brackets that, in mathematics, signify zero and at New College represented a gently dorky statement of nonconformity. While the administration ultimately chose ​“the Mighty Banyans” — remaking the tropical trees that grow on campus as a meathead with bulging biceps — their initial proposals included the Rufo-esque ​“Conquistadors.”

Online, Rufo predicted a similar reconstitution of the school’s people: ​“The student body will be recomposed over time: some current students will self-select out, others will graduate. We’ll recruit new students who are mission-aligned.” 

Since part of the takeover’s rationale was New College’s years of flagging enrollment, Corcoran instructed admissions officers to approve as many applications as possible, recruiting particularly among private and religious schools, homeschooled students and athletes, and offering abundant $10,000 scholarships. 

Admissions staff told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s Steven Walker they’d been promised $5,000 bonuses if they enrolled 300 new students that fall, potentially violating federal law. According to a hiring letter shared with In These Times, the school’s new athletics director was initially offered a similar bonus of $3,750 for every 15 students he recruited and enrolled. When the next semester began, Corcoran announced a record enrollment of 325 incoming students. More than a third were athletes, including enough baseball players for more than two teams, even though New College had no on-campus athletic facilities. 

But a quarter of the students expected to return did not, and many of those who did were reassigned to off-campus hotels to make room for the new recruits. (Administrators blamed mold in some dorms and a policy requiring first- and second-year students to reside on campus.) That the new class was disproportionately male, Rufo praised as a bonus, reasoning the influx could ​“rebalance the hormones and the politics on campus.” 

A similar transformation was underway among faculty and staff, as a tide of political allies — including a former state senator, GOP aides and political spouses — assumed leading roles in the transition and offices of general counsel, student affairs, admissions and the New College of Florida Foundation, which manages the school’s modest endowment, since tapped to pay the majority of Corcoran’s salary.

One former GOP lobbyist and aide was first named dean of students and then, in early 2024, interim provost, despite lacking a doctorate or other customary qualifications for a college’s chief academic post. The new athletics director was hired from a private Christian academy run by one new trustee — who this May conducted a mass baptism of students in Sarasota Bay — and he in turn set about recruiting coaches almost exclusively from conservative Christian colleges, according to a federal civil rights complaint. 

At the same time, faculty and staff were fleeing or being pushed out — with 77 leaving by fall 2023, shortly after trustees abolished the entire gender studies program. The school’s chief diversity officer and librarian were fired without cause. The provost, who had clashed with Rufo, was forced to step down. The contract for a visiting professor who had publicly criticized the takeover was not renewed. And that April, trustees made the anomalous decision to overrule faculty recommendations to grant tenure to five junior professors — prompting the board’s faculty representative, computer scientist Matt Lepinski, to resign mid-meeting, from both board and school. 

The same month, Aaron Hillegass, a New College alum and data scientist who had joined the faculty that semester, followed suit, posting a resignation letter on X (formerly Twitter) declaring the takeover a fascist experiment that threatened academic freedom nationwide. 

“I love New College,” he wrote, ​“but for the good of our nation, I hope the school fails miserably and conspicuously. If I were more patriotic, I would burn the college’s buildings to the ground.”

But it was also a weak institution. For years, student enrollment and retention had been declining — which some faculty attributed to chronic underfunding — and the legislature had increasingly paired allocations with warnings that both must improve.

“It made it an obvious target,” says Hillegass, ​“for DeSantis to say nobody really cares about this school anymore, why don’t we use it for this publicity stunt, to see if we can get away with it.”

That’s the broader context surrounding the Right’s assault on higher ed: decades of systematic defunding that’s cost some public universities a full half of their prior support.

In 2023, West Virginia University’s flagship campus cut or terminated some 30 academic programs, laying off nearly 170 faculty. This fall, the University of Connecticut reviewed almost 250 programs for possible closure, in everything from ethnic studies to English. Across the country, regional public universities from Pennsylvania to Montana are following suit.

“What’s interesting about the West Virginia situation is that wasn’t the ideological dismantling of a public university,” says Dennis Hogan, a Harvard lecturer who teaches and writes about higher education. ​“Unless you think starving institutions of higher learning of money is ideological — in which case, it wasn’t Chris Rufo doing it.”

At times, historically, defunding higher ed certainly has been ideological. ​“One recommendation America made to Chile under Pinochet was to starve your higher education institutions in order to conserve your own power,” says Juliana Paré-Blagoev, a professor in the school of education at Johns Hopkins University, as well as a New College alum. Throughout the 1970s and ​‘80s, Pinochet’s government sought to purge the country’s university system of all traces of Marxist influence not just by appointing military leaders to run universities or firing professors by the thousands, but also by privatizing numerous degree programs, slashing state funding by, in some cases, more than 60% and removing entire disciplines deemed to have been ​“infiltrated.”

