DeSantis Policies Come Home to Roost at New College
He's getting what he wants.
An aggregator pointed me to the Tampa Bay Times report “At New College of Florida, a ‘ridiculously high’ number of faculty are gone.”
More than one-third of New College of Florida faculty will not be returning in the fall.
That’s according to Provost Bradley Thiessen, who called the 36 departures in a single year a “ridiculously high” number for a school with fewer than 100 full-time teachers.
Some of those were retirements or sabbaticals that were planned long before the school made national headlines in January, when Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed six trustees with a mission to transform the small liberal arts school.
But many are teachers and researchers who — frustrated and dismayed by the school’s new leadership — saw no other option but to resign or take leave to look for opportunities elsewhere.
Biologist Liz Leininger started looking for a new job the same day the new appointments were announced, and the decision to leave was cemented weeks later when the trustees fired former president Patricia Okker in their first meeting.
“I felt a little guilty to be leaving,” Leininger said. “I want to support New College students, but I told them, ‘I can support you even from afar.’”
Leininger took a job as chairperson of neuroscience at St. Mary’s, a public honors college in Maryland. But with her departure, New College’s neuroscience department shrinks to just one faculty member, down from three the year before.
That leaves students like Alaska Miller, a third-year cognitive science major, with few options. There are no upper-year neuroscience classes offered in the fall, she said. Until the school hires more faculty, it’s impossible for her to move forward with her degree.
[…]
“The majority of faculty who have left have not given us any kind of consideration, or notice, or thought or anything,” interim president Richard Corcoran said at a July 6 trustee meeting. Long-term hiring decisions in academia typically take a year or more, and with this year’s hiring season long gone, the school will rely on temporary positions to fill the gap.
New College has already recruited 10 new visiting faculty, with another six positions still under negotiation, Thiessen said. The school will be launching a visiting “presidential scholar” position and hopes to recruit notable scholars to fill the position on a temporary basis.
We’ve all seen reports of the havoc DeSantis has wreaked on education in Florida. While there were dire warnings that this would make it hard for the state’s public universities to retain and attract talented faculty, I was skeptical that it would matter much except at the margins simply because of how lousy the academic job market has been for decades. If you’ve got a tenure-track job, it’s hard to replace it with another one unless you’re a superstar.
But, it turns out, New College is a unique situation. Looking for more background, I found an Orlando Sentinel report (“New College faculty turnover is ‘ridiculously high’ after DeSantis takeover“) that shed additional light on the situation:
The school in Sarasota has drawn heavy attention in recent months as DeSantis appointed a slate of conservative trustees.
The governor and his allies say New College, a progressive school with a prominent LGBTQ community, had been indoctrinating students with “woke” ideology, and they’ve set about revising it into a conservative institution.
Now, how exactly a public university in a fairly red state came to be “a progressive school with a prominent LGBTQ community” is a question unto itself and not one for which I have an answer. Regardless, the school was particularly targeted by DeSantis over and above his general attack on academic freedom and DEI initiatives.
Alas, unless the courts intervene, he’s going to get away with it. The headline numbers about faculty turnover are actually rather misleading:
A presentation given Monday to a committee of the New College Board of Trustees detailed reasons that faculty members will be out for at least one semester.
Six faculty members have retired, six have resigned and six took leave without pay. Another 16 faculty members will be out for reasons such as being assigned research leave or being on family leave.
Also, out of seven visiting professor contracts that were up for renewal, five have been renewed, meaning that the school has two visiting professor slots that need to be filled.
Thiessen pointed to the school being in the process of “negotiating offers” with six additional prospective faculty members.
“If this meeting were a week later, I think we would get up to 21 (faculty members hired),” Thiessen said.
So, first, this isn’t a mass resignation of tenured faculty. There are 36 vacancies out of ~94 faculty slots, 24 of which seem to be in the ordinary course of business. And they seem to be filling them apace.
Wil they be able to replace top-flight neuroscientists with equally talented faculty with more “suitable” ideological leanings? I doubt it. But the thing is, I don’t think DeSantis and company care. They’ll happily take someone fresh out of Liberty University.
New College was the one institution of higher learning in Florida where students were encouraged and able to take a greater role in the direction of their own studies. This escape valve for those who were constrained by other more traditional educational instititions has been destroyed by the Governor and his minions. It is telling that GOP leaning student lemmings did not previously go to this school for self directed study, as they can’t operate independent of the instructions of a “dear leader.” Now, the top-down tell-you-what-to-think puppets of the Governor are in charge of New College. The irony of New College is that it’s is being turned into a venue for “old school” know-nothings. In the Governor’s wake, freedom for him and his followers means less freedom for the others.
It’s not just New College…farmers are having trouble finding people to pick their crops, and Contractors are having trouble finding tradesmen.
And several scheduled conventions are cancelling.
Meanwhile inflation in FL is about double the national average.
But I understand why people move there, after all the roads are paved with
goldradioactive waste.Oh, I forgot to mention that DeSantis and his cronies are putting out education materials that include the language;
Here’s my bet: In no more than 7 years, New College will have an accreditation crisis, at which point it will become “accredited” by one of the alternatives created to service colleges from politically bankrupt states and anti-science religious schools.
@Daryl:
What, like pleading for mercy?
WTF is wrong with those people?
@MarkedMan:
Ah – you mean like Rand Paul’s ophthalmology accreditation?
@JohnSF: Strictly speaking it is not a false statement (presumably this is about American slavery) as indeed non-field hands given or allowed skilled trade roles did indeed do such. As I recall from old readings, that specific class had the highest rate of self-manumission – not unique certainly to the Americas, a common pattern historically.