At some point, Paré-Blagoev, also a board member of Scholars for a New Deal in Higher Education, predicts, funding will likely ​“swing back,” when ​“the billionaire ideologists have enough control over higher education that market libertarianism can be baked into that educational experience. Then you’ll see more public money going back into higher ed, in the same way that tons of public money is now going into New College.”

In the meantime, the defunding that created the current system of astronomical tuition, crippling student debt and the adjunctification of academia — 70-75% of all U.S. faculty are now contract employees — has also helped delegitimize higher education among much of the public, a fact the Right is eager to exploit. 

When right-wing activists like Turning Point USA cofounder Charlie Kirk hawk books with titles like The College Scam, notes HoSang, they’re drawing on a reserve of distrust built over decades, as higher ed went from ​“a public good that everyone was entitled access to, to now a private responsibility that’s devolved onto individual families.” Faculty and administrators didn’t create that situation, but they’re now ​“asked to defend: Why does this thing cost so, so much money? Why does it seem to guarantee so little economic security?” 

And in the face of that anger, other complaints more easily take hold. Like when Claremont Institute fellow Scott Yenor — an Idaho professor best known for declaring that academia is ruled by a ​“medicated, meddlesome” ​“gynecocracy” and who has advised the DeSantis administration on appointing Florida universities’ trustees — deploys culture war rhetoric about ​“useless degrees” to propose that public universities be broken up along disciplinary lines, creating a science university that receives public funding and a humanities college that does not.

“There’s a way in which these guys are the cleanup crew of the neoliberal hollowing-out of our universities,” says Hogan. ​“They’re showing up to the fire sale.”

The departure of roughly a third of the faculty meant classes some students needed to graduate were canceled or lacked an instructor. After Corcoran’s frenzied enrollment drive, the incoming first-year class had lower SAT scores and GPAs than the year before. The school dropped 24 spots in U.S. News and World Report’s 2023 ranking of liberal arts colleges — then another 22 spots in 2024.

Corcoran launched a new freshman seminar based on Homer’s epic The Odyssey, which certainly seemed a step toward building a ​“classical” college. But a portion of each class was spent socializing around hired food trucks; according to a faculty member who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, Corcoran had told professors he wanted ​“a class no one could fail.”

In December 2023, the administration abruptly announced it was launching an online degree program in a collaboration, brokered by Rufo, with the ​“Ricketts Great Books College”: a brand-new entity underwritten by Joe Ricketts, whose business and political empire also encompasses various conservative education projects. (Among them, notes Florida education writer Billy Townsend, is Academica, the nation’s largest for-profit charter school management company and a beneficiary in the bid-rigging scandal that led to Corcoran’s resignation as education commissioner in 2022.) 

Faculty, who had been given little chance for input about the program, subsequently voted against it. The administration responded by surreptitiously naming a new academic division to house the program, and hired a visiting professor and an adjunct to teach its pilot classes. In its first semester, few students enrolled. By the time Ricketts spoke at graduation, rumors spread that he’d abandoned the project, and nearly all mention of his involvement disappeared from New College’s discussion of the program.

It was typical, said current and former faculty, of how the takeover administration operated: announcing big initiatives, rushing their implementation, then watching them fall through.

“They’re just throwing things at the wall to see what will stick,” says former professor Amy Reid, then-faculty representative on the board. ​“They don’t care about destroying what they don’t understand — the educational model of New College. They don’t really think about what should be replacing it.”

That assertion was arguably demonstrated in June, when the board adopted a new core curriculum centered on two sets of required courses: ​“logos” (a Greek term denoting reasoning and discourse, and generally covering the liberal arts) and ​“techne” (applied practical skills, including science and technology). An administrative presentation illustrated the tracks with mashup AI images: Benjamin Franklin flying a drone, Thurgood Marshall talking to a ​“robot judge,” Millicent Fawcett selling Bitcoin.

Over the previous year, the administration had referred to the new curriculum as Corcoran’s vision, but in fact it appeared to be taken — seemingly without attribution — from a proposal sent to Corcoran in April 2023 by a disgraced academic looking for work.

According to emails shared with In These Times, just days after Aaron Hillegass’ incendiary resignation, former Harvard data scientist David Kane cold-emailed Corcoran, offering to take Hillegass’ place. Kane noted he’d been “ ​‘canceled’ for the usual nonsense reasons” — in this case, fallout from a series of racist posts on a blog Kane founded, some written under a pseudonym.

Among the pseudonymous posts, reported the student-run Harvard Crimson, were calls for professors to discuss racial differences in IQ, a declaration that 90% of Black students at Williams College (Kane’s alma mater) wouldn’t have been admitted ​“were it not for their Black’ness” and, according to the student-run Williams Record, defenses of the white supremacist group Identity Evropa. Under his own name, Kane argued that Williams should admit fewer students of color and poor students in order to compete with the Ivy League. Kane’s contract with Harvard’s Division of Social Science, then overseen by Dean Claudine Gay, was not renewed, and a subsequent course he taught at Simmons University was canceled.

Corcoran responded quickly to Kane’s email, arranging a call the next day, then a campus visit the following week. Kane wasn’t hired. But much of a 20-page memo he sent Corcoran, outlining a new curriculum based on ​“virtue” and ​“techne,” was adopted, as subsequent emails between administrators and faculty (including discussion of renaming the ​“virtue” component to avoid ​“comical misunderstandings” about grading students’ virtuousness) made clear.

Three weeks after Kane first wrote him, administrators emailed faculty Corcoran’s ​“vision statement” for the new curriculum, roughly 75% of which came verbatim from Kane’s memorandum.

By late 2023, this apparent plagiarism seemed ironic, as Rufo shifted his attention to hunting for plagiarism among liberal academics. (Kane would not answer whether he’d given permission for his proposal to be presented as Corcoran’s, but said any suggestion of plagiarism was ​“utter bullshit.” Corcoran and Rufo did not respond to requests for comment.)

By then there were other problems. In November 2023, Corcoran asked Florida lawmakers for $420 million in direct and indirect funding to continue the school’s transformation — including plans for an anti-“cancel culture” ​“Freedom Institute,” a bass fishing team and other initiatives to reposition New College as a ​“luxury brand,” even as the school’s academic programs continued to operate on austerity budgets. The request drew skepticism even from legislative allies, noted Florida business and politics website The Capitolist, given the financial breakdown would make New College ​“the costliest per-student public higher education institution in the state.”

In March, the legislature agreed to allocate an additional $15 million with the unusual caveat that New College submit a detailed business plan and quarterly status updates. And while the Board of Governors approved that plan in September, the decision came with strong reservations about the resources being spent to support the school’s focus on recruiting athletes — something faculty and critics describe as a Ponzi scheme.

“The only way we’re able to recruit students is by giving these full scholarships, and that requires the legislature to keep pumping money into the school,” explains the anonymous faculty member. ​“I don’t think the appetite for the legislature to keep funding this facade, this mirage, is unlimited.”

“They had this libertarian fantasy that they can be the people who walk into the terra nova and remake the institution from the ground up,” agrees Trinity College political scientist Isaac Kamola, director of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and author of a recent report on right-wing attacks on academia, including at New College. ​“But the truth is they are incompetent and institutions are way more complicated than they think they are.” And so, ​“Of course the only way you’re going to get students there is fully funding the 75-person baseball team in order to pretend this is working.”

The faculty exodus continued — including Reid in August — and the administration increasingly exerted authority in hiring their replacements, overriding faculty decisions 43 times last year, according to an open letter from the New College Education Policy Committee. A number of new hires hailed from explicitly right-wing institutions, while others seemed chosen for spectacle, like the author of a book called The Case for Colonialism and a British talk-show host best known for creating satirical anti-“woke” social media personalities. In September, the school hosted climate change denier Michael Schellenberger for a ​“Socratic” debate; a follow-up will feature neo-eugenicist Steve Sailer, a longtime contributor to white nationalist website VDARE.

“I don’t see how this experiment can ever be successful,” says former professor Matt Lepinski, noting that, despite the headlines such stunts garner, even conservatives have little interest in taking classes taught by extremists. ​“For ideological reasons they are creating a product there is no demand for, and they destroyed my school to do it.”

By fall, there were signs the board and administration feared the model was failing, too. Trustee Mark Bauerlein wrote multiple articles urging conservative state governments to embrace ​“the trustee solution” of imposing change on public universities from above. In his newly released book, Storming the Ivory Tower, Corcoran mournfully writes that although he’d transformed New College ​“from one of the most progressively captured universities in the country to the freest in the nation,” he didn’t ​“see it happening elsewhere.”

“There is still time to stop being talkers and start being doers,” Corcoran urged. ​“We can ensure that New College is not just a blip on the screen.”

New College declined to answer any specific questions, but communications director Nathan March wrote in an email, ​“New College is thriving like never before in its history.”