Of course such profile is a tiny minority of the overall slave population.
So it is in some fashion engaging in deceptive propagandistic framing (assmuing the surrounding text does not in some fashion provide better context or framing, as it is a snippet out of context).
[an easy referrence to this effect: https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/skilled-labor-overview%5D
Due to DeSantis, climate, and the insurance issues, it was a very simple decision for me to recently sell my home in Bradenton, FL. It went up 5X since I purchased it in 2009. My wife, a Florida native, with family still there, has decided she won’t go back. We pay for her family to come visit us, as she refuses to travel there any longer.
@EddieInCA:
My three brothers live in FL…the last of my immediate family.
I refuse to visit, in spite of having lived there in the 80’s and early 90’s.
I have missed a number of Weddings and other gatherings.
@Lounsbury:
Strictly speaking…slaves were given housing and fed…so what’s the big deal?
SMFH
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to enrollment come fall.
If I were that age and looking specifically at small liberal arts colleges / universities New College wouldn’t even make the list. Between the political climate and the actual climate, I wouldn’t touch Florida with a ten foot alligator.
When I was that age in my town you couldn’t throw a rock and not have it hit the campus of a small liberal arts college/university. All private, all pricy. I ended up going to one. Albeit, with requirements about work/study, GPA, etc. Basically, I had to work x hours a week at shitty campus jobs for minimum wage, maintain a GPA above y, and other hoops.
What is interesting is that some big brain in Floida government came up with the idea for New College and it got implemented and became reality. (Obviously, during a different political climate.) Provide a small liberal arts experience at a state university price. That’s pretty genius! Other states should totally steal that idea.
Two predictions:
1. DeSantis forbids the usage of the word “liberal” in how colleges/universities can describe their curriculum.
2. DeSantis bans rainbows in Florida because rainbows are gay.
Middle-aged man shaking his fist at the sky demanding a rainbow to vamoose defying physics and optics.
@de stijl: Yeah. A great idea. Now the only problem left is that a state university education now costs what a private university education cost then. Solve that one, and they’ll be in business.
He is indeed. He wants to impress GOP primary voters that he’s owning the libs. It’s his only campaign tactic. The MAGA regard every bad thing that happens to New College as an accomplishment. Hurricanes, insurance problems, climate issues, COVID deaths, driving all the roofers out. None of that matters as long as he owns the libs.
@de stijl:
It was originally a private school. It wasn’t designed by the state.
@Kurtz:
Ah! That makes sense when you think it through. The idea is still pretty genius.
I liked my notion. I thought it some evidence that we were not in an irreparable downward death spiral.
@Lounsbury:
…on-field hands given or allowed skilled trade roles did indeed do such.
I am aware of that.
And also that in the West Indies for example, some slaves could be “promoted” to assistant overseers.
Though it’s also notable that historians generally think manumission levels in the US were on the low side of the historical spectrum; probably due to the racialised nature of American slavery.
0.01% per year IIRC
The lowest levels of all IIRC were in the W. Indies sugar colonies, Haiti in particular.
Manumission was far more common in Imperial Rome. Some studies have indicated that statistically more than half of Roman slaves could expect to be freed by the time they were 40.
What the figures are for manumission in other slave-centric societies, especially in the Middle East, I’ve no idea.
Main point is: it’s a bloody stupid thing for the state-approved educational material to include.
And let’s not fool ourselves that this isn’t a political decision.
And one way more toxic in the US than in Europe, due to the legacy of slavery as an integral part of the relatively recent history of the USA.
Are a quarter of all faculty usually gone each year? On the surface, that seems implausible.
Seems like an awful lot of people are lining up retirements and leaves to coincide with the change in direction. It may even be affecting peoples decisions on Family Medical Leave.
It also doesn’t match the picture painted here:
James your statement that
Is contradicted by this:
Now, I’m not an academic, never went to college, but it seems to me that having “24 of which seem to be in the ordinary course of business.” unfilled at this point in late July is dereliction of duty. But then so would be filling them with grads fresh out of Liberty University.
Yep, sure looks to me like another round of DeSantis doing hippie punching. This is for show. He is “doing something” which amounts to wrecking an institution of higher learning, which has “crazy” ideas about how to educate young adults by engaging them more. Pah. They should just skip class, and cram for the exams from the fraternity file, like normal people do.
@JohnSF:
I guess they can justify Soviet Communism because it had great math and physics programs at some universities, not to mention world-class ballet.
And there was this awful central European regime in the forties, which nevertheless ran the world’s best rocket program at the time.
@Daryl: There is a vast difference between that and skilled labour, so that is the difference. of course given the hysteric Bobo Left habits anything less than rending ones shirt and declaiming the end-of-times appears unsatisfactory although does rather contribute to explaining a pathetic underperformance electorally.
@JohnSF: Yes, I was merely making the remark that they were not strictly speaking incorrect, I also wrote and I quote ” it is in some fashion engaging in deceptive propagandistic framing”
USA is quite peculiar in its form. The USA passed specific laws in the 18th century as a recall, resulting in quite the peculiar system without any doubt founded in the extreme racialisation.
Islamic systems had rather high manumission rates although the sole apparent case of a kind of plantation slavery in the sugar fields of Iraq seem to have been rather worse and different.
Of course the ‘slave soldier’ phenomena itself somewhat stands outside of this – if one is the army and heavily armed, are you more deraciné foreign conscript than actual slave? Peculiar history.