But maybe it doesn’t matter. New College’s administration and trustees, says Kamola, are bad at running a college in ​“the same way the Freedom Caucus is bad at governing.” Which is to say, ​“If you’re funded by people who want government to fail, then by being bad at governing, you’re doing exactly right.” 

“The failure of New College is not itself a failure,” Kamola says. ​“Because the goal is not what’s going on at that college; the goal is to fundamentally transform higher education.”

And across Florida, so many Republican politicians were appointed to university presidencies — most notably former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, whose reign at the University of Florida was marked by outrageous profligacy and nepotism—that when state Rep. Randy Fine failed to be appointed president of Florida Atlantic University, he publicly complained that he’d ​“never agreed to compete for the job.”

Then there was the fallout from widespread campus protests against the unfolding genocide in Gaza, which gave unprecedented momentum to the Right’s attack on higher ed, as Republicans declared ​“our schools are producing monsters” and ultra-rich Ivy League alumni organized campaigns of donor attrition. The House launched hearings into what it cast as epidemic campus antisemitism, starting with the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT. Two of them subsequently resigned, including Harvard’s Claudine Gay, the initial target of Rufo’s new operation exposing plagiarism among progressive academics, particularly Black women.

When Gay resigned in early January, Rufo — who, days after October 7, had urged conservatives to ​“create a strong association between Hamas, BLM, DSA and academic ​‘decolonization’ in the public mind” — declared her ​“the symbol of the DEI regime that has conquered American academic life.” In short order, right-wing politicians, activists and commentators were declaring that all DEI-related programming, or gender and ethnic studies, were at the root of campus antisemitism.

The American Enterprise Institute pronounced DEI the ​“ideological engine for anti-White, anti-Western, and anti-Semitic hatred.” Soon, conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens echoed the logic — that the ​“real problem” lay among ​“the main convictions and currents of today’s academia: intersectionality, critical theory, post-colonialism, ethnic studies and other concepts” that ​“politicize classrooms.”

More targets emerged, from demonizing Middle East and Arabic studies to Corcoran’s suggestion that campus antisemitism was in fact caused by shared governance, the principle of academic freedom that grants faculty authority over hiring, curriculum and tenure.

Some conservatives acknowledged the opportunism of the moment, declaring the protests a ​“once in a lifetime” or ​“once-in-a-century” chance to ​“change the face of American higher education,” proving the entire ​“sector is bloated and toxic at best, and outright hostile to civilization at worst,” and letting colleges become ​“the architects of their own destruction.”

State DEI bans went into overdrive, and campus after campus began shuttering their departments. The Right moved the goalposts, arguing that simply firing DEI staff didn’t ​“go far enough,” and universities must ​“root out” subtler traces lingering in the system. The Texas Senate held a hearing to grill university leaders on how they would ensure that no DEI programming remained under alternate names. A new pattern arose, of schools preemptively complying before laws were even passed, as when the University of Missouri, Columbia closed its DEI office in August — citing what was ​“happening in other states” — and the University of Missouri, Kansas City followed suit in October.

“We’re seeing an epidemic of university leaders capitulating to these threats,” says Young, ​“that’s more insidious than anything before. Previously, the weak link in the higher ed system was state legislation. Now we’re seeing that the weak link is leaders themselves.”

Meanwhile, universities have undergone a level of militarization not seen since Kent State. SWAT teams swarmed campuses, and students and faculty were arrested, suspended or barred from campus by the thousands. Administrators enacted alarming new restrictions on campus ​“expressive activity,” numerous contingent faculty lost contracts and one tenured professor was fired for a social media post condemning Zionism. One foreign student protester was placed at risk of deportation, but many more could follow, since Trump has promised to revoke student visas from any ​“radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners at colleges and universities” and to send ICE to campus protests.

All in all, AEI education policy director Frederick Hess told The Hill in September, ​“it’s been the best two years for conservatives in higher education in a half century.”

Since the election, that estimation has only been strengthened. The right-wing education group National Association of Scholars celebrated Trump’s pick for Education Secretary, World Wrestling Entertainment cofounder Linda McMahon, by calling on her to ​“tombstone piledrive” the Education Department, including by asking Congress to outlaw student loan forgiveness and cutting the department’s civil rights office by 80%. A Heritage Foundation fellow suggested repurposing that office from investigating sex and gender discrimination to targeting schools that take race into consideration for admissions or scholarships. And Rufo announced an early December meeting with Trump’s transition team to outline his plan to cut all federal funding for both public and private universities that refuse to eliminate DEI programs — a means, he said, for ​“the Florida playbook” to be ​“expanded on the national stage.”

This fall, Corcoran and the trustees began arguing that the New College Foundation, a legally separate entity, is a ​“wholly-owned subsidiary” of the college, prompting concerns that a second, ​“mini-takeover” is coming that might plunder the endowment to obscure fiscal mismanagement at the school and use restricted funds intended for student scholarships to instead cover Corcoran’s salary or expensive athletic programs. In late November, New College trustees voted to grant Corcoran the authority to remove Foundation board members without cause. The following day, Corcoran removed the heads of the Foundation’s finance and governance committees, both of whom had voiced criticism of the school’s direction in the past. College spokesperson Nathan March said in a statement to In These Times that the firings were part of ​“critical measures to strengthen oversight and accountability” after an internal audit, which found financial mismanagement and possible violations of state transparency laws.

A sad consensus grew that the school will likely close within five years or less.

“I don’t know anybody who’s incredibly optimistic,” says alum Sophia Brown, former editor of student paper The Catalyst who now, along with Young and Reid, works at PEN America. ​“What’s more important is the student and alumni community we’re able to foster in whatever time we have left.”

Brown spoke to me on the morning before graduation, when several dozen members of the broader New College community had gathered in a Sarasota community center for a two-day teach-in, largely about the takeover. The night before, hundreds more had met to hold an alternative commencement for graduates — a vastly different affair than the official ceremony that would take place that evening.

Graduates wore wings and capes, Patricia Okker watched her former students walk the stage and journalist M. Gessen delivered the keynote, recounting ​“three painful lessons” New College students had been forced to learn: that institutions are fragile, autocracies have a dumbing-down effect and they couldn’t trust the state to defend their education.

Both events grew from a wave of organizing that began in early 2023, as hundreds of students, faculty and alumni pooled their talents to respond to DeSantis’ testcase takeover with what alum Paré-Blagoev called ​“a take-back playbook.”

After Okker was fired, recalls alum Brian Cody, a sleepy alumni forum shot up to 2,000 members, who quickly began self-organizing into various areas of focus: legal action, legislation, policy compliance, student support. New groups formed, including Cody’s Novo Collegian Alliance (NCA) and NCF Freedom, which gave itself a university-style Latin motto: Facile Vincere, Difficile Occupare—“easy to conquer, difficult to occupy.” 

“I remember saying, ​‘Everyone wants the police to come in and stop this, and it’s not happening. But who are the police for these different things?’” Cody asks. ​“We went through every issue asking, if there was someone who can regulate this, who would it be? It felt very, very New College to me.”

What began with rallies and op-eds led to lawsuits, federal complaints and public records requests filed by the dozens. NCF Freedom and the New College faculty union filed separate lawsuits on behalf of New College and other Florida professors for violations of free speech, academic freedom and tenure protections. NCA submitted more than 100 pages of documentation to New College’s accreditor, Cody says, for complaints ranging from violations of faculty governance to false advertising. Two civil rights complaints were filed with the federal Department of Education.

The community also learned about the limitations of those avenues, as lawsuits were dismissed, accreditation complaints stalled and the DOE settled one case while a larger civil rights complaint languished. The latter appeared to overwhelm a department that, as one faculty member says, was ​“designed for individuals experiencing civil rights harassment, not an entire school under a civil rights attack.”

And yet, almost two years later, they haven’t stopped — if only to make clear to other states that DeSantis’ gambit was a failure.

“In the end, we may not save the college,” says the same anonymous faculty member, ​“but I think we can save this model from being truly exported.”

For Young, it’s an example of ​“what could be possible all over the country, if advocates for higher education really organized to fight back in a way that could turn the tide.”

Glimmers of that sensibility are starting to arise. In September, the AAUP gathered in Philadelphia with 10 unions that represent higher ed workers to launch a new coalition, Labor for Higher Education. Their demands — from fully funding public universities to ensuring the freedoms to speak, assemble and learn — represent a growing acknowledgment that the fights for academic freedom and against austerity are inextricably intertwined.

While the Right doesn’t admit it, the vision of higher ed they’re advancing is one where the lucky few have access to a rich liberal arts education, others get a ​“classical” right-wing imitation and the majority receive utilitarian instruction designed to fill holes in the labor market.

It’s a future, says Young, that looks a lot like the past, ​“when higher education was the prerogative of the elites and was not available to all.”

That makes whatever happens next a multifront fight.

“Those of us who believe in education as a project and as important to a free and democratic society have to be in the fight now,” says Hogan. ​“Because almost everything is out there to fight for.”

Fact-checking by Thomas Birmingham